What happened to futurism?

Okay I understand for capitalism, futurism hit a brick wall with the whole US space exploration stagnating as capitalists lost interest in space. Yet I notice on the left there are those that don't have faith in space communism and instead their vision seem kind of neo-Luddite. In that they want to scale everything back to avoid environmental devastation and don't trust technology to push humanity forward once it is released from its shackles of capitalism. I hardly see leftist that envision communism growing to a K2 civilization.

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thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

People grew out of their delusions.

On a more serious note Graeber wrote about this in thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit and Utopia of Rules

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Zizek wasn't talking bout space as in the location but space as the concept or more accurately the abstraction we call space.

Reality. That's what happened. The universe's expanding in all directions at the speed of light. That don't mean that new stars, planets and moons are popping up in the middle of nowhere as time goes by, it just means that everything that ever was and there's ever gonna be is stretching like a rubber band. That means one day the stars you can see at night are gonna be too far away from Earth to even see, same of course goes for planets we think we're gonna reach one day, but ain't never gonna unless humans build spaceships that literally travel faster than the speed of light which is how fast they're gonna have to go to catch up to anything outside this tiny corner of The Milky Way. Remember, our galaxy's a pretty small fish in a big lake when you pan out and think bout the billions or even trillions of whole galaxies that's out there filled with millions of their own stars and planets that might just have something worth travelling billions of light-years through the infinite fuck all that is space to get to.

This is quite literally why aliens don't visit us. They can't. Nobody can cuz you'd A) have to survive without your species getting wiped out long enough to figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light and B) manage to fly a space ship faster than the speed of light through space with radiation that'll kill pretty much anything it goes through and then somehow try to dodge millions of asteroids coming at you when prolly all you can see is just a blur of dark matter and stars.

TL;DR: Science fiction's a lie.

This. Basically, we're stuck on earth until the death of this species and the universe is dead, deadly and boring.
Even just traveling to the moon or mars consumes ungodly amounts of energy to get out of LEO.
The market abandoned it because it doesn't work.

Thus doesn't explain why we can't be a K2 civilization, building mega structures in our solar system.

We don't have the energy to do that. Play some Kerbal Space Program and you'll realize why we haven't done that yet.

We actually do, the USSR and USA figured out it wouldn't take much to start a colony on the moon build nuclear reactors there so your are free from the Earth's gravity well and start expanding from there.

Good luck with that.

Many futurists have pointing out it is more a political and economic issue rather then technical. Earth already has the technological and industrial means to start colonizing space now.

Yeah imagine in Muh gommie utopia where we can devote time and resources into space travels than into oil refineries and mansions.

Neoliberal futurist normally don't know anything about the field they're rambling about.
If capitalism with its extreme, world consuming growth doesn't manage getting to space, you can bet your ass a communist utopia won't either.

The problem is that all that resources and energy in space doesn't help capitalists. You can't have realistic trade in space due to gravity wells, making colonizes mostly self-sufficient (except with other colonizes outside gravity wells).
You can't practically have a commodity system in a K2 civilization as you have these islands of overproduction where trade is limited.

No it's not.

We're stuck in our local cluster of this galaxy forever though. Unless you can find a planet where the air's clean enough to breath and the ground's hard enough to step on less than 10 light-years away from Earth we ain't going there. Again, everything moving apart at the speed of light explains why in a universe fulla billions of galaxies and trillions of stars there ain't a single other species out there making contact with other planets. Why give a fuck of aliens exist if we're too far away from them to even get an intergalactic message in a bottle?

Christ you're retarded.
Light, let alone your sorry ass, wouldn't even MOVE in a universe with an expansion rate matching its speed. And there's plenty of explanations for Fermi's paradox that don't involve there not being interplanetary civilizations please look them up.
You have no idea what you're talking about.

Also "stuck" in a CLUSTER OF GALAXIES? Do you have a notion of how mindbogglingly vast an area of space that is?
Get that aneurysm taken cared of, man, I'm worried about you.

Either way everything's too far apart to ever reach and it's moving fast as fuck.

Afroplasm is correct
Plasm gank rolling in

Bookchin has some solid criticisms of futurism. We should be utopians, not futurists.

You're splitting atoms, pointdexter.

The immortal science Anarcho-Plasmism will usher in a new era of image board namefaggotry.

Fuck space. Read Bifo.

This guy really knows his shit.

Is there a better place to be a utopian than in space though? Whatever rock you land on and stick your flag in is yours in the universe. Leftist colonists could hypothetically just create their own little planet-communes light-years away from the class struggles of Earth without having to go through the age old stages of different types of civilization and bloody revolutions.

