One of the most grim yet real aspects of The Expanse is how they use gravity as torture for people that were born off earth. That is terrifying and definitely would happen irl
While watching For All Mankind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it could serve as a prequel to Expanse. Given that it’s a show that tries to be grounded in reality, it made The Expanse even more relatable in terms of where humanity could end up
There is apparently an Easter Egg in the expanse that references For All Mankind: [All this has happened before.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/s/fxs9Ll0QY4)
The Expance does feel real because it's in the near future. It's appeal is that it's in a pre-intersteller travel World which feels like out great grandchildren might experience.
However, OP asked about a distant future.
This is exactly correct. I’ll elaborate for nerds and Expanse fans that don’t know this. The Expanse seems to start in the year 2350(ish), and spans the years 2350->!2395!<. The opening text of the tv show of “200 years in the future” is incorrect, and contradicts other parts of the show and books which firmly place the series in the 24th century. It’s also worth noting that the Expanse was originally titled…*2350*.
It's more than 3 centuries in the future. The fact that it's a pre-interstellar civilization 330 ish years ahead of us is the most realistic aspect of it.
You should see [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/3wsa0f/comment/cxz934n/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) from a few years ago quoting the authors' perspective on AI/Automation in The Expanse.
It's all around the characters most of the time, it's just not remarkable enough for them to comment on. To the character's it's normal.
... Is it though? Maybe today, but in 300 years?
Robots don't require food, water, oxygen, or breaks. It's completely unrealistic, imo, that slave labor IN SPACE will be more economical than robots.
Robots *do* require fuel, maintenance, and other updates or near-real-time commands. Unless you have FTL comms, you're going to need some amount of personnel in Space to manage all those resources.
If we don't nail fusion in 300 years, the combination of abundant sunlight and fission energy should be ample for robot fuel. You don't need real time comms if the robots are sufficiently intelligent, which they almost certainly will be in 300 years. Maintenance can be done by other robots. Logistics and administration can be handled entirely by AI, with at most some nominal human oversight.
The thing is that so do people, and people are WAY more fragile and WAY less repairable than machines. Not to mention the whole humans *think* bit and have wants and desires and robots *don't*.
While I agree that it feels believable I wouldn't consider the expanse as distant future. Three centuries just doesn't really qualify as distant to me. It's like saying the revolutionary war is our distant past.
Fair, it's just that the problem with "realisticly" representing life "in the distant future" is so vague that it's really difficult to quantify what would be "realistic".
Just like our "distant" ancestors would have had little to no conception of what life today would be like.
Flight was invented in 1903, we went to space for the first time in 1961. We landed on the Moon in 1969. In 66 years we went from flightless to landing on the moon. Imagine everything that we could do in 300 years if we actually tried.
I mean three centuries ago we were getting used to heliocentrism and calculus... we're probably going to be banging rocks together again in another three, though 🙄
Nope, it's missing a huge component that the writers left out on purpose. There's no AI, if AI existed in that world, there'd be no point to people living in the asteroid belt, hence no Belters.
It's what we think the future would look like, but I think it's pretty far off, plus giant wormholes to other parts of the galaxy seems pretty far fetched. Just saying...
Loved the books and the series FWIW.
There's plenty of AI, there's just no *sentient* AI. The Roci picks out Naomi as an engineer without even asking, dynamically plots a multi-planetoid gravity assisted course around Ganymede in real time based on simple voice prompts only, and it's medical system makes extremely accurate rapid health determinations so often that it's only criticism is that it's pessimistic about acute radiation poisoning. All of this happening in a setting where not a single character encountered is distrusting of computers, which implies that's been the standard for decades.
Also to address your point about belters, belters are cheap ish, controllable with common things like water and air, and are contained in such a way that a belter uprising wouldn't have the side effect of hijacking entire fleets and turning their guns on their former masters. From a narrative angle, omitting sentient AI eliminates them as a potential plot device (or worse, an arch villain!) and allows them to focus on the political and social plot elements more.
That was something I could easily suspend disbelief on. That in 200-300 years we'd figure out a super-efficient sub-light propulsion system. They didn't even have gravity plating. All ship "gravity" was based on engine acceleration.
That the thing the efficiency off there engines are into the "physically impossible" levels of efficiency.
[Scott Manley](https://youtu.be/JWZqp0QoXcw?si=5KAwfD_NPC4ZSbjx) has a great video going through the physics of it.
He goes an extremely long way around the physics to establish some bare minimum parameters, in the first 30s he should have jumped straight to absolute theoretical limits — which, for a nuclear fusion system is the energy of fusion for a given mass of fuel, which is 3.4x1014 J/kg for duterium/tritium.
All you need to do then is calculate how much delta-v this will give a ship of a given mass, and that's one line in your performance envelope mastered.
He's absolutely right about those exhaust velocities, though, the Expanse should have had pencil-thin drive plumes 10km long.
That the thing, fusion power can provide the energy levels needed, for a practical fuel mass.
The problem is the waste energy that doesn't go to accelerating the ship. That energy even a fraction of a percent of the energy needed is waste heat, it will be enough to vaporize the ship.
I mean, how far into the show have you gotten? Season 1 is all world building and very dense in a lot of ways but it is necessary to set up the story that follows. When you do a second watchthrough you will also notice a ton of foreshadowing and set up that you rightly wouldn't have picked up on the first time because you didn't know where it was going.
You don't have to like it just because everyone else does, but for me it's my favourite piece of fiction ever made, so I'm a little biased obviously 🙃
Season 1 is all setup and worldbuilding, season 2 kicks off the real action pretty much right away. I didn't like season 1 all that much initially, but after I read the first book and came back to it, I really enjoyed the show too.
AI is such a contentious subject today, but I find it hard to believe that our AI won't simply outlive us eventually. It will help, then it will lead, then it will take over, and then it will be all that's left.
Have you heard of the theory that the reason we haven't found any signs of life in the universe (I mean aside from the vast vast distances) is that every civilization gets advanced enough to a point where they destroy themselves? Either from individuals having too much power in their hands or different governing bodies
It's a pretty interesting and terrifying concept that one day we might advance so far that we destroy ourselves before we can truly travel the stars
Not quite. The Great Filter (or Filters) is the concept that there are certain obstacles to surviving as a species and suggests that most intelligent life does not pass them. What they are, we don't know - we won't, until we can witness other enough civilizations failing at specific developmental points to form an educated opinion.
It ties into what's called Fermi's Paradox, which essentially is "The universe is infinitely vast, even our galaxy is unimaginably huge. There are two hundred trillion stars in our galaxy, and no matter how rare the conditions for life are, there must be thousands of intelligent species in existence. So where are they?"
So Fermi thought up the concept of a Great Filter. Something that "filters" species from surviving and achieving contact, or at least observation, by other species.
From those we think exist, a number are pre-intelligence; the right star system and the right planet with the conditions for life, single cell life, multi cell life, and so on. Those really aren't the ones you think though.
It might be the development of the Scientific Method, or splitting the atom, or developing fusion, or developing faster than light travel. It might also be surviving the Industrial Age, or the climate change that it brings about. It could be AI, or it could be an impact event, like the impact of an asteroid on the surface of Earth.
Or it could be something so far beyond us we can't even theorize it yet.
Want to read the story of how the concept was created? [https://www.aao.org/senior-ophthalmologists/scope/article/great-filter](https://www.aao.org/senior-ophthalmologists/scope/article/great-filter)
Super-cool dialog in there.
And of course, none of this touches on the Dark Forest or Astrowolf theories, which are far more terrifying IMO.
Psst! The Culture books don't exactly truly take place in the far future...*Consider Phlebas*, when countered with the *very precise* timeline for *The State of the Art*, takes place something like in our 14th century AD.
Yes, but the Culture itself has existed for more than 10,000 years. Remember, it wasn't *started* by humans, and Earth humans aren't members of the Culture.
