I like the epicness of sci-fi, but I feel like taking sci-fi to its inevitable conclusions makes it unfun

I like the epicness of sci-fi, but I feel like taking sci-fi to its inevitable conclusions makes it unfun.

If we have the power to travel the stars, we should also have the power to go anywhere we want on a planet in an instant. So no need for vehicles.

If our manufacturing capabilities keep moving forward at the pace they are, widespread access to 3D printers will mean the collapse of traditional, capitalist economies. Wealth will take on entirely esoteric meanings. If we advance really far into the future, the numbers of colonies supporting Earth will mean there will be no poor people, and no one will have to actually have a job if they don't want to.

Given the ease of manufacturing and massive amounts of cheap energy, terrorists of every stripe will run rampant. Forget school shooters, if society doesn't crack down on the trade of certain materials, anyone with a screw loose in their head will be able to level a city with a missile that will travel across the globe in second and detonate in a room with no collateral damage, killing hundreds of people.

If we encounter aliens and want to go to war with them, all we have to do is send a nasty virus their way, or crash an asteroid into one of their planets. The massive space battles you see in sci-fi have no reason to happen when you can just send guided missiles at light speed, or cause infinitely more damage by just disrupting their power supply or something.

If we're able to fully map out how the brain works, this will allow us to upload our brains, and essentially live forever. If we wanted a new body, we could grow them. There'd be complications, surely, but those with the resources could become immortal.

Furthermore, as our ability to model life in virtual worlds increases, people will stop caring about real life. We already retreat into the virtual world constantly, imagine if we could feel everything we can in real life, but in a game?

The things you see in most sci-fi just wouldn't happen.

>inevitable conclusions
Your belief that your conclusions are inevitable or that the actual results would be necessarily unfun convince me that you are confusing your fantasies of future technology with Science Fiction.
This is a disservice to all concerned.
Kindly knock it off.

>we can go into orbit
>therefore I am also able to teleport across North america

I agree with you for the most part. Think about it, we've already hit and past the Cyberpunk age. However, I would like to offer one counter to you:

Maintenance

A lot of these awesome, high-tech systems are going to break down and they will require entire industries to fix. Parts, supplies, the more you can take from an asteroid, the more you will need.


The one point I disagree of with most space story lovers is that you won't get too many Han Solo types. Every planet is going to have a !NASA certifying people who can go into space.

Your a fucking idort

>he doesn't know how to teleport across North America
What were they teaching you in school?

If we can travel faster than light across space, surely we travel across the planet in mere moments?

It takes less than a day to fly from America to Japan today. Imagine how easy it will be a century from now?

And all the work will be done by robots, software programs, and nano-fabricators.

What's your point?

Pretty much what this guy said. At best you can make extrapolations, but it's not unreasonable to think that there could very well be limits to what can be accomplished in certain areas. Please notice:

>If our manufacturing capabilities keep moving forward at the pace they are
>If

If is the key word here. Nothing, barring death and taxes (and anarchists of various stripes would dispute that second bit) is inevitable. Set your own rules for how far technology can go - if you're going to be including FTL, then you're already so far into the realm of speculation that you can plausibly come up with ALL KINDS of reasons that they don't have post-scarcity or brain uploading or whatever. Literally all you have to do is say "Well, they tried brain scanning, but they still don't fully understand how consciousness works and the last twenty attempts were miserable failures." You can just say, "Yeah, manufacturing can only get so efficient and you've still got to deal with transport and other logistical issues regardless."

Seriously, OP, even a second's thought reveals that you can basically come up with perfectly good reasons for ANY KIND of sci-fi you want to run.

>The only way we can have the power to travel the stars is if everyone has the ability to instantly anywhere at all times.
Nope.

>3D printers will develop into replicators...
Probably not, but assuming they did...
>...it would change economy and end poverty
Why are you describing Roddenberry's vision as bad thing?

>Given the ease of manufacturing and massive amounts of cheap energy, terrorists of every stripe will run rampant.
Not an insurmountable problem, really.

>anyone with a screw loose in their head will be able to level a city with a missile that will travel across the globe in second and detonate in a room with no collateral damage, killing hundreds of people.
Maybe they might keep the missiles locked up?

>The massive space battles you see in sci-fi have no reason to happen when you can just send guided missiles at light speed
What if they have anti-light-speed-missiles that also move at light speed?

>or cause infinitely more damage by just disrupting their power supply
What if their power supply is protected by powerful warships?

>or something.
Nope.

