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What the Future Fiction of 2015 Revealed About Humans Today (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: There were a lot of stories told about the future in 2015. More than usual, maybe. Big budget blockbusters, hefty, idea-rich novels, and epic, dystopian video games—there was complex, stirring speculative fiction dripping from every media faucet we've got. And it spoke volumes about our anxieties about the present. In 2015, those anxieties are, apparently, concern the rise of science denial, climate change, total collapse.
That humans today are still terrible at predicting the future?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
tell dramatic stories about a dramatic future. Stories about a future where a guy goes to work and installs software on computers for an insurance company don't get made into movies.
And Hollywood continues to turn out lots of bland, unimaginative, formulaic movies that are less and less compelling relative to TV and video games.
"Watch Us Try to Spin as Many Science Fiction Works as Possible into Supporting All the Progressive Talking Points We Were Planning to Cram Down Your Throat Anyway"
Getting repeatedly called out on thinly-veiled, agenda-driven clickbait like this is exactly why Motherboard Vice censored its comment sections.
Maintain the status quo, that is what people today and people of yesterday are all about.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
On Jan 25th, 2016 "the world will reach a point of no return". It's not next week, it's 3 weeks from now.
If that only was true.
The forms of scepticism that I've encountered most frequently is the refusal of any data that is presented by any sources but themselves. (Note that not all of the sceptics are like this. But many of those with a particularly loud voice are like this)
Then it doesn't matter whether there are rather reliable temperature records for the past 200 years. Since the chair of IPCC was accused of sexual harassment every single thing that is connected with the issue must be a lie.
"If only they [men] saw us for the filthy creatures we really are." Daisy, 27, told me. "Take me for example" as she lifted up her right pant leg, "I haven't shaved my legs or my pits in 5 years."
How did she get dates, I wonder. Was she married to a blind man?
"I love to live as I really am! In fact, if every feminist were true to themselves they would live as I do. No razor, even if your upper lip sprouts hair." She leaned forward towards me and whispered as if the whole world were listening, "no waxing, not even for my private parts!"
Truly this woman was honest. More honest than any feminist I had ever met. I wondered what she did when she went swimming somewhere.
"Oh I get a lot of looks, a lot!" she laughed. "Mostly curious but it sure does keep the men away." She reached for a coffee mug and pointed to her hairy legs. "This is what we really are! This is how we really should appear. Why hide it?"
Why, indeed. I excused myself and thanked Daisy for her time and honesty.
Finally, I had met a woman. A real woman. "Well, back to the world of lies and perfume on a pig" I told myself, walking out to the street where I hailed a taxi. I looked back at Daisy as she stroked her leg hair. "A reeeeal woman" I blew out through my smiling lips.
The most amusing thing there was a targeted advertisement for Walmart telling me to go to a local store that doesn't exist :)
The future is now and advertisers know too damn much about us.
Besides, I don't know enough about the topic to know if Gore is wrong, do you? Remember all those "future shock" predictions about world starvation? Those sort of numbers would have been correct if Mao hadn't died and China hadn't got their shit together, not to mention the "green revolution" in agriculture that gave us our current levels of production. Maybe Gore would have been correct without the reduction in pollution the economic hassles of 2008+ had not happened. Maybe he's still correct, the "experts" that make fun of him seem to be economists and nothing to do with anything even loosely connected to physics.
They sometimes end up being self-fulfilling prophecies.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
In contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.
Sounds like a lot of people around here.
The big thing that happened was natural gas replacing coal.
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was basically a demake of the original Star Wars.
It's not a shot-for-shot remake, obviously, and it's not a reboot. But it is basically the same fucking story and it's got tons of scenes and settings that are found almost identically in the original. Just like Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, the new Star Trek films, and to a lesser extent Rocky Balboa.
It's like a restaurant selling you a "deconstructed" burger. It's main selling point is that it's a burger, but they've gone and taken the burger you liked, separated the pieces, dressed them differently, and served them up in a manner that's foreign and undesired. It's neither the burger you're familiar with nor something worthy of being on the menu in its own right.
Demakes are a fucking trend now, unfortunately. They have nothing in the tank to do a creative sequel but they know people are sick of remakes and reboots.
Anyone else read seven eves?
I did and I quite enjoyed it but well, ehhh.
First it was waaay too long. Dude needs an editor. Second, boy does he really REALLY like orbital mechanics. That seems to be a theme across his books, but a times kinda becomes a bit like reading about someone playing KSP. Also, I find his long desciptions where he's describing the relative spatial layout of things (space or ground) to be really hard to follow. I find I don't get a clear picture of what's going on often which makes action scenes really rather confusing. Oh yeah and did I mention too long? I also find some of the descriptions of stuff a bit patronising, too.