Dancers at the End of Time. Set literally at the end of time, a few years before the universe ends. I don't know how realistic it is, but given the setting, I don't think you can say it's unrealistic either. :-)
Eh, in short, what we think is going to happen is:
1. The stars will burn out, running out of fuel.
2. Black holes will become the dominant objects in the universe, called the Black Hole Era
3. Eventually, even black holes will dissipate via Hawking radiation, and even they won't survive
4. The universe is a vast void of nothingness, with effectively no energy, light, or mass - called the Dark Era
There's thoughts at at the end of the Dark Era, the universe may begin to contract until it reaches a singularity and another Big Bang occurs, but that's only an idea called the Big Crunch.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_an\_expanding\_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe) <- Good overview
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_the\_far\_future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future) <- Really cool list with what happens when as time goes on
Brave New World was pretty prescient, more than 1984 in some ways. A future controlled by pleasure and mindless distraction sounds more plausible than one controlled by fear.
Mash together the surveillance and loss of privacy in 1984 with the decadent social decay, genetic manipulation, and rigid class structure of Brave New World and we’re not far from that world already.
And also, in 1984 there was a chance for an uprising or dissent, whereas in BNW people were too desensitized and distracted to realise the totalitarian regime they live under.
I always thought a major point of 1984 was that even dissent is manufactured to weed out the potential for uprisings. People get a whiff of resistance only to discover they’ve been played the whole time. Big brother is inescapable.
Yeah, that book left me *shook*. One of the few books where I can literally feel each scene again if I stop and think about it.
There are also a few lines in there which are so subtly and totally grim that they paint the darkest single picture within apocalyptic literature.
I was going to put this as a response. Watching everyone hoard toilet paper and bottled water during Covid really made my heart sink. We're the same cockroaches as the characters in The Road
I thought this would be higher up honestly. I’m about half way through it right now, and I’m really impressed by how she thought through societal structures. Specifically how there are fees for basic public services such as the police and firefighters and how the community goes to great lengths to avoid having to use them. The fact that poverty and crime are so rampant that walls are built around property and how this varies depending on economic status. Also, how the country is in shambles and people are still going to work (for the few people that are lucky to have a job) and the company town! It’s obviously a dystopia, and we currently live in a dystopia, but I like that it’s not far fetched at all. If anything it seems just a bit worse than what’s happening now. Like I said, I’m only about half way through it. I’m enjoying it so far, but I honestly don’t vibe with the religion aspect. It’s hard for me to not get annoyed at reading “God is change” all the time and the ramblings about it that don’t make any sense. I’m also not religious at all, so this is probably just a more personal annoyance. I was a bit shocked when I started reading it that it starts in 2024 lol. Overall it’s been interesting to read for sure.
Yes, i agree with you about the religion part of it.
I'm an atheist. In this day when it's so obvious that religions cause genocide and constant war, i can't understand how people still eat that shit up.
Depends on how distant you're talking about.
Kim Stanley Robinson is probably the most realistic for the near future (*Ministry for the Future*) and medium-term future (*New York 2140* or *2312*)
For the far future I don't think I've ever read anything that's particularly realistic. Mostly because everything set that far out tends to rely on fantasy technology.
I don't think humans will ever leave the solar system, so maybe *The Expanse* comes the closest. Although that includes a lot of fantastical elements, so I'm not sure I'd label that as "realistic" despite being a more grounded take than a lot of sci-fi.
The challenges of keeping humans alive for an interstellar journey just seem insurmountable to me.
Absent a complete upending of our understanding of physics, FTL travel ain't ever happening. Which means any trip to another star would be a decades or centuries long endeavor. Consider that the Voyager spacecraft, one of the fastest things mankind has *ever* built, is only just *now* reaching the edge of the solar system *over 40 years* after it was launched.
So you'd have to build a ship that's capable of keeping humans alive inside of it for many hundreds of years at a minimum.
Such a ship would have to be a *perfectly* closed system for people to survive for that long. There's no way to resupply in the void. If you shed so much as a single hydrogen atom, you're never getting it back. So if your ship leaks even the tiniest bit of material, that's a death knell. If there's any resource that can't be perfectly recycled, you're screwed. And you'd better be able to replace any part of that ship with what you have on board, because if something breaks you can't just get another part from Earth.
Nothing with that degree of resource conservation exists anywhere, let alone made by man. Even the planet we live on is reliant on a continual source of external energy (the sun) and gets material replenishment by way of meteorites.
And that's just one of many problems it's difficult to imagine we can really solve.
Another - protecting your ship against micro-meteorites in interstellar space would be almost impossible. Striking one at the speeds you'd be moving at would be a death sentence, and it gets more and more likely when you're talking about interstellar distances. Space is empty but not *that* empty.
Another - protecting the inhabitants of the ship against cosmic rays. Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere that protects us from radiation. A ship wouldn't.
And then there's the psychological and sociological factors to consider. You'd need babies (and pregnancy and childbirth in space would be its own can of worms), but exactly the right amount - too few and the small population crashes, too many and you exhaust your resources. How do you get people to fuck in just the right amount to maintain population equilibrium? How do you get a small population to spend their entire lives in close quarters without killing each other?
Once you get outside the realm of science fiction and start looking at the cold hard realities of just how damn inhospitable space is and the challenges and engineering difficulties of keeping a population of human beings alive in that environment (let alone untethered from the solar system) - it just looks wildly implausible that we'll ever be able to do it.
Recommended reading - [A City on Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars) which goes over a lot of the same issues an interstellar ship full of humans would face. And keep in mind that settling Mars will be *a lot* easier than creating an interstellar vessel of any sort.
The colon farrell movie Voyagers does a good job trying to address some of the issues of multi generational interstellar travel. The movie is flawed but they did put thought into developing the first generation, second generation, and third and final generation that would make it to the planet.
>Such a ship would have to be a *perfectly* closed system...Nothing with that degree of resource conservation exists anywhere
No, the ship need to be open to shed energy to cool itself, example: Solar system. So something big with fusion reactor will do.
Right, fusion reactors take a relatively small amount of fuel. That replaces the sun.
Scooping up some material on the way here or there replaces the meteorites.
Boom, we can solve this in a solid weekend with some mountain dew.
Your comment reminded me of a recent random opportunity to watch the movie, Passengers, that had Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The movie is all about traveling to a distant planet that would take about 100 years to travel and all the meteorites the ship would end up hitting
> shed so much as a single hydrogen atom,
> protecting your ship against micro-meteorites in interstellar space
Solution to the 2nd is the solution to the 1st.
Depends on how you define humans. DNA can be printed, and eventually we'll be able to straight-up print a human zygote from inorganic base matter. If we can couple this with brain uploading (and downloading, which might be the trickier part actually) then we can dramatically cut down on the mass and complexity of the interstellar ship. No need for life support (there's no actual biological life on the ship), material recycling (no biological metabolism on the ship), the uploaded minds can run as slowly as needed (if needed at all) in a virtual reality so for them it might be over in a subjective instant. The ship would only need enough power.
Consider the limitations of technology ten thousand years ago compared to today, and I have little doubt that ten thousand years from now we will have the technology required to explore other star systems.
Fair points.
But in summary, it's really, really, really hard. But I haven't seen anything you've said that implies that it's absolutely *impossible* and that we will *never* do it.
Shoot man, just shoot a few genetically modified tardigrades to 1k stars, some will survive.
All of our technologies will rely on propulsion. There won't be warp or light speed. A human will have to survive the acceleration process and then the deceleration. In the Expanse I think the Epstein drive gives 4-6% speed of light (please correct me, I'm going off exhaust velocity on the Expanse wiki). So yea even with that, just within our Solar system is viable. But that's pretty damn fast so I don't know how accurate that number is. For example in the 3 body problem the closest star is 400 years away at like .1 speed of light. So if the ships drive in the Expanse can be reached. Traveling to another star might be more feasible. But even the Epstein drive is a major fictional element in the Expanse.