>If we're able to fully map out how the brain works, this will allow us to upload our brains, and essentially live forever.
>imagine if we could feel everything we can in real life, but in a game?
Yeah, those are both genres and rely on a big "if", not an "inevitable conclusion".

>The things you see in most sci-fi just wouldn't happen [if all science exceeds all boundaries like nobody but me is saying it absolutely will].
You had a point about ships not necessarily being the best way to war with other races, but otherwise, you're just a stupid bundle of useless assumptions.

Clearly all you put was a second's thought into what you were saying.

In the forseeable future, nanofabrication will make things so efficient as to change the face of society forever. That alone would be enough to invalidate many tropes of sci-fi settings. And that's just scratching the surface. You can't just say people don't discover it, because discovering the ability to travel at light speed (and understanding how we did it, anyway) precludes that many other, more primitive technologies have been discovered.

Not being able to understand how the brain works, I can give credit to. It is possible that we never figure out how to replicate the patterns of the human brain, but it's far more likely that centuries of study yields some result.

> Nope.

Yes? If we have access to energy sources that can allow this, it gives way to the possibility of having energy for all sorts of things.

The only way this wouldn't be the case is if we discovered a way to travel the galaxy that we didn't actually understand.

> Why are you describing Roddenberry's vision as bad thing?

I'm not, it just invalidates sci-fi tropes of 'le poor undercity gangers' and 'muh poor factry workers'.

> Not an insurmountable problem, really.

They way your surmount it is with constant surveillance. NSA shit on steroids.

> What if they have anti-light-speed-missiles that also move at light speed?

They very welll could, the point is you won't see epic battles between the space marines and the aliens.

> What if their power supply is protected by powerful warships?

Why the fuck would you build a warship in space? The idea that space can be treated like the seas of the pacific back in WW2 is the stupidest meme of science fiction.

> Nope.

Yup.

> Yeah, those are both genres and rely on a big "if", not an "inevitable conclusion".

I'll grant you that.

> you're just a stupid bundle of useless assumptions

You haven't provided anything but assumptions yourself.

>The things you see in most sci-fi just wouldn't happen.
Arn't you basically describing Star Trek: the Next Generation? Aside from the lack of interstellar war. I'm not sure why no one has ever tried to drop an asteroid on Earth. Maybe the Sol system is too heavily guarded. The Enterprise did save a planet from an asteroid that one time (with Qs help)

He looks so sad

>You haven't provided anything but assumptions yourself.

Not him, but that's because we're not living in the future. All we have is assumptions of what might happen.

If you want epic sci-fi, and all your personal assumptions of what is most likely to happen are getting in the way of the tone you want, then why aren't you looking towards the less likely assumptions so you can get something that you actually enjoy, rather than complaining about things that only might be true?

Fuck off frog

I'm of the opinion that there's an upper limit to what we can actually do. People say science is an exponentially expanding - but what'll happen if we reach the top, and its nowhere near as high as we thought it would be?
What if there is no magical, space-folding, reality-warping tech that allows us to feasibly migrate to other solar systems?
What if even terraforming other planets is too big a project to even perform, given ours' limited resources?
What if human-like AI is a pipedream?
What if we, for just our microsecond of existence in comparison to the universe, really are alone? And by the time intelligent alien life does exist, we'll have locked ourselves away in Pleasure Mindbanks, and are unable to find them?

I feel like the best we can hope for is the absolute optimisation of space, food production and facilities to have the most people alive, happy and healthy. But even then we'd need to give up our sovereignty to a bureaucratic supercomputer, who can maximise the effecincy of everything to achieve it.

Interstellar travel is more feasible than terraforming. We are talking about a heavy-duty process that would last thousands of years. Anyone who thinks terraforming is a simple and quick process is fooling himself.

We will hit a wall the moment we can't risk a triggering a vacuum metastability effect for an experiment. Then again, we could do it anyway when things go desperate enough, with our ever-losing battle vs entropy, that you don't care if it goes wrong.

There's also the theory that most terrorists are such people due to a combination of lack of goods, perversion of holy texts, the ease at which to point the blame at another party, and a charismatic individual who inspires them to take violent action.

If you remove the "lack of goods" problem via a combination of 3D printers and more efficient food/water retrieval, this leads them into figuring out a properly translated holy text and nipping that destructive thought chain in the bud.

To use Star Trek as the example, it was First Contact that revealed that humans aren't alone in the universe, and after a world war where nukes were used and about 1/8th of the population killed in the process, inspired them to look to the stars and start exploring again, to see what new discoveries could be made. It lead to a push of new technology growth and shared desire to start cruising through the cosmos. And while some were resistant to change (see the anti-alien sentiment in Enterprise), by the time the Federation was founded those notions were mostly removed.