Either way I still say nobody's ever leaving Earth for good.

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fixed

Nice one fam.

Why, Earth should be turned into a historical site and nature preserve given the fast resources off Earth. Hell we could build a ring world with the asteroids in our solar system.

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Sounds like pie in the sky, sci-fi utopianism to me. I don't expect much more than robotic butlers on wheels to come outta the turn of this century. Back when Alien came out Ripley and her original crew members were landing on far off planets fulla xenomorph eggs in the 2020s. It's 2017 now and we ain't even put boots on Mars yet. Rearranging asteroid trajectories into a man-made belt or whatever ain't in our near future.

Besides, it might be a while, but all stars die sooner or later and when they do it's literally gonna be lights out for sentient life in the universe.

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Mostly due to stagnation of society, once we get rid of capitalism we should be able to move forward with colonizing space.

Transhumanism happened. The futurism of old was popular because it showed an unadulterated humanity who managed to overcome great challenges of alien or terrestrial origin. People of today can't see a future without proprietary software implanted inside their brain(b-but what if we had FREE software instead, then there wouldn't be a problem, r-right???), the massive array of problems that come with transhumanist ideal, the waning humanity that we are already seeing, etc. Transhumanism is intrinsically linked to dystopia, and any attempt to sugarcoat it results in terrible fiction because of the massive amounts of loopholes required to justify its existance, the dystopian aspect of it however provides many interesting plot points.

None of your ideas are original and implies a limit in FTL travel. Science fiction was always about speculation and breaking the boundaries of "common sense", you don't understand it at all. Your

Hope so. Imagine space travel being so advanced and such an everyday thing that you'd have petrol stations for spaceships in the middle of the universe just floating on asteroids for pilots to refuel and prolly get a pack of smokes at.

Still, The Femi Paradox though…

Not an argument. Tell me why aliens don't talk to us.

Capitalism and neoliberalism had to become a lot more totalitarian, so any concept of space travel is corrupted by spooks about how capitalism is the only way, etc. It became necessary to control fiction so that proles don't have big dreams any more. Hence, all of the grimdark shit that passes for science fantasy these days, culminating today in the total rape of Star Trek with the new Discovery series.

Also, cosmology as it is taught in the scientist institutions itself was designed on premises to control and stifle progress. They took the observations that supported Einstein's relativity and the absolute speed limit of light and blew them up into a gargantuan system where space magically expands and everything is receding from us faster than we can ever hope to travel. I have a feeling the whole system of mathematics was intentionally designed to mix observations with ideological goals.

Why else would Obama go on TV to make a big speech about finding the Higgs Boson, like it's some grand discovery? Most of the experiments carried out with particle accelerators these days are scientists looking for the answer they think they already know, because it's impossible to accurately track all of the data from a particle accelerator. Instead they're just looking for evidence of something that fits their pre-established theory, which is really as much as they can do with present technology and may be all humanity is ever capable of doing.

I have a feeling that some day - perhaps in the near future - physics and chemistry as we know it will be overturned in some dramatic way, and everything we speculate on with quarks, gravitons, etc. will just be junked and replaced either with a different model with its own flaws, or something resembling the truth (of course you can never quite prove a scientific theory completely, Incompleteness Theorem and all that shit).

Recently I was looking up alternatives to the mainstream physics that is preached in the university. Most of it is obvious crank material (Bill Gaede lol), but there were a few interesting alternative theories that try to line up with all observations that we currently can make about the universe, or explain how our observations are flawed in some way. I'm not a physicist or mathematician so I can't really make a qualified judgement, but some notions like space itself expanding or something coming out of nothing don't pass the smell test even to my uneducated mind.

Underrated post. Ty for the good read.

Science stopped being cool among far-left circles and started to be portrayed as one of the evils of capitalism. The growing trend of neo-Luddism among the left only served to drive away scientifically minded people. At this point the left is even more scientifically illiterate than the far right.

This is a prime example of what I'm talking about. You've completely misunderstood really fundamental concepts in astrophysics. The other stars in our galaxy are not moving away from us at light speed. Even some other galaxies (Andromeda is the main example) are actually getting closer.
Space travel is really fucking hard, but not for the reasons you think.

If the gut feelings of uneducated commoners was sufficient to reliably determine the validity of scientific hypotheses, we'd have solved all of the world's problems a few tens of thousands of years ago and be enjoying our immortality in peace and luxury by now. Do you have any idea just how many scientific theories have been rejected as "not passing the smell test" throughout history, only to later be conclusively proven correct?