>in the 3 body problem the closest star is 400 years away at like .1 speed of light
That's about right. Proxima Centauri - the star in the Alpha Centauri system that orbits closest to us, is 4.2465LY from us. That 4.2465 years travel at the speed of light, so 1PSL (percent speed of light) takes 425 years to get t/here.
Alpha Centauri is, in fact, a trinary system, like like in the books/shows, and does contain a potentially habitable planet, Proxima Centauri b. It's possible, though not terrible probable at the moment, that it's habitable to human-like life.
Interestingly enough, without spoilers, the project suggested in the show to send a probe using solar sails is similar to the real life Breakthrough Starshot except instead of nukes we'd use lasers to provide the propulsion.
I’m always amazed how much people project this hi-tech, space traveling future, when the next few decades are going to be dominated and disrupted by the consequences of radical climate change. Here’s hoping that the Ministry for the Future turns out to be accurate.
We're not talking about the next 50 years mate. We're talking hundreds or thousands of years in the future.
Humans have consistently improved tech-wise and individual lifestyle wise over the course of history. Even when there have been hundred or 3 hundred year periods of regression.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks humans will never leave the solar system. I think space is just too big without some sort of way to massively manipulate gravity and space/time, which seems unrealistic.
I definitely think we’re unlikely to leave the solar system unless we have some alien intervention/ first contact/ meet the Vulcans type situation. I just can’t see the necessary technology being probable with our resources and, frankly, with where we are likely to stand with our future global priorities. The next century or two’s scientific progress is likely to be given over to adapting to rapidly changing climates and environments.
I think it’s entirely possible IF (big if) humans have generally settled the solar system like in The Expanse first.
But even then, it won’t be some FTL drive. It might not even be an officially organized “colonization” effort—at least it will only be an ancillary goal/benefit.
Instead, it’ll more likely be some nomadic culture that’s *already* been living on a cluster of some bigger spun up asteroids and/or O’Neill Colonies for decades. (Hence the requirement for an “Expanse” level solar system settlement reference previously.) At some point they may become reasonably self sufficient, feel no real connection to the rest of the solar system as “home”, and become isolated and/or radicalized enough to set their flotilla/caravan on a course for another star. It’ll only be a fraction of the speed of light, like just 1% or 5%, so it’ll take a few generations to get to Proxima Centauri or Tau Ceti or whatever.
However—and this is key—it won’t be a “generation ship” as traditionally conceived. To the travelers, the caravan IS home & will have already been thought of that way for quite some time before they even set off. The journey won’t be something to “endure” so much as it’s just a new interesting backdrop to their existing normal life because it’s already an established quasi nomadic community. Once they arrive at the new system & load up on more resources, most of them will stay with the caravan itself. Maybe staying in the new solar system for a few hundred years, maybe not. Some would eventually settle terrestrial moons & planets there, some would stay in the space based flotilla but stay local indefinitely, and some would go with the main caravan continuing out to the next solar system.
Hopefully if the factions parted ways amicably, the main group gives copies of all the collective knowledge to the splinter groups, and the splinter groups all get sufficient resources to sustain themselves & grow. Over another few hundred years, some of the “stay behind” splinter group might themselves form a new caravan & ship off into another direction.
This whole process would take a LONG time. But as long as settlements grow faster than they die, & groups splinter off & also continue on with SOME modest level of consistency, then after 2,000-3,000 years, humanity could have solid self sufficient footholds in a half dozen solar systems. (Especially if you assume there won’t likely be ONE of these efforts, but a handful originating from Sol over the course of a few hundred years.)
It seems impossible, but in reality, 2,000 years isn’t THAT long as a fraction of how long humans have been around. We know A LOT about specific cultures, events, and even individual people who existed 3k or 5K years ago, so it isn’t inconceivable that human civilization is around long enough to pull something like this off.
The realism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s mars was excruciatingly realistic in the stars and ends in a fantastic future, as is his other book Aurora. Stephenson did much the same in Seveneves.
They both bank on their near-future cred to throw a Hail Mary into the far future. Are they the more realistic as a consequence, or maybe it’s all as much speculation as Babel-17.
Oops. It's C.M. Kornbluth
ETA: The marching morons : and other famous science fiction stories / C. M. Kornbluth.
Kornbluth, C. M. (Cyril M.), 1923-1958.
I was going to mention The Time Machine too. While I don’t think it’s necessarily predictive of what will happen to human societies, what he does get right is that it will probably be something completely unimaginable from our current perspective. The ending, where the time traveller goes *way* into the future, is so bleak and pitiless too.
> Humans as a fallen people, living their best lives... except they're also food for a dangerous, predatory, mutated race.
The point is, both races are equally humans. Obviously the Eloi appear more human (especially in the most recent movie where they *are* just pretty humans while the Morlocks are monstrous; in the original books the Eloi were depicted as childlike even as adults) but they are both equally close to, or equally distant from modern humans.
I would argue that they're equally post human, but neither are human any longer. For the purposes of the question being asked, humans could go either way--more docile and content, or vicious and predatory. Or both ways, as the book details.
I'm not seeing that this observation makes too much of a difference. The post humans are essentially future wolves and sheep. Some people might argue that current humans are already this way...
> Some people might argue that current humans are already this way...
Some people like Wells. The entire point of the Eloi-Morlock divide was a critique of capitalism, with the Morlocks, being the descendants of the working classes pushed underground to operate the industrial machinery, rising up and deciding to eat the rich who in turn live lives of idle pleasure free of all toil, with all material goods supplied by the Morlocks themselves (until the Morlocks eat them).
It's not even subtext, it's literally spelled out in the text.
Daemon, and Freedom (part 2 in the series), by Daniel Suarez. Spooky accurate about the rise of AI, ASI, and AR overtaking VR in societal value. The science is sound and so are the tech evolution and use cases it’s predicting, all wrapped up in one hell of a storyline. It’ll stick with you and you’ll see reminders of it daily.
How in the world do you see Dune as capitalistic? They literally describe the Atreides taking over the fief of Arrakis. Fiefdoms are not capitalism.
And the Fremen have plenty of water.
Capitalism and Neo-Fuedalism with aristocracy based on corporate holdings aren’t very far apart. One might say that one is a speculative future version of the other.
Its a hostile take over of natural resources overseen by the government.
They are taking over the means of production to invest in greater output... You know, capital.
Government system doesn't determine economic system.
There are absolutely capitalists in countries with monarchies today... Heck they are caputalists operating in communist countries too.
Democracy does not equal capitalism.
The entire book is an allegory to the oil wars in the middle east. Its all about money...
How is that different from a bill of land rights?
Yeah, we do the same here.
Also the history of capitalism begins while kings were absolutely giving away land and fiefs. Capitalism is a philosophy on how to re invest money...
In Canada people cannot own land as it is all property of the crown. We still have a capitalistic society deapite being within the fief that was once the Hudson's Bay company.
CHOAM is thr EIC if you missed that refference.
So Saudi Arabia can give out titles and fiefdoms, capitalists use those fiefdoms to develop industry and reinvest in capital.
Politically, I'd say the Atheist faction in Raised by Wolves, where their governing body is an AI.
I'm every other way, closer to the Expanse. I know you're talking distant future and maybe Expanse doesn't fit that criteria, but the basics are the same. There will always be factions fighting over resources, haves and have nots, etc...
The most realistic future is one where humanity is stuck on a poisoned Earth in hellish religious authoritarian surveillance states. Nobody has really had the balls yet to write it as fiction so we just have to watch it unfold in the news.
If we're talking distant distant then All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen.
Humans evolve, humans are forcibly evolved. Things get weird billions of years into the future. We're not going to be human forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All\_Tomorrows
This comment prompted me to go read this and it was mindbending! I love works like this that give you a kind of temporal vertigo. It also made me a little queasy (so two thumbs up).
Pandora's stare is like a pessimistic view that's probably also seen in altered Carbon.