Part of it was due to HFY wanking, but also because at the end of the day the more unique thoughts given a voice, the higher chance of new discoveries being made.

Of all the tech in Star Trek, the two biggest marvels and leap forward in technology is the teleporter and the replicator, and things we are really only beginning to scratch the theoretical surface of.

>If our manufacturing capabilities keep moving forward at the pace they are, widespread access to 3D printers will mean the collapse of traditional, capitalist economies.

Stopped reading here.
Not only is it full of baseless assumptions, but if you actually think 3d printing will ever eliminate manufacturing, you're fucking retarded.

My guess is that the user is taking 3D printing to the most extreme end point: that eventually we will refine it down to a point where we just feed the materials into an industrial-sized printer and out comes a car, or a plane, or the sections to a mega-cruise ship.

Yes, his notion is flawed, because even in that scenario you need to then move the product off the line, and if it's something like a plane or a boat, you still need workers to assemble the damn thing.

>and if it's something like a plane or a boat, you still need workers to assemble the damn thing.
Nigga we dont even use workers to assemble these things -right now-

That's not a 3D printer, its Star Trek magic.

>Nigga we dont even use workers to assemble these things -right now-

What are called crane operators, Alex?

That was kind of my point: barring a gigantic leap forward in technology and our manipulation of physics (and probably quantum physics) the most likely end point of 3D printers is using them for printing off smaller, hand held objects made of plastic or soft metals.

So... maybe a metal handgun (I know plastic-printed handguns exist already, but those aren't fully tested), but not an assault rifle.

>If we can travel faster than light across space, surely we travel across the planet in mere moments?
See 2300ad's Stutterwarp

Does FTL matter all that much when we could make ourselves immortal? Perhaps it's all a matter of getting used to planning centuries, thousands or even millions of years ahead of time. Our only limit then will be the expansion of the universe and the ever-increasing entropy.

millions? I plan on downloading into a time accelerated sim and living billions of subjective years.

Wow, so much fail and lack of basic physics in this post.

>FTL flight means instant transportation.
It might. But very likely it won't. You have a device that can bend space to move you to another place - how big is it? What does it cost? What is its energy requirement? What is the resolution of these jumps. If the answers are - the size of a container ship, hundreds of millions of dollars, huge, millions of miles then you still have great FTL but you do not have personal teleportation.

>3D printing means no capitalist economies.
Even assuming that everything is printable (dubious) someone still needs to produce raw materials in a suitable form, package, distribute and sell them.
Someone still needs to create designs and if you have really good designs you aren't going to be letting those designs out into the wild - you're going to be printing them yourself and selling the item. There are also loads of services that will still be bought sold. 3D printing does not mean post scarcity.

>missile that travels across the globe in a second
See first point.

>sci-fi space battles
Have never been remotely realistic in the overwhelming majority of cases. There is plenty to rsd on this subject, it's hardly insightful to point this out. However

>"light speed" missiles
Are you talking about FTL missiles? How does an FTL missile see things to aim.
Or are you talking about a missile moving at a significant fraction of C? If the technology of the setting makes that possible (it may well not) then yes that's absolutely a useful tool. Again, lots written about this.

>If we're able to fully map out how the brain works, this will allow us to upload our brains

Mapping something is not the same as duplicating it. We've mapped the circulatory system in its entirety...

>We already retreat into the virtual world constantly
Some projection here?

You can already 3D print in very hard
metals.
See laser sintering.

It's not going to be a compact and inexpensive machine anytime.
>but it will just get smaller, better and cheaper in a few years
Moore's law only applies to electronics...

Doesn't help you make ammunition. Or springs.

>i like X thing because it's fun.
>But if I do Y thing with X thing, then X isn't fun.
There's nothing to discuss then. Just don't do Y thing. If there are people who like doing Y thing then they'll do it and you don't have to.

>The things you see in most sci-fi just wouldn't happen.
Yeah. It's almost like it's sci-fi... as in, science fiction. Key word fiction. If you want to write a compelling story and not a thought experiment, then you probably don't want to write about boring stuff.

This is why you go for cheesy space opera.

Star Wars >>> "Hard" science fiction trash

>The only way this wouldn't be the case is if we discovered a way to travel the galaxy that we didn't actually understand.
Or if, stay with me here, the method of traveling the galaxy is not reasonably viable for traveling across the planet.