I thought the first half was better, and the speculation mostly seemed plausible.
On the plus side, it was pretty typical Stevenson, and it was an easy read, bowled along at a fast pace without heaps of implausibility. I did enjoy reading it.
Spoiler Alert if you read on.
The evil president (politician) is evil and politicians are eeeeeevil and 1 dimensional and did I mention stupid and eeeeeevil was way too obvious. As obvious as John Ringo's[*] "liberals are stupid and evil and deserve to die because they're liberals (and stupid because they're liberals)" characters. Kinda of lazy, silly, flat and it was telegraphed a mile off (a mile is about 1/5th of the thickness of the book by the way). So a key character was basically a 1D parody matching the fantasy stereotype that we techies love and that spawned the key chain of events. Trouble is while the stereotype is appealing (who here doesn't have a lot of contempt for politicians?) it was just too flat and too obvious. That for me made one of the key parts of the book just a bit less believable which is a shame.
I think in the second half, the speculative stuff was a bit full of holes. In no particular order (and I read it a while back so it's random what stands out) here's my nitpicking:
- For the people that survived on earth, where did all their heat go? How did they not cook from the heat generated by their plant growing machinery?
- Why did the pingers get sea-creature colouration. The sea had only been usable for 500 years. Not remotely long enough.
- The spacers had been post industrial for 3000 years (minimum), had a high population, vast industrial capacity, fabrication tech beyond what we have, high reliance on intelligent robots and hadn't/didn't want to figure out dense IC fab tech? I don't buy it. If he's said "couldn't because it all had to be rad hard" that would have worked. The rest was too much of a stretch.
- Small chunks of metal aren't great at shileding cosmic rays (especially galactic ones): the atmosphere (which is good) has 10 tons of stuff between you and space per meter squared, more or less equivalent to 10m of water or 3m of ion. Composition does matter, but 1cm of nickel iron won't do much.
- Was really unclear why, if the moon stayed more or less together initially, why it's orbit was changed so much. The moon is very far outside the Roche limit so would naturally coalesce under its own gravity (as it did originally) not turn into rings.
In the second half, given the society had been heavily industial for 3000-4000 years and had vastly surpassed
[*]actually Stevenson is really like a left wing mirror of John Ringo, or Ringo is a right wing mirror of Stevenson. [Stevenson]/[Ringo] is kind of man builds stuff and the [right wing nuts]/[liberal sissies] get it in the neck. I find Ringo awful.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
On Jan 25th, 2016 "the world will reach a point of no return".
Of course, the world did not just continue on its pre-2006 path, but has been making changes. In the US and Europe, GHG emissions are down by 5-10%. Even globally, CO2 emissions seem to be leveling off and that before the recent global agreement. Nevermind that the "point of no return" was about conditions likely to produce a couple of degrees temperature rise in 2100, not the date when New York City would be taken back into the sea.
Sure, the activists tend to use worse-case predictions (in exactly the same way that the "deniers" use better-case predictions). But it's disingenuous to pick out some 10-year old predictions, ignore the corrective actions taken to prevent disaster, and claim that the predictors were idiots. Remember the Y2K problem and how it turned out to be no-big-deal? That's not an argument to ignore the Epoch bug.
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was basically a demake of the original Star Wars. It's not a shot-for-shot remake, obviously, and it's not a reboot. But it is basically the same fucking story and it's got tons of scenes and settings that are found almost identically in the original.
Hardly surprising. If you look closely enough, most stories are the same. They used to teach the basic plots in grade school English, because the formulas for "good" stories have not really changed since Euripides.
It's a classic denier pattern of course, which is either a deliberately attempt at deception or a massive failure at understanding even the most basic premise of science.
Science makes a very specific kind of prediction: if X then Y.
Then, when we take steps to prevent X the result becomes: !X therefore !Y - and deniers declare that this somehow DISPROVES the original prediction (when, in fact, it confirms it).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
They are not skeptics. Skeptic has a specific definition - and they are literally the opposite of skeptics.
Skeptics are people who believe only that which has evidence, they embrace science and reject pseudo-science, religion and other ideologies not based on evidence.
Skeptics accept climate science as one of the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in the world today (we have more evidence for this theory than we have for the link between tobacco and lung cancer and very nearly more than we have for evolution - and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence against it).