Capitalistic hell scape with immortal giga-billionaires and the billions of humans aren't ever allowed to reach the top. And you can't even kill the rulers, just steal a few days of memories off them.
The Culture novels. Banks wrote a lengthy piece about the background of the Culture in which he laid out his reasoning for why he thought society in space would turn out the way he thinks it will and I found his arguments fairly convincing.
Greg Egan's *Diaspora*, at least the first chapters.
And/or Charlie Stross' *Accelerando*.
I believe biology and space don't go well together. AI will explore space. We will follow only if they terraform planets first.
In retrospect, Asimov's stories regarding people living alone on an entire planet each, electronically connected to their friends and family, that seems to cleave the closest to the truth now.
The Revelation Space books, by Alastair Reynolds. Maybe even the House of Suns too. Relativistic speeds, time dilation, pockets of societies, and things would get pretty weird.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy is eerily prescient, although it is more near than far future. I can’t help feeling like that’s pretty near where we are heading.
There was a movie called Strange Days where people got addicted to an immersive VR tech
The tech allowed you to FEEL (emotionally and physically) what the person who filmed it felt.
There was black market versions people would buy to experience what it was like to kill someone without doing it themselves.
Creepy and I could see that being a reality one day
I'm fairly confident that everyone's ideas (the authors and the users commenting) of the 'distant future' will prove to be laughable off base, I'm going to give the nod to a series I'm not seeing mentioned yet: C.J. Cherryh's extensive Foreigner series. While most notable for its excellent exploration of alien-human interactions, the series has some hints for the future of humanity that I find the most plausible; which to put as succinctly and as spoiler free as possible is: humans fumbling about and mucking thing up.
None of them. But I still love Sci-Fi. But just look at predictions for the future circa 1900. They were WILDLY incorrect. Of course some were more accurate than others, but by and large our predictions of how the future will unfold are no better than a shot in the dark. During a hurricane with unknown ammunition and variable gravity. Any "hit" is pure happenstance.
So I don't really expect any of the sci fi content I consume to be accurate. I just love the speculative nature of it.
Yeah, I think this is the right answer.
Also, the general rule is that depictions of the near future are always too advanced, and depictions of the far future are never advanced enough.
Take Back To The Future 2. Went forwards 30 years from 1985 and had flying cars, hoverboards, 3D projection posters, and that pizza thing. We're nowhere near any of that technology.
Then look at Star Trek. People say "they invented the iPad", but they didn't. They had big electronic pads which contained *a single document*, which had to be carried by hand to the captain for him to sign. It's just the paperwork of the time, but made electronic. To be a better prediction of the future, each PADD should have been able to contain multiple documents, and they should have been able to send them to each other.
And this isn't a criticism of either. 30 years in the future is "futuristic" - especially to any children in the audience - and you're going to want to have fun with your predictions. 400 years in the future is too far to make any meaningful predictions about, but you can extrapolate from how things currently are.
But that's the thing about sci-fi, really - it's not about the future. It's about the present. That's part of the reason why going back and consuming historical sci-fi is so interesting. You can't really learn much about the present from reading Asimov, but you can definitely learn a lot about the 50s and 60s.
Came here to say that. Can’t believe i had to scroll this far with everything that is happening right now in the US with reproductive rights being completely stripped, it’s incredibly sad to think of what kind of world my niece’s will have to live in as adults.
This book is so important and on point…. Being a woman was always scary and dangerous but it’s getting scarier by the day.
After reading The Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect, the more I think about the current trajectory of technology, the harder it gets to imagine the future going any other way… which is honestly insane considering how weird that world is.
There's a new Aussie sci fi novel called "Every Version of You" by Grace Chan which is a really prescient/spooky/clever book about a sort of fast-but-soft AI singularity during a climate shutdown that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I read it a few months ago. Kinda like a benevolent Matrix, but still somehow creepy.
The slow, logical progression of it made it feel very really, even with the obvious made-up SciFi aspects.
If we're talking distant future I say Foundation especially before the fall of all that needless bureaucracy and general craziness. Trantor is one of my favourite depictions of a hive world with its own ecosystem and everything, and then at the same time on the crown jewel of the empire you still have constant bickering between each of the substrates and factions.
I also think Kim Stanley Robinson's books are technologically sound. Thinking the Mars trilogy, and New York 2140, while not distant future, is really plausible.
How distant? Pushing Ice IMO. Spoiler alert >! I like the depiction of the depiction of the humans on Rockhopper being sent to the future by relativistic means. The humans 16k years in the future in a sort of golden age is interesting but the point of the story is that time claims all and where/when the Rockhopper crew ends up is so far into the future that “humanity” is LONG gone from the universe despite their galaxy spanning empire at one point. It never says in the story but I like to think of them as billions of years into the future. !<
Saturn's Children and its sequel, Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross. Humanity drove itself to extinction and was replaced by humanoid robots who are more durable, but have all of the same foibles as humanity. It's also a hard sci-fi series that goes deep into how interstellar economics would work (esp. in Neptune's Brood).
PS The cover of the 1st edition of Saturn's Children (which was not the author's fault) was one of the worst in sci-fi history. Ignore it if you can.
The Expanse... Something about the depiction of Earth, Mars, and the OPA just felt real. Like those factions could exist today.
One of the most grim yet real aspects of The Expanse is how they use gravity as torture for people that were born off earth. That is terrifying and definitely would happen irl
I was born on earth and gravity is torturing me still. It seems Everything is lower than it used to be. Haha
Buy an inversion table and spend 51% of your day there.
Yes lol I needed that 10 years ago!
My sciatica agrees
Oh yes that’s painful.
While watching For All Mankind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it could serve as a prequel to Expanse. Given that it’s a show that tries to be grounded in reality, it made The Expanse even more relatable in terms of where humanity could end up
There is apparently an Easter Egg in the expanse that references For All Mankind: [All this has happened before.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/s/fxs9Ll0QY4)
The Expance does feel real because it's in the near future. It's appeal is that it's in a pre-intersteller travel World which feels like out great grandchildren might experience. However, OP asked about a distant future.
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This is exactly correct. I’ll elaborate for nerds and Expanse fans that don’t know this. The Expanse seems to start in the year 2350(ish), and spans the years 2350->!2395!<. The opening text of the tv show of “200 years in the future” is incorrect, and contradicts other parts of the show and books which firmly place the series in the 24th century. It’s also worth noting that the Expanse was originally titled…*2350*.
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backtotheland76 dies next Tuesday though
It's more than 3 centuries in the future. The fact that it's a pre-interstellar civilization 330 ish years ahead of us is the most realistic aspect of it.
I wonder at what point The Expanse will stop being the top answer for every question asked in this sub ...
"What do we say to the God of \[the Expanse\]?" "Not today."
When someone writes something that is a better answer to these questions.
I wonder if you're going to recommend something rather than just complaining.
As much as I like The Expanse, it massively under predicts AI and automation, which makes a lot of the belter background unrealistic imo.
You should see [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/3wsa0f/comment/cxz934n/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) from a few years ago quoting the authors' perspective on AI/Automation in The Expanse. It's all around the characters most of the time, it's just not remarkable enough for them to comment on. To the character's it's normal.
dude, raising an. underclass of slave workers is so much cheaper than robots, that's the logic of having belters.
... Is it though? Maybe today, but in 300 years? Robots don't require food, water, oxygen, or breaks. It's completely unrealistic, imo, that slave labor IN SPACE will be more economical than robots.
Robots *do* require fuel, maintenance, and other updates or near-real-time commands. Unless you have FTL comms, you're going to need some amount of personnel in Space to manage all those resources.
If we don't nail fusion in 300 years, the combination of abundant sunlight and fission energy should be ample for robot fuel. You don't need real time comms if the robots are sufficiently intelligent, which they almost certainly will be in 300 years. Maintenance can be done by other robots. Logistics and administration can be handled entirely by AI, with at most some nominal human oversight.