>I'm not, it just invalidates sci-fi tropes of 'le poor undercity gangers' and 'muh poor factry workers'.
Yes, not all of the many, many different possible kinds of science fiction settings can exist simultaneously.

>They way your surmount it is with constant surveillance.
That's easy for you to say. But yeah, that's one way.

>They very welll could, the point is you won't see epic battles between the space marines and the aliens.
The point is that war is fought on many levels, in many ways, in many methods.

>Why the fuck would you build a warship in space?
Because there are threats that can be intercepted in space?
So you can move significant military assets with attack and defense capability?
Why would you not want the capability to move an offensive or defensive force to where it needs to be at a moment's notice?
What are you suggesting the alternative would be?

>>or something
>Yup
Hard to argue intelligently against that.

>You haven't provided anything but assumptions yourself.
Actually, I have just provided counterpoints illustrating how flawed your assumptions are.

Obviously when our economic model is obsolete, a new one will replace it. If most of the population doesn't produce anything, other than amusement for themselves, the current system must adapt or it will collapse. That's hardly the end of things. It's jut a new paradigm.

Hello Grandpa. I'm sorry that the future of Compact Cassettes and VHS won't come to pass.

As I see it, the main problem in designing a plausible 23rd century these days isn't lack of grandeur, it's the imminence of changes so fundamental and unpredictable they're likely to make the dramas of 2298 as unintelligible to us as the Microsoft Anti-Trust Suit would be to Joan of Arc.

Most scifi is all about problems from today run isolated, projected, and exaggerated into hypothetical future that will never come to pass. They are more a criticism of today's problems than accurate predictions of the future.

>Nigga we dont even use workers to assemble these things -right now-
You think a plane is astonishing miles by robots or something? Couldn't be more wrong. Incredibly human labour intensive.

Before you can decide who you are looking for, you must first decide who you want to be. Are you a free-floating post-physical brain echo? Are you a pangendered hypersexual AI designing your own body to download and grow at your Maker Vat? Are you a humanist clinging to the pre-diaspora? Whoever you are going to be, be the best of that person.

As an example, you could be an asexual cat angel modeled on Benedict Cumberbatch. Having transcended your physical birthform you are capable of downloading your consciousness into any form you can imagine. It is a trivial thing to make a body capable of sports. You could even make a body that can shoot a basket. It's easy and no one is impressed by any feats of athleticism.

With global warming solved using green nanobots and our energy crisis averted thanks to orbital mirror stations and the space elevator, everyone has access to full brain upload and download. Money is no longer a thing we concern ourselves with and we are all able to become the beautiful Asian women we have always wanted to be.

To find the suitable pleasuremate for your enjoyment you will first want to decide whether or not simulated pleasure is sufficient. It is actually far better than any real sort of romance or sex, consisting of episodes of TV shows which you can relive or alter as a main character of your choosing. Make love to any cartoon character or Fringe villain or spend hundreds of lifetimes locked in romance with a Judge Judy plaintiff stored in the completely open data archive located offshore atop a massive tidal generator.

If you are not satisfied with this sort of superior stimulation, you can enter the body you have constructed and begin your search for a physical pleasuremate. Novices to dating should begin by creating a copy of their personality module and uploading this into a physical body you find pleasing. That way you can experiment with various pickup lines and sex moves without risking the humiliation of rejection. If you've already dated yourself at least once, you are ready to search for the right mate. Try entering "I WANT A DATE" and you will be matched with a perfect date by the dating search.

Going on a date can be exciting and memorable. You can visit any planet in the solar system for your date so long as your new body can withstand the environment. Keep in mind AIs can be very picky about who they date, so don't get your feelings hurt if you are an inferior flesh being or uploaded consciousness. Even someone blessed with autism can't keep up with an AI. You just don't have the calculation speed to get an AI excited. They will sometimes go on millions of dates per second with other AIs to create the perfect date.

Food is no longer needed. Movies and live performances are inferior to simulations, so mostly you will want to go to a park or garden. Pleasure gardens will be located on many planets and also suspended in the air using advanced blimp technology developed by computer modeling. Have fun. Do things that interest you like becoming nebulae or visiting the furry Roman empire. Pay attention to whatever your date is saying. Do not talk about Lego bricks or bit torrenting. Make eye contact and smile.

When it is time to engage in intercourse you should begin by explaining everything you wish to do in exhaustive detail. Of course you cannot have any children because that will be outlawed, but other than that there will be no judging your kinks or your inability to perform sexually.

After, your date will end and you can decide whether you wish to have another date, cancel all future dates, or delete all memory of the date. Then you can discard the useless husk of your body and return to the pristine realm of data.