Do you look look back with fondness no the past or forward with wonder to the future?

>You will never be a Spacer and enjoy abject luxury as the sole Human ruler of your won continent

If the past is so great, why isn't it here anymore?

Everything is an illusion. Free will doesnt exist. Nothing has a purpose. Now, let's watch some TV.

Things didn't use to be better, but they're worse now.

If detailed world simulations are possible you are probaly in one.

But you can always acquire nukes and be The Man.

Imagine that you have just arrived at work to begin your shift, and you see that the entire building is wrecked, the walls are covered in excrement, the computer system is crashed, the machines are visibly smoking, and there are 38 million Africans beating at the door demanding to be let in.

Imagine how you look at the clerk who handled the last shift. That is how I look at the past.
Now imagine how you look at the vibrant horde of diversity pounding against the door with garbage cans. That is how I look at the future.

Only fantasy can provide a secondary world with a history that does not fill me with rage.

You know why the two authors in OP were great? It's because they didn't do the simplistic "past is good, future is bad" or vice-versa that OP is implying.

They did build a lot of their writing around concepts which are easy for reductionists to conflate with those kind of blanket generalities, though, and we've seen plenty of authors play that kind of stuff insultingly straight in the years since.

Asimov believed that properly applied technology had the ability to make human life better, and many of his stories were written in response to the "hurr, technology bad, robots will kill all humans" crap that cheap Tolkien-imitators had been spewing for decades. His basic conceit was "Humans are smart enough not to build something that will immediately try to destroy us," which isn't exactly an unreasonable statement. But he was well aware of the old maxim, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and many of his stories are about how the careless or rushed application of unknown technology does carry risks. I remember one of his short stories in particular, in which a mining company altered the first law in its robots to just "a robot may not injure a human," and there was an exploration of all the ways that was a terrible idea that would have had terrible consequences if not stopped in time. More broadly, the general theme of his writing was "technology allows humans to do MORE," and Asimov showed great awareness that "MORE" wasn't good or bad by definition; it was up to people to apply technology ethically and sensibly.

Tolkien wasn't actually all that far removed from Asimov's attitude toward tech (though you'd never guess it from looking at the myriad LotR ripoffs). But Tolkien had a lot less faith in people to root out unintended consequences in time and, more importantly, approached matters with a more Hippocritic lens than Asimov's Utilitarian-leaning one. "First, do no harm" was Tolkien's approach to the world at large, and he was reluctant to accept the growing pains that advancement inevitably brought. He didn't actually oppose advancement itself; what he feared was progress so rapid that its consequences were ignored or misunderstood in the rush to implement.

Asimov was aware of this risk, too! He wrote a number of stories about the dangers and risks of trying to push out a new technology or update too quickly, Where he and Tolkien differed was in that the former's humanist bent led him to believe that people would ferret out these kinks and, even if there were growing pains, advancement at all costs wouldn't be allowed to triumph over the essential good of humanity, and preservation of human ethics. The latter's religious training, on the other hand, informed his view that "progress at all costs" could all too easily become a self-fulfilling cycle, with "advanced" replacing "moral" in society's dictionary and progress becoming an end in itself, rather than a means to improve and benefit humanity.

Which viewpoint has history favored? Well, it's not hard to find supporting arguments for either worldview; that's precisely what makes both of their writings so effective today, and is why neither of them is likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history any time soon. Meanwhile, those authors who write stories with basic, easily-refuted premises like "the future = good!" and "everything was better before and is worse now!" are dated the moment their stories hit the bookshelves, destined to be forgotten in favor of writers with a worldview worthy of consideration.

To be fair: every piece of writing that is both pessimistic and optimistic will stay relevant forever.

>The latter's religious training

Well, that and a pair of world wars, the first of which he got to see a bit of in person.

True, he had a lot of firsthand experience in the field of "ways progress can dick over people when haphazardly or immorally applied." Watching all your friends die because technology changed faster than human understanding will do that to you.

Now these are quality posts.

And so we have the opinion of those who hate humanity.

Imagining the past as checking into a corporate workplace is one of the saddest things I've heard.

What the fuck is this false choice bullshit?

Both motherfucker.

I favour reminiscing about a past that includes dragons and serried hosts of elves in shining mail. It's just more realistic than any future asimov imagined.

upvoted

The past fucking sucked. Why would I ever look back at it with fondness?

I look back with regret and forward with dread.

There are things in the past that are better than today. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) it was Foucault who said that we look at our history in a linear fashion, as a continual advancement in all things but this is wrong.