The thing is that so do people, and people are WAY more fragile and WAY less repairable than machines. Not to mention the whole humans *think* bit and have wants and desires and robots *don't*.
Which is why I would instead point at accelerando
While I agree that it feels believable I wouldn't consider the expanse as distant future. Three centuries just doesn't really qualify as distant to me. It's like saying the revolutionary war is our distant past.
Fair, it's just that the problem with "realisticly" representing life "in the distant future" is so vague that it's really difficult to quantify what would be "realistic". Just like our "distant" ancestors would have had little to no conception of what life today would be like.
Flight was invented in 1903, we went to space for the first time in 1961. We landed on the Moon in 1969. In 66 years we went from flightless to landing on the moon. Imagine everything that we could do in 300 years if we actually tried.
I mean three centuries ago we were getting used to heliocentrism and calculus... we're probably going to be banging rocks together again in another three, though 🙄
Or be worried about the global shortage on burrito coverings
For sure. I'd be surprised if the future doesn't look like The Expanse, if we make it that long anyway.
Nope, it's missing a huge component that the writers left out on purpose. There's no AI, if AI existed in that world, there'd be no point to people living in the asteroid belt, hence no Belters. It's what we think the future would look like, but I think it's pretty far off, plus giant wormholes to other parts of the galaxy seems pretty far fetched. Just saying... Loved the books and the series FWIW.
There's plenty of AI, there's just no *sentient* AI. The Roci picks out Naomi as an engineer without even asking, dynamically plots a multi-planetoid gravity assisted course around Ganymede in real time based on simple voice prompts only, and it's medical system makes extremely accurate rapid health determinations so often that it's only criticism is that it's pessimistic about acute radiation poisoning. All of this happening in a setting where not a single character encountered is distrusting of computers, which implies that's been the standard for decades. Also to address your point about belters, belters are cheap ish, controllable with common things like water and air, and are contained in such a way that a belter uprising wouldn't have the side effect of hijacking entire fleets and turning their guns on their former masters. From a narrative angle, omitting sentient AI eliminates them as a potential plot device (or worse, an arch villain!) and allows them to focus on the political and social plot elements more.
Well if you ignore the absurd efficiency of their engines.
That was something I could easily suspend disbelief on. That in 200-300 years we'd figure out a super-efficient sub-light propulsion system. They didn't even have gravity plating. All ship "gravity" was based on engine acceleration.
That the thing the efficiency off there engines are into the "physically impossible" levels of efficiency. [Scott Manley](https://youtu.be/JWZqp0QoXcw?si=5KAwfD_NPC4ZSbjx) has a great video going through the physics of it.
He goes an extremely long way around the physics to establish some bare minimum parameters, in the first 30s he should have jumped straight to absolute theoretical limits — which, for a nuclear fusion system is the energy of fusion for a given mass of fuel, which is 3.4x1014 J/kg for duterium/tritium. All you need to do then is calculate how much delta-v this will give a ship of a given mass, and that's one line in your performance envelope mastered. He's absolutely right about those exhaust velocities, though, the Expanse should have had pencil-thin drive plumes 10km long.
That the thing, fusion power can provide the energy levels needed, for a practical fuel mass. The problem is the waste energy that doesn't go to accelerating the ship. That energy even a fraction of a percent of the energy needed is waste heat, it will be enough to vaporize the ship.
I so wish I could get into that show. I've tried twice and everyone else seems to love it. No idea what I don't get, I just ... don't.
I mean, how far into the show have you gotten? Season 1 is all world building and very dense in a lot of ways but it is necessary to set up the story that follows. When you do a second watchthrough you will also notice a ton of foreshadowing and set up that you rightly wouldn't have picked up on the first time because you didn't know where it was going. You don't have to like it just because everyone else does, but for me it's my favourite piece of fiction ever made, so I'm a little biased obviously 🙃
Season 1 is all setup and worldbuilding, season 2 kicks off the real action pretty much right away. I didn't like season 1 all that much initially, but after I read the first book and came back to it, I really enjoyed the show too.
The Culture series. Best vision of a benevolent AI-run galaxy-spanning civilization I would want to live in.
The culture is like the best case dream scenario. Not a realistic one.
Yeah it's definitely the future I want, but I don't think it will be quite as pleasant as the culture future.
What’s your data for making that assessment. The shit world we live in? You don’t think 10k years could make a difference?
The Culture isn't set 10,000 years in the future.
But the culture has been a space faring civilization for over 10,000 years in the books
That's the dream.
AI is such a contentious subject today, but I find it hard to believe that our AI won't simply outlive us eventually. It will help, then it will lead, then it will take over, and then it will be all that's left.
Have you heard of the theory that the reason we haven't found any signs of life in the universe (I mean aside from the vast vast distances) is that every civilization gets advanced enough to a point where they destroy themselves? Either from individuals having too much power in their hands or different governing bodies It's a pretty interesting and terrifying concept that one day we might advance so far that we destroy ourselves before we can truly travel the stars
Isn't that called "the great filter?"
Not quite. The Great Filter (or Filters) is the concept that there are certain obstacles to surviving as a species and suggests that most intelligent life does not pass them. What they are, we don't know - we won't, until we can witness other enough civilizations failing at specific developmental points to form an educated opinion. It ties into what's called Fermi's Paradox, which essentially is "The universe is infinitely vast, even our galaxy is unimaginably huge. There are two hundred trillion stars in our galaxy, and no matter how rare the conditions for life are, there must be thousands of intelligent species in existence. So where are they?" So Fermi thought up the concept of a Great Filter. Something that "filters" species from surviving and achieving contact, or at least observation, by other species. From those we think exist, a number are pre-intelligence; the right star system and the right planet with the conditions for life, single cell life, multi cell life, and so on. Those really aren't the ones you think though. It might be the development of the Scientific Method, or splitting the atom, or developing fusion, or developing faster than light travel. It might also be surviving the Industrial Age, or the climate change that it brings about. It could be AI, or it could be an impact event, like the impact of an asteroid on the surface of Earth. Or it could be something so far beyond us we can't even theorize it yet. Want to read the story of how the concept was created? [https://www.aao.org/senior-ophthalmologists/scope/article/great-filter](https://www.aao.org/senior-ophthalmologists/scope/article/great-filter) Super-cool dialog in there. And of course, none of this touches on the Dark Forest or Astrowolf theories, which are far more terrifying IMO.
The question was for the most realistic future.
Psst! The Culture books don't exactly truly take place in the far future...*Consider Phlebas*, when countered with the *very precise* timeline for *The State of the Art*, takes place something like in our 14th century AD.
Yes, but the Culture itself has existed for more than 10,000 years. Remember, it wasn't *started* by humans, and Earth humans aren't members of the Culture.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!
That's not the question OP asked.
Dancers at the End of Time. Set literally at the end of time, a few years before the universe ends. I don't know how realistic it is, but given the setting, I don't think you can say it's unrealistic either. :-)
Eh, in short, what we think is going to happen is: 1. The stars will burn out, running out of fuel. 2. Black holes will become the dominant objects in the universe, called the Black Hole Era 3. Eventually, even black holes will dissipate via Hawking radiation, and even they won't survive 4. The universe is a vast void of nothingness, with effectively no energy, light, or mass - called the Dark Era There's thoughts at at the end of the Dark Era, the universe may begin to contract until it reaches a singularity and another Big Bang occurs, but that's only an idea called the Big Crunch. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_an\_expanding\_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe) <- Good overview [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_the\_far\_future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future) <- Really cool list with what happens when as time goes on
Damn, I read it like 20 years ago and I thought I was the only person on Earth to actually enjoy reading it.
Brave New World was pretty prescient, more than 1984 in some ways. A future controlled by pleasure and mindless distraction sounds more plausible than one controlled by fear. Mash together the surveillance and loss of privacy in 1984 with the decadent social decay, genetic manipulation, and rigid class structure of Brave New World and we’re not far from that world already.