People who refuse to believe something *despite* all the evidence are not skeptics, by definition they are not. The proper term is "deniers" whether what they are denying is evolution, climate change or the holocaust - they are all the same movement intellectually.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Very long way to go with that, but in some situations yes, probably into the double digits of percentage by now. As the coal power generation units age that replacement will increase. Steel production is down (economic hassles) so coal use is down in that area where natural gas does not work because the coal is needed for a chemical reaction as well as the heat.
Skeptics accept climate science as one of the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in the world today (we have more evidence for this theory than we have for the link between tobacco and lung cancer and very nearly more than we have for evolution - and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence against it).
Look, it doesn't make sense to say that there is evidence for or against "climate science" -- that just doesn't make sense. But is there evidence for or against a particular climate model? Absolutely. Every time they adjust a model or present a new one, that is evidence that the previous models were flawed.
I would write a story about a future taking place decades after science got hijacked and turned into a religion by liberals, who were determined to turn science into a religious/social instrument to promote their own anti-capitalist social agenda. The story would be set in a prison for the people who questioned this social agenda, and who were arrested and charged with social crimes. The protagonist is serving time for science denial and improper use of scientific data without government approval. He is serving his time alongside other social criminals charged with racism, misogyny, hate-thinking, harassment of protected classes, and carnivorism.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
After what Abrams did to Trek I suppose we should not expect different with the current effort.
Replace "Wars" with "Trek" and your comment works, I'll soon see if it applies to both, preferably on a day when the cinema airconditioning will make it worth it whether the movie is worth seeing or not.
From Gallup (Dec 2015 - http://www.gallup.com/poll/187...) American's top anxieties are:
#1: Terrorism (16%)
#2: Government (13%)
#3: Economy (9%)
#4: Guns (7%)
>> In 2015, those anxieties are, apparently, concern the rise of science denial, climate change, total collapse
None of those seem to be top-of-mind here.
I'm not sure why Star Wars was even in the article.... I thought this was about *future* fiction. Star Wars is a story that takes place "a long time ago".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Euripides
His name has always evoked in my mind the image of an Italian tailor saying (after mending a portly gentleman's pants for the nth time) "You rippa dees, I break-a your face!"
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The podcast is a total waste of time, mostly devoted to noodling about comics and the reappearance in 2015 of a certain major movie franchise. The subject of books comes up in minute 47, immediately before it's time to wrap.
Go ahead and write it. But don't expect any royalties from your tear jerker autobiography. The Son of Sam law took care of that(and it probably was those sciency liberals who did that!).
Oh, and don't forget to include the part where once upon a time you were a sweet little boy who loved his new-age-vegan-yogini-single-mommy who would dress you up in girls clothes while listening to Enya. Then this all changed when the girl you had a crush on in 7th grade(and who turned out to become a highly regarded professor of womyns studies) beat you up when you laughed at her lisp in the lunchroom and your reaction to this was to eventually join the high school Republicans, and go on to a brilliant career delivering pizza on K street.
Thats the part I want to read.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
One prominent picture is from starwars? That is about 2015? It is set a long time ago in a far away galaxy. Makes the title of the article seem pretty stupid.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Damn you, manbearpig!
Just because models get updated does not mean the premise is flawed. It may just mean that variables are known more accurately.
Consider other science where there is consensus like the theory that stars get their energy from nuclear fusion. The consensus is pretty high that the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion which leads to models showing the Sun is getting more dense due to an increasing ratio of helium to hydrogen and a more dense Sun burning hotter. Some models show that in 500 million years the oceans will boil and some models show it happening in a billion years. Just because both models disagree and keep getting adjusted does not mean that the basic premise that the Sun experiences nuclear fusion is wrong. It just means that there are variables that we're unsure of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The Force that Awakens appears to be referencing the Marketing Force. It turns out to be pretty strong.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I agree with you. Those people are in fact deniers.
But in most conversations I've been, they were adamant on being labelled as "sceptics. Many of them state that they'll believe reliable evidence and then ask for such evidence. But in the end virtually everything will be shot down in many cases. Most commonly by ad hominem, nitpicking, strawmen, false dichotomies and similar things.
The most fruitful conversations I've had in these cases where, when people simply admitted that they they are mostly sceptical of the agendas of politicians and other powerful people/organisations. And again, I don't want to argue a strawman here myself. This is just an anecdote on my part.
Oh you're right - they are very adamant about that, which is exactly why I refuse to go along with it. The sceptic movement cannot afford to be associated with these people who stand for exactly the opposite of what the sceptic movement does.