So while (in the first world) it is more comfortable, safe, and clean to live in todays world. One cannot deny we have regressed in other areas because of the consequences of our advancements and growth. Every human action, even advancement has its consequences so it is important not to become strictly obsessed with what we consider advancement but instead philosophically ponder HOW and WHY we should advance.

So yeah people who overly romanticize the past are foolish (after all disease, crime, starvation, etc. was rampant) but those who deny the past of what it truly was better in are just a foolish.

I look forward with dread to the future that I might remember the terrors of the past.

The past was relatively (in the USA) ethnically homogeneous, with slower rates of geographic personnel diffusion. In summation: higher trust.

The future is Brazilification. Fewer friends. More tan. More bureaucracy for the SJW HR gods and the atomized capitalism they thrive within.

Material and social technology don't advance together. Rather, advances in one often permit decay elsewhere, so long as a vague state of leveling homeostasis exists.

I look at the present with apathy.

On the contrary, he must love it if he's trying to save humanity from savages.

I look forward to the return of the past.

The truth.

>Do you look look back with fondness no the past or forward with wonder to the future?
no

>correct me if I'm wrong
it sounds to me like you're getting at hegelian dialectics but he didn't exactly see it as "linear"

Your flesh is a relic; a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you. We demand it.

I like a different past and a different future.

I see neither purpose nor reason in either, but I can't be bothered with dying because even in my not-so-great present situation I'm still having too much fun.

>What can you expect, from filthy little heathens?

If you're hearing that song in your head, right now? That's you.

>This is what we feared! The pale-face is a demon!

That's the people you /actually/ need to reach terms with. And by "reach terms," I of course mean "pacify through whatever available means short of extermination," because extermination has radicalizing effects and you do not want to knock over what few dominoes are still standing.

If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, the baby comes back with a lightsaber screaming about how you killed his father.

This. I fear for the future of my children. We're being invaded, and no-one will fight back.

> If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, the baby comes back with a lightsaber screaming about how you killed his father.

See, that's not how it works in real life. In real life, the baby doesn't go through a plot arc and shows up twenty years later. In real life, he just dies, lives a marginal life, or turns to petty crime. It's not really a great metaphor.

>That's the people you /actually/ need to reach terms with. And by "reach terms," I of course mean "pacify through whatever available means short of extermination," because extermination has radicalizing effects and you do not want to knock over what few dominoes are still standing.
>If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, the baby comes back with a lightsaber screaming about how you killed his father.

Who is left to radicalize, and why should it matter if they're forbidden from arriving on our shores?

...

...

Be the change you want to see in the world, user.

1. Cities of tall, needle-shaped spires, where people put on glass bubble helmets and fly from balcony to balcony with jetpacks and garishly colored flying cars.

2. A well-lighted labyrinth of shiny pastel white, with ubiquitous sliding doors and touchscreens and holographic displays.

3. Monolithic structures of black, ribbed living metal grown in the shape of human genitalia, with segmented tubes running into everything and people who grow out of the walls.

4. Carefully engineered forests and meadows everywhere, with implausibly clean and healthy looking hippies who live in "harmony" with nature by bio-manipulating the fuck out of it.

5. Endless slabs of rusty, gray metal crudely bolted together, all covered in scaffolding and walkways with no handrails, and almost everyone has a cyborg limb.

6. Radioactive desert with barbarian tribes making endless, petty war on each other out of their closed system bunkers.

It was much better in the past. It's much worse now. It'll get exponentially worse in the future.

I would like to travel the stars and built wonders.

...

>It requires 300 km long tethers

A space elevator would have to extend past Earth's geostationary orbit to the height of 35000 kilometers

In other words that guy has zero idea what he's talking about

Merlin pls.

Yes

What do you expect from a frogposter?

Actually, according to the papers linked, the tethers of the orbital ring really would only need to be 300 kilometers. Being stationed in low earth orbit is part of the draw of the proposal, and according to the papers themselves, the cost of the project would be well within the capabilities and budgets of the American government, and going by the calculations done by the frogposter (which were based on the papers), the cost would still be below the budget the US military.

I get the impression that the paper's calculations are a bit optimistic, but frogposter isn't technically wrong.

Links to the papers so you can make your own judgments:
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-I.pdf
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf
orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-III.pdf

>to the past
To a degree, I feel my uni days were the best in my life. I'm thinking of doing another degree partly so I can experience it again. Highschool was also a more innocent time. My childhood sucked though.

>wonder to the future?
Maybe, I always wonder where I'll be in several years, but recently my outlook has been pretty pessimistic.

This guy likes pooping in a chamber pot.

Both, but recently it's hard to see where the brightness of the future is.