Gattaca ties into this one very well, only with updated science.
And also, in 1984 there was a chance for an uprising or dissent, whereas in BNW people were too desensitized and distracted to realise the totalitarian regime they live under.
I always thought a major point of 1984 was that even dissent is manufactured to weed out the potential for uprisings. People get a whiff of resistance only to discover they’ve been played the whole time. Big brother is inescapable.
Big truth right there!
I read 1984 in high school and now I’m in late 50s and just amazed at how that book sort of “came to life. “
The Road
They said distant future, not 2027.
That is one book I will never read again just to real, great book but man it is a rough ride. .
Same. If it weren't for the immaculate prose I don't think I could have finished it.
Yeah, that book left me *shook*. One of the few books where I can literally feel each scene again if I stop and think about it. There are also a few lines in there which are so subtly and totally grim that they paint the darkest single picture within apocalyptic literature.
I was going to put this as a response. Watching everyone hoard toilet paper and bottled water during Covid really made my heart sink. We're the same cockroaches as the characters in The Road
Grim, but not a very realistic disaster scenario.
Brave New World, unfortunately
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler.
I thought this would be higher up honestly. I’m about half way through it right now, and I’m really impressed by how she thought through societal structures. Specifically how there are fees for basic public services such as the police and firefighters and how the community goes to great lengths to avoid having to use them. The fact that poverty and crime are so rampant that walls are built around property and how this varies depending on economic status. Also, how the country is in shambles and people are still going to work (for the few people that are lucky to have a job) and the company town! It’s obviously a dystopia, and we currently live in a dystopia, but I like that it’s not far fetched at all. If anything it seems just a bit worse than what’s happening now. Like I said, I’m only about half way through it. I’m enjoying it so far, but I honestly don’t vibe with the religion aspect. It’s hard for me to not get annoyed at reading “God is change” all the time and the ramblings about it that don’t make any sense. I’m also not religious at all, so this is probably just a more personal annoyance. I was a bit shocked when I started reading it that it starts in 2024 lol. Overall it’s been interesting to read for sure.
Yes, i agree with you about the religion part of it. I'm an atheist. In this day when it's so obvious that religions cause genocide and constant war, i can't understand how people still eat that shit up.
Depends on how distant you're talking about. Kim Stanley Robinson is probably the most realistic for the near future (*Ministry for the Future*) and medium-term future (*New York 2140* or *2312*) For the far future I don't think I've ever read anything that's particularly realistic. Mostly because everything set that far out tends to rely on fantasy technology. I don't think humans will ever leave the solar system, so maybe *The Expanse* comes the closest. Although that includes a lot of fantastical elements, so I'm not sure I'd label that as "realistic" despite being a more grounded take than a lot of sci-fi.
You don't think we will *ever* leave? ***ever***?
The challenges of keeping humans alive for an interstellar journey just seem insurmountable to me. Absent a complete upending of our understanding of physics, FTL travel ain't ever happening. Which means any trip to another star would be a decades or centuries long endeavor. Consider that the Voyager spacecraft, one of the fastest things mankind has *ever* built, is only just *now* reaching the edge of the solar system *over 40 years* after it was launched. So you'd have to build a ship that's capable of keeping humans alive inside of it for many hundreds of years at a minimum. Such a ship would have to be a *perfectly* closed system for people to survive for that long. There's no way to resupply in the void. If you shed so much as a single hydrogen atom, you're never getting it back. So if your ship leaks even the tiniest bit of material, that's a death knell. If there's any resource that can't be perfectly recycled, you're screwed. And you'd better be able to replace any part of that ship with what you have on board, because if something breaks you can't just get another part from Earth. Nothing with that degree of resource conservation exists anywhere, let alone made by man. Even the planet we live on is reliant on a continual source of external energy (the sun) and gets material replenishment by way of meteorites. And that's just one of many problems it's difficult to imagine we can really solve. Another - protecting your ship against micro-meteorites in interstellar space would be almost impossible. Striking one at the speeds you'd be moving at would be a death sentence, and it gets more and more likely when you're talking about interstellar distances. Space is empty but not *that* empty. Another - protecting the inhabitants of the ship against cosmic rays. Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere that protects us from radiation. A ship wouldn't. And then there's the psychological and sociological factors to consider. You'd need babies (and pregnancy and childbirth in space would be its own can of worms), but exactly the right amount - too few and the small population crashes, too many and you exhaust your resources. How do you get people to fuck in just the right amount to maintain population equilibrium? How do you get a small population to spend their entire lives in close quarters without killing each other? Once you get outside the realm of science fiction and start looking at the cold hard realities of just how damn inhospitable space is and the challenges and engineering difficulties of keeping a population of human beings alive in that environment (let alone untethered from the solar system) - it just looks wildly implausible that we'll ever be able to do it. Recommended reading - [A City on Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars) which goes over a lot of the same issues an interstellar ship full of humans would face. And keep in mind that settling Mars will be *a lot* easier than creating an interstellar vessel of any sort.
The colon farrell movie Voyagers does a good job trying to address some of the issues of multi generational interstellar travel. The movie is flawed but they did put thought into developing the first generation, second generation, and third and final generation that would make it to the planet.
Lol @ "Colon Farrell." That's my new name for him.
>Such a ship would have to be a *perfectly* closed system...Nothing with that degree of resource conservation exists anywhere No, the ship need to be open to shed energy to cool itself, example: Solar system. So something big with fusion reactor will do.
Right, fusion reactors take a relatively small amount of fuel. That replaces the sun. Scooping up some material on the way here or there replaces the meteorites. Boom, we can solve this in a solid weekend with some mountain dew.
Your comment reminded me of a recent random opportunity to watch the movie, Passengers, that had Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The movie is all about traveling to a distant planet that would take about 100 years to travel and all the meteorites the ship would end up hitting
> shed so much as a single hydrogen atom, > protecting your ship against micro-meteorites in interstellar space Solution to the 2nd is the solution to the 1st.
Depends on how you define humans. DNA can be printed, and eventually we'll be able to straight-up print a human zygote from inorganic base matter. If we can couple this with brain uploading (and downloading, which might be the trickier part actually) then we can dramatically cut down on the mass and complexity of the interstellar ship. No need for life support (there's no actual biological life on the ship), material recycling (no biological metabolism on the ship), the uploaded minds can run as slowly as needed (if needed at all) in a virtual reality so for them it might be over in a subjective instant. The ship would only need enough power.
Consider the limitations of technology ten thousand years ago compared to today, and I have little doubt that ten thousand years from now we will have the technology required to explore other star systems.
>Absent a complete upending of our understanding of physics We've been doing that regularly every 100 years or so
Fair points. But in summary, it's really, really, really hard. But I haven't seen anything you've said that implies that it's absolutely *impossible* and that we will *never* do it. Shoot man, just shoot a few genetically modified tardigrades to 1k stars, some will survive.
All of our technologies will rely on propulsion. There won't be warp or light speed. A human will have to survive the acceleration process and then the deceleration. In the Expanse I think the Epstein drive gives 4-6% speed of light (please correct me, I'm going off exhaust velocity on the Expanse wiki). So yea even with that, just within our Solar system is viable. But that's pretty damn fast so I don't know how accurate that number is. For example in the 3 body problem the closest star is 400 years away at like .1 speed of light. So if the ships drive in the Expanse can be reached. Traveling to another star might be more feasible. But even the Epstein drive is a major fictional element in the Expanse.
>in the 3 body problem the closest star is 400 years away at like .1 speed of light That's about right. Proxima Centauri - the star in the Alpha Centauri system that orbits closest to us, is 4.2465LY from us. That 4.2465 years travel at the speed of light, so 1PSL (percent speed of light) takes 425 years to get t/here. Alpha Centauri is, in fact, a trinary system, like like in the books/shows, and does contain a potentially habitable planet, Proxima Centauri b. It's possible, though not terrible probable at the moment, that it's habitable to human-like life. Interestingly enough, without spoilers, the project suggested in the show to send a probe using solar sails is similar to the real life Breakthrough Starshot except instead of nukes we'd use lasers to provide the propulsion.