Getting them to admit it's really a political motivation for their opposition is, perhaps, a positive step (I've had that a few times) but unfortunately that it still an appeal-to-consequences fallacy, the truth of a theory is not dependent on whether you like what we have to do about it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I would write a story about a future taking place decades after science got hijacked and turned into a religion by liberals, who were determined to turn science into a religious/social instrument to promote their own anti-capitalist social agenda. The story would be set in a prison for the people who questioned this social agenda, and who were arrested and charged with social crimes. The protagonist is serving time for science denial and improper use of scientific data without government approval. He is serving his time alongside other social criminals charged with racism, misogyny, hate-thinking, harassment of protected classes, and carnivorism.
I don't quite see where you'd get any sympathy for your protagonist in this utopia?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Also, jingoistic nationalism, while ultimately destructive, also helps give people a sense of purpose, such that they see their "privation" as part of their noble duty to the motherland.
Exactly.
The economy is no better in any real terms, but now people have a reason for the privation.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you want it to be halfway good, drop the politics as much as possible. Writing about the other political team engineering a thoroughly improbable and evil social manipulation may give you a warm feeling, but bladder incontinence will do that also and be less embarrassing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
All models are flawed. Ask any scientist about the models he or she uses. In this case, the newer models are probably less flawed than the older ones, and they don't disagree in the broad strokes. There is very strong evidence that we are warming things up, for example.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A few years ago on Slashdot, there was a submission about a climate scientist who was a skeptic getting the funding to study the evidence, and concluded that, yes, there is AGW. One commenter found one comment of his saying AGW was possible, and claimed he therefore wasn't a skeptic. Sigh.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In other words, it's in the Star Wars tradition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The first episode of Dr. Who's "Enemy of the World" (one of the recovered "Lost" episodes of Dr. Who 1964?) had a ride in a helicopter. The license plaque behind the pilot's seat said 2018.
The arch-enemy of that film was a guy nicknamed "The Salamander". His plan to take over the earth involved dicking with the weather, including earthquakes. Whenever a region suffered from one of his manufactured disasters, he would take over with a corporate bailout.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
So your strategy for discussion is to attribute the opinions of people to the things they describe?
You must really hate journalists that report on murders.
Get it right - try instead "Something the Saudis are working hard to reverse by bringing the oil price down low enough to drive the US producers out of the market". Fracking costs more than a shallow well in a desert.
LOL Pretty much. I saw the first three (only now they're not the first three) and made it through most of the first one of the new ones (which would be the fourth one but is now the new first one - I think) and then made it part way into the second one before giving up. I've never seen the end of the first one nor the last 3/4 of the second one (which are fourth and fifth respectively).
I just couldn't get into them. Then again, I was kind of old when the first few came out so they've never been a huge attraction to me. I like some science in my science fiction and I don't think Star Wars qualifies as science fiction. Yes, I'm aware that such beliefs make me the spawn of Satan. I accept the label. I don't hate them but they're just not that important to me and I really just couldn't get into the prequels even though I bought the set on either DVD or Blu-Ray. (No, I have no idea which ones I bought.)
I mostly only watch documentaries or read books - if I'm not reading something online. I've never really been into television much - we didn't have it on much when I was growing up. Sometime in the mid or late 1980s they changed the format and there started being so many commercials that I simply stopped viewing entirely. I don't have anything against it - I have cable in the house here where I am until spring. (I did not know this and I have no idea how long I've been paying for this.)
I'm not one of the folks that hates TV. I just don't watch it enough to worry about it. I don't even have OTA hooked up and I took the satellite dish down years ago back home - I'd only had it turned on for a year or so and it wasn't getting used. I've gone from being a "freak" to a "hipster" to a "cord-cutter" and now I'm the "new normal." All because I don't really watch television.
In some regards, the 'net has been awesome for me. I've vast stores of documentaries at Hulu+ and Netflix. I've countless documentaries at YouTube. I'm not bashful, I'll even go pirate some if I am interested and can't find it available legally. I do, on occasion, watch regular movies but not that often. It probably sounds odd to some but I'm really entertained with documentaries. I don't watch them as a scholarly pursuit, just as passive entertainment.
Also, I'd not really call Coal House a documentary? It's a bit of a re-enactment or it might get classified as a reality television show except there aren't any real games and nobody is getting kicked out or any of those things. It's a bit like a historical recreation but less technical. I really think you might enjoy it and the Farms series that are in that same playlist. I'd guess you'd find both the Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm to be of interest but they're all *very* good. Quite surprisingly so as that's just not my cup of tea normally.
Ah well, I've babbled long enough. ;-) Give the Coal House a try. I think you'll really like it. I still find it a bit odd that I do but it's surprisingly good.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."