Even in the bleakest big bang/big rip models, new stars will continue forming for at least 100 trillion years, and planets continue to exist for a quadrillion years. This gives us quite a lot of time on our hands, as the earth has about 2-3 billion years of habitability left before the red giant sun, the earth itself only being 4.5 billion years old, and the entire universe a mere 14 billion years. For comparison, the entire history of human behavioral modernity dates from 400 thousand to as little as 50 thousand years ago, and all of recorded history barely several thousand years.

Innumerable chances for such nihilistic theories to be proven wrong over that vast sea of time aside, allowing humanity to wink out of existance barely a moment after creation in the timescale of the universe, and leave untouched the near-limitless riches of wisdom and joy that await us above the skies, would be the worst imaginable sin of pointless sloth.

The choice between space and earth, is the choice between life and suicide.

I blame postmodernism, the bastard offspring of romanticism. Literally trying to turn back the clock to before the Enlightenment happened. Once that kind of openly anti-intellectual malaise washed over the left, the backward conservatism inherent to the right went not only unchallenged, but uniformly bolstered.

I blame lack of imagine and people not exposing themselves to traditional science fiction. Most people don't even know the vision of the future Soviet science fiction had.

Well if aliens are of equal tech to us then it would be like finding a needle in a hay stack, they would only be obvious if their civilization spans at least a solar system.

I think Zizek once said something about this. It sounds cliché but basically we don't dream of a better world anymore. He said that the ban on time travel and alternative reality scenarions in fiction in China was a sign that atleast they still have the imagination to do so while here such a ban is not necessary as we voluntarily make up dystopian alternative realities instead.

People stopped working for a better future*

Capitalist realism

I wish people even tried to dream about progress in social sciences in the same way
but it doesn't even cross their minds, it's just muh STEM bullshit
I don't care about space honestly, good for people who do, but I don't

This poster is correct. The universe is not "about to die". The universe hasn't even gone through one percent of its expected lifespan. Put another way, if the universe was expected to be inhabitable for 100 years, then the universe would only be one hour old. People are needlessly fatalistic just because they know eventually the universe is coming to an end. It's like grieving for a newborn.

Of course, we shouldn't subject beings to a universe that's ripping itself apart anyway.

The reality is that people have realized in many subtle ways that this really is as far as their current society can realistically take them. They don't know how to imagine past this society, so they think this is the end.

That's not how the expansion works, bud.

Even Marx Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the time travel loses. I do not know of a time travelling story were the time travel causes society to skip right to communism or at have nobles piss themselves with the full might of a modern (to them) revolutionary army. Like take the G.I. Samurai premise yet with a Soviet Army division from the Great Patriotic War sent back to Russia during the Napoleonic Wars and them deciding to be uber tankies, waging war against both Napoleon and Russian nobility.

Any links? Genuinely interested

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox

Because our Alien comrades already have tried to contact us but the World Governments are covering up the existence of alien life. It would have to be the workers who contact our comrades in space to help us bring forth the future of communism and interstellar partnership with our alien comrades. Only then will we be able to have Star Trek.

Other notes include that the US government knows that the aliens would help us the workers bring forth a revolution on a global scale. That is why they deny the their existence and all attempts to bring the truth to light is mocked and considered conspiracy theorists. Also wack jobs who believe that flying saucers are real. Do you think that we are the only intellgent life in the universe? That is unlikely as said its like looking for a needle in a haystack. Unless they are some ancient precursor that existed in the distant past or something then we will not be able to contact our comrades if this is true. But do not give up hope the Dolphins and other UFO's will come and tell us what we need to do next. For now we must avoid destroying ourselves in a nuclear war.

There's can't be futurism if there won't be a future.

Read Maximun Jailbreak by Benedict Singleton, it's a fairly short essay and it lays the arguments as for why bringin back cosmism is an essential task in order to imagine a Promethean future beyond our current society.

spot the Anglo

have you ever tried to hold a conversation with a human being?
it's rarely a pleasurable experience.

More like people stopped imagining a better future. Science fiction that dealt with futurism back in the 20th century mostly tried to get the audience to think about the future as something alien to the present yet still plausible. Negatives of the fictional worlds were not painted as insurmountable before dystopian stories overshadowed them.

Basically we went from a glimmer of a better future used as a narrative means to contrast it with issues of contemporary society, to more narratives basically saying shit can get even worse.