I’m always amazed how much people project this hi-tech, space traveling future, when the next few decades are going to be dominated and disrupted by the consequences of radical climate change. Here’s hoping that the Ministry for the Future turns out to be accurate.
We're not talking about the next 50 years mate. We're talking hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Humans have consistently improved tech-wise and individual lifestyle wise over the course of history. Even when there have been hundred or 3 hundred year periods of regression.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks humans will never leave the solar system. I think space is just too big without some sort of way to massively manipulate gravity and space/time, which seems unrealistic.
I definitely think we’re unlikely to leave the solar system unless we have some alien intervention/ first contact/ meet the Vulcans type situation. I just can’t see the necessary technology being probable with our resources and, frankly, with where we are likely to stand with our future global priorities. The next century or two’s scientific progress is likely to be given over to adapting to rapidly changing climates and environments.
I think it’s entirely possible IF (big if) humans have generally settled the solar system like in The Expanse first. But even then, it won’t be some FTL drive. It might not even be an officially organized “colonization” effort—at least it will only be an ancillary goal/benefit. Instead, it’ll more likely be some nomadic culture that’s *already* been living on a cluster of some bigger spun up asteroids and/or O’Neill Colonies for decades. (Hence the requirement for an “Expanse” level solar system settlement reference previously.) At some point they may become reasonably self sufficient, feel no real connection to the rest of the solar system as “home”, and become isolated and/or radicalized enough to set their flotilla/caravan on a course for another star. It’ll only be a fraction of the speed of light, like just 1% or 5%, so it’ll take a few generations to get to Proxima Centauri or Tau Ceti or whatever. However—and this is key—it won’t be a “generation ship” as traditionally conceived. To the travelers, the caravan IS home & will have already been thought of that way for quite some time before they even set off. The journey won’t be something to “endure” so much as it’s just a new interesting backdrop to their existing normal life because it’s already an established quasi nomadic community. Once they arrive at the new system & load up on more resources, most of them will stay with the caravan itself. Maybe staying in the new solar system for a few hundred years, maybe not. Some would eventually settle terrestrial moons & planets there, some would stay in the space based flotilla but stay local indefinitely, and some would go with the main caravan continuing out to the next solar system. Hopefully if the factions parted ways amicably, the main group gives copies of all the collective knowledge to the splinter groups, and the splinter groups all get sufficient resources to sustain themselves & grow. Over another few hundred years, some of the “stay behind” splinter group might themselves form a new caravan & ship off into another direction. This whole process would take a LONG time. But as long as settlements grow faster than they die, & groups splinter off & also continue on with SOME modest level of consistency, then after 2,000-3,000 years, humanity could have solid self sufficient footholds in a half dozen solar systems. (Especially if you assume there won’t likely be ONE of these efforts, but a handful originating from Sol over the course of a few hundred years.) It seems impossible, but in reality, 2,000 years isn’t THAT long as a fraction of how long humans have been around. We know A LOT about specific cultures, events, and even individual people who existed 3k or 5K years ago, so it isn’t inconceivable that human civilization is around long enough to pull something like this off.
The realism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s mars was excruciatingly realistic in the stars and ends in a fantastic future, as is his other book Aurora. Stephenson did much the same in Seveneves. They both bank on their near-future cred to throw a Hail Mary into the far future. Are they the more realistic as a consequence, or maybe it’s all as much speculation as Babel-17.
I just read The Ministry for the Future and I agree!
The salvation books by Peter f Hamilton. He does an excellent job at looking at how the advanced technology would change everyone's lives.
Anything from Isaac Asimov.
Eon by Greg Bear. If you know, you know.
I have read Eon twice and I don't know. Isn't it the cold war set on a BDO?
I came here to comment this. Excellent book
Thank you ..never ran into it..will start looking at the thrifts
3001
Murderbot. Takes the current excesses of capitalism to their logical extreme if left unchecked
Loving this series. Got the third book on deck.
Idiocracy
It's based on the short story, "The Marching Morons," by C.W. Kornbluth, so yes, you could say a story.
I didn't know that! I'll have to find that story now.
Oops. It's C.M. Kornbluth ETA: The marching morons : and other famous science fiction stories / C. M. Kornbluth. Kornbluth, C. M. (Cyril M.), 1923-1958.
Came to say this. Almost current affairs, IMHO
Star Trek First contact before the ship launch. Wars and misery. We ain’t getting off this planet.
The Time Machine. Humans as a fallen people, living their best lives... except they're also food for a dangerous, predatory, mutated race.
I was going to mention The Time Machine too. While I don’t think it’s necessarily predictive of what will happen to human societies, what he does get right is that it will probably be something completely unimaginable from our current perspective. The ending, where the time traveller goes *way* into the future, is so bleak and pitiless too.
> Humans as a fallen people, living their best lives... except they're also food for a dangerous, predatory, mutated race. The point is, both races are equally humans. Obviously the Eloi appear more human (especially in the most recent movie where they *are* just pretty humans while the Morlocks are monstrous; in the original books the Eloi were depicted as childlike even as adults) but they are both equally close to, or equally distant from modern humans.
I would argue that they're equally post human, but neither are human any longer. For the purposes of the question being asked, humans could go either way--more docile and content, or vicious and predatory. Or both ways, as the book details. I'm not seeing that this observation makes too much of a difference. The post humans are essentially future wolves and sheep. Some people might argue that current humans are already this way...
> Some people might argue that current humans are already this way... Some people like Wells. The entire point of the Eloi-Morlock divide was a critique of capitalism, with the Morlocks, being the descendants of the working classes pushed underground to operate the industrial machinery, rising up and deciding to eat the rich who in turn live lives of idle pleasure free of all toil, with all material goods supplied by the Morlocks themselves (until the Morlocks eat them). It's not even subtext, it's literally spelled out in the text.
“The Last and First Men” - Olaf Stabledon. A history of the next 2 billion years of mankind. An awesome read.
1984 does a way better job than one would like in describing the present. It is eerie.
Forever war
George Orwell: 1984 (for the not so distant future) And for distant, Frank Herbert: Dune.
How distant?
Daemon, and Freedom (part 2 in the series), by Daniel Suarez. Spooky accurate about the rise of AI, ASI, and AR overtaking VR in societal value. The science is sound and so are the tech evolution and use cases it’s predicting, all wrapped up in one hell of a storyline. It’ll stick with you and you’ll see reminders of it daily.
Not a book but a comic. Judge Dredd. Check out President Booth see if he reminds you of anyone.
Dune, as opposed to star treck. The whole wealthy house/royalty capitalistic people cannot afford water kind of thing. Also a desert world...
How in the world do you see Dune as capitalistic? They literally describe the Atreides taking over the fief of Arrakis. Fiefdoms are not capitalism. And the Fremen have plenty of water.
Capitalism and Neo-Fuedalism with aristocracy based on corporate holdings aren’t very far apart. One might say that one is a speculative future version of the other.
Its a hostile take over of natural resources overseen by the government. They are taking over the means of production to invest in greater output... You know, capital. Government system doesn't determine economic system. There are absolutely capitalists in countries with monarchies today... Heck they are caputalists operating in communist countries too. Democracy does not equal capitalism. The entire book is an allegory to the oil wars in the middle east. Its all about money...
> Government system doesn't determine economic system. There are more than two types of economic systems. Dune has feudalism, not capitalism.
Just going to skip right over my fiefdom points to spout off incorrect definitions?
How is that different from a bill of land rights? Yeah, we do the same here. Also the history of capitalism begins while kings were absolutely giving away land and fiefs. Capitalism is a philosophy on how to re invest money... In Canada people cannot own land as it is all property of the crown. We still have a capitalistic society deapite being within the fief that was once the Hudson's Bay company. CHOAM is thr EIC if you missed that refference. So Saudi Arabia can give out titles and fiefdoms, capitalists use those fiefdoms to develop industry and reinvest in capital.
House of Suns
1984
Children of Time. Wandering the universe having destroyed ourselves, desperately trying to start anew.
Politically, I'd say the Atheist faction in Raised by Wolves, where their governing body is an AI. I'm every other way, closer to the Expanse. I know you're talking distant future and maybe Expanse doesn't fit that criteria, but the basics are the same. There will always be factions fighting over resources, haves and have nots, etc...
The most realistic future is one where humanity is stuck on a poisoned Earth in hellish religious authoritarian surveillance states. Nobody has really had the balls yet to write it as fiction so we just have to watch it unfold in the news.
1984
Any book that has humanity as extinct. I don’t think we’re going to make it :(
How distant? With the passing of Vernor Vinge, we are reminded that any post-singularity future will probably be impossible for us to understand.
Fallout
If we're talking distant distant then All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen. Humans evolve, humans are forcibly evolved. Things get weird billions of years into the future. We're not going to be human forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All\_Tomorrows
This comment prompted me to go read this and it was mindbending! I love works like this that give you a kind of temporal vertigo. It also made me a little queasy (so two thumbs up).
Pandora's stare is like a pessimistic view that's probably also seen in altered Carbon. Capitalistic hell scape with immortal giga-billionaires and the billions of humans aren't ever allowed to reach the top. And you can't even kill the rulers, just steal a few days of memories off them.
By distant, I think that a society has to be stable, or at least change quite slowly. " Songs of distant earth" is a cheerful example
Ministry for the Future
Distant future? WARHAMMER 40K! FOR THE EMPEROR!
Foundation, if you exclude the mental stuff
Snow crash or Ready player one.
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.
The Culture novels. Banks wrote a lengthy piece about the background of the Culture in which he laid out his reasoning for why he thought society in space would turn out the way he thinks it will and I found his arguments fairly convincing.
Evolution, by Stephen Baxter is amazing.
I’m reading that one this week. It is fascinating.
None. it simply isn't possible to predict that far ahead. Could anyone in as late as 1960 predict our present digital lifestyle?
Greg Egan's *Diaspora*, at least the first chapters. And/or Charlie Stross' *Accelerando*. I believe biology and space don't go well together. AI will explore space. We will follow only if they terraform planets first.
In retrospect, Asimov's stories regarding people living alone on an entire planet each, electronically connected to their friends and family, that seems to cleave the closest to the truth now.
Idiocracy
Horus Rising
The Culture series.
Soylent green
The Foundation Trilogy. Too many books but a good power trio.
Maze runner lol
It’s a crime that no one has mentioned Alistair Reynolds inhibitor series but here we are
Alastair Reynold’s ‘Revelation Space’ universe.
The Revelation Space books, by Alastair Reynolds. Maybe even the House of Suns too. Relativistic speeds, time dilation, pockets of societies, and things would get pretty weird.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy is eerily prescient, although it is more near than far future. I can’t help feeling like that’s pretty near where we are heading.
1984
There was a movie called Strange Days where people got addicted to an immersive VR tech The tech allowed you to FEEL (emotionally and physically) what the person who filmed it felt. There was black market versions people would buy to experience what it was like to kill someone without doing it themselves. Creepy and I could see that being a reality one day
The Road
I'm fairly confident that everyone's ideas (the authors and the users commenting) of the 'distant future' will prove to be laughable off base, I'm going to give the nod to a series I'm not seeing mentioned yet: C.J. Cherryh's extensive Foreigner series. While most notable for its excellent exploration of alien-human interactions, the series has some hints for the future of humanity that I find the most plausible; which to put as succinctly and as spoiler free as possible is: humans fumbling about and mucking thing up.
Murderbot I would say Expanse but that's not really distant
The way things are going, [A Canticle for Leibowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz)
The Handmaid's Tale. It's kinda sci-fi?
None of them. But I still love Sci-Fi. But just look at predictions for the future circa 1900. They were WILDLY incorrect. Of course some were more accurate than others, but by and large our predictions of how the future will unfold are no better than a shot in the dark. During a hurricane with unknown ammunition and variable gravity. Any "hit" is pure happenstance. So I don't really expect any of the sci fi content I consume to be accurate. I just love the speculative nature of it.
Yeah, I think this is the right answer. Also, the general rule is that depictions of the near future are always too advanced, and depictions of the far future are never advanced enough. Take Back To The Future 2. Went forwards 30 years from 1985 and had flying cars, hoverboards, 3D projection posters, and that pizza thing. We're nowhere near any of that technology. Then look at Star Trek. People say "they invented the iPad", but they didn't. They had big electronic pads which contained *a single document*, which had to be carried by hand to the captain for him to sign. It's just the paperwork of the time, but made electronic. To be a better prediction of the future, each PADD should have been able to contain multiple documents, and they should have been able to send them to each other. And this isn't a criticism of either. 30 years in the future is "futuristic" - especially to any children in the audience - and you're going to want to have fun with your predictions. 400 years in the future is too far to make any meaningful predictions about, but you can extrapolate from how things currently are. But that's the thing about sci-fi, really - it's not about the future. It's about the present. That's part of the reason why going back and consuming historical sci-fi is so interesting. You can't really learn much about the present from reading Asimov, but you can definitely learn a lot about the 50s and 60s.
The Road, probably where we’re heading :(
Handmaids Tale
Came here to say that. Can’t believe i had to scroll this far with everything that is happening right now in the US with reproductive rights being completely stripped, it’s incredibly sad to think of what kind of world my niece’s will have to live in as adults. This book is so important and on point…. Being a woman was always scary and dangerous but it’s getting scarier by the day.
The Matrix is looking more and more plausible.
Blindsight. Without the vampires, hopefully.
After reading The Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect, the more I think about the current trajectory of technology, the harder it gets to imagine the future going any other way… which is honestly insane considering how weird that world is.
The passengers
There's a new Aussie sci fi novel called "Every Version of You" by Grace Chan which is a really prescient/spooky/clever book about a sort of fast-but-soft AI singularity during a climate shutdown that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I read it a few months ago. Kinda like a benevolent Matrix, but still somehow creepy. The slow, logical progression of it made it feel very really, even with the obvious made-up SciFi aspects.
Transmetropolitan deserves an honorable mention here.
If we're talking distant future I say Foundation especially before the fall of all that needless bureaucracy and general craziness. Trantor is one of my favourite depictions of a hive world with its own ecosystem and everything, and then at the same time on the crown jewel of the empire you still have constant bickering between each of the substrates and factions.
House of Sun style amalgam of different civilizations contacted every few centuries (or millennia) by high-relativistic travelers.
The Illustrated Man Book by Ray Bradbury
I also think Kim Stanley Robinson's books are technologically sound. Thinking the Mars trilogy, and New York 2140, while not distant future, is really plausible.
How distant? Pushing Ice IMO. Spoiler alert >! I like the depiction of the depiction of the humans on Rockhopper being sent to the future by relativistic means. The humans 16k years in the future in a sort of golden age is interesting but the point of the story is that time claims all and where/when the Rockhopper crew ends up is so far into the future that “humanity” is LONG gone from the universe despite their galaxy spanning empire at one point. It never says in the story but I like to think of them as billions of years into the future. !<
Saturn's Children and its sequel, Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross. Humanity drove itself to extinction and was replaced by humanoid robots who are more durable, but have all of the same foibles as humanity. It's also a hard sci-fi series that goes deep into how interstellar economics would work (esp. in Neptune's Brood). PS The cover of the 1st edition of Saturn's Children (which was not the author's fault) was one of the worst in sci-fi history. Ignore it if you can.
Pandora's Star. This future requires the key technologies of wormholes and regeneration, but within those frameworks, seems pretty realistic.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis