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Why did society lose interest in space and the future during the early 2010s?


AstroV69

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I wish we had shows like this on TV during the early 2010s.

But sadly it seemed like people stopped dreaming of space and the future back during the early 2010s.

I remember a speech by Neil Degrasse Tyson circulating throughout the internet at the time.

Many sci fi fans were quite vocal about the lack of TV sci fi.

https://gizmodo.com/why-we-need-more-space-adventures-5837047

https://www.impossiblepodcasts.com/2012/02/rayguns-and-rocket-ships-can-books-save.html

https://ricochet.com/226027/archives/the-death-of-the-space-opera/

https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/06/mind-meld-has-space-opera-lost-its-luster/

https://practicalfreespirit.com/2011/09/06/to-infinity-and-beyond/

What happened?

Did society become too materialistic to dream of an interstellar future as evidenced by the reality show boom? Hey life on Earth is good enough already, So why dream of a "Trek" future?

Sadly when I was in high school during the mid 2010s I did not know anyone who said they dreamed of becoming an astronaut. I remember during college orientation a student memorably blurted out "I want to be rich!".

Or is there only room for one big TV show and that show happened to be "Game of Thrones"? People can only be obsessed with one TV show at a time?

I enjoyed both "Game of Thrones" and "The Expanse".

I hope society will dream of space travel and the future although I think that is unlikely.

I hope the next pop culture TV phenomenon is something with space travel in it.

Edited by AstroV69
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I didn't notice that we did.

I mean we were doing less stuff once they retired the shuttle and it's not as fun reporting on how our astronauts are ride sharing on Russian launches. But I personally never lost my love of it and didn't really notice the public at large doing so either.

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33 minutes ago, AstroV69 said:

Sadly when I was in high school during the mid 2010s I did not know anyone who said they dreamed of becoming an astronaut. I remember during college orientation a student memorably blurted out "I want to be rich!".

Okay? Do you know what said student wanted to do with the money? Maybe they wanted to go to space with that money? Why do the wishes of one student erode your confidence that the public is still interested in spaceflight?

35 minutes ago, AstroV69 said:

Or is there only room for one big TV show and that show happened to be "Game of Thrones"? People can only be obsessed with one TV show at a time?

Did Interstellar sail you by? Loads of people enjoyed that, it wasn't a TV show but still demonstrates to me that whatever thoughts of society being uninterested during the early 2010s are only thoughts.

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3 hours ago, AstroV69 said:

Did society become too materialistic to dream of an interstellar future as evidenced by the reality show boom? Hey life on Earth is good enough already, So why dream of a "Trek" future?

Ahem... 2008-2009 would beg to differ.

Global-GDP-Growth-1995-2020.jpg

And we're entering into another "fun" era where gnostic dualism (and gnosticism-induced manichaeism) will be a more common attitude than technooptimism that tends to drive "classic" sci-fi. Expect less fiction about rosy futures threatened by faceless forces, and more fiction about gloriously thrashing foreign-looking and unambiguously evil Earthly adversaries.

At best, we're talking about Tom Clancy "20 minutes into the future" technothrillers, which, come to think of it, harken back to the mood of early sci-fi, with Wells's poison gas-spewing Martians being just a stand-in for the Germans.

Spoiler

zOGINv5sJxEZQWw2dGuO8JUzvyK.jpg

All day, every day, and without the advesary forces' identity obscured.

Edit: reminded of a less widely-known but more accurate example:

001745248.jpg

 

Edited by DDE
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2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Did Interstellar sail you by? Loads of people enjoyed that, it wasn't a TV show but still demonstrates to me that whatever thoughts of society being uninterested during the early 2010s are only thoughts.

I think it was one of the first in a mid-2010s "space renaissance" recognized by Dwayne Day and the other folks at The Space Review. OP might just have their chronology off.

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1 hour ago, DDE said:

At best, we're talking about Tom Clancy "20 minutes into the future" technothrillers, which, come to think of it, harken back to the mood of early sci-fi, with Wells's poison gas-spewing Martians being just a stand-in for the Germans.

+ Time Machine, War in the Air, and other books by the same great author.

1 hour ago, DDE said:

gnostic dualism (and gnosticism-induced manichaeism)

Literally and by known persons.

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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Literally and by known persons.

I'm not a fan of Muzykantskyi and Yakovenko's application of the two concepts to Russian culture exclusively (PDF). Economic hardships will likely cause the proliferation of gnosticism worldwide, and I think we're already seeing it.

Spoiler

And by gnosticism, I don't mean the particular Christian heresy but the belief that

  • The creator of the world isn't infallible and didn't actually know what they were doing (hence, in original gnosticism, there were between a dozen and 365 dieties)
  • The world was created to contain both inherent good and inherent evil
  • Because the world is imperfect, Earthly life has to be rejected
  • Some people are born inherently good, some people are born inherently bad, and some people can be saved through secret esoteric knowledge (gnosis)... you can see why the Church took offense

Manichaeism merely add the narrative of a final battle between good and evil, in which victory mist be accomplished by whatever means necessary so that the current imperfect world can end and a world without evil can be ushered in. In this battle, your enemies are evil incarnate, and against th any atrocities are permissable and welcome.

 

I would still be interested in a more detailed modeling of the development of sci-fi. I get the feeling of a cycle of sorts, when first after a war there's a way of "soft" sci-fi in an attempt to make sense of the trauma (Forever War), followed by an optimistic "golden age", which then slides into jingoistic technothrillers as the next war looms.

 

Edited by DDE
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  • 3 weeks later...

Can’t speak for anyone else but for me, the future looks less like Star Trek and more like Blade Runner 2049. Which makes it kind of hard to get enthusiastic about.

If the last couple of years have taught me anything it’s that, collectively, humanity is a bunch of dumb, squabbling apes whose first response to any sort of crisis is ‘how can I make a fast buck from this.’

So yeah. Pick up some new and interesting rocks on Mars. That’s cool - all the more so if you happen to be into rocks. If there are any microbes to be found under an icy moon somewhere, then they’d be worth knowing about too - especially if we can avoid wrecking their ecosystem in the process.

But all the manifest destiny, expanding into the solar system stuff? That just sounds like an elaborate way of putting even more power and wealth in the hands of even fewer people at the expense of everyone else.

What’s the point of space exploration if the end result is ‘same mulch, different day, on a different planet’?

Put a different way.

The future didn’t turn out to be flying cars and moon bases.

The future turned out to be Facebook, YouTube comments, TikTok influencers, and ordering takeaway online, to be delivered to you by a courier that the courier company is doing their level best to pretend is not an employee.

Edited by KSK
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4 hours ago, KSK said:

But all the manifest destiny, expanding into the solar system stuff? That just sounds like an elaborate way of putting even more power and wealth in the hands of even fewer people at the expense of everyone else.

...in the vague - and at this point quite unrealistic - hopes of said "everyone else" multiplying thanks to access to new territory. Spaceflight without a higher purpose doesn't make sense, and you can either sweep it under the rug, or go for mysticism (e.g. cosmists or the Overview Effect worshippers), or just go for pure old-fashioned jingoism.

The issue you highlighted does bring us to a politically hairy topic: is constraining the maximum achievements of individuals, potentially curbing advancement of society in aggregate, in order to prop up those less able or fortunate?

A good riposte to this would be, should you even consider space colonization achievements?

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1. No gems and semi-naked princesses on Mars and Venus. Only frozen dirt, lifeless rocks,and stinky gases.

2. No need in a second astronavigator with blaster, because only idiots would leave the Earth without a smartphone with Interplanetary GPS Navigator.

3. The practices which were normal in H.G.Wells time (like crashing the selenite skulls, shooting the martian mantises, and various forms of male chauvinistic pigging on other planets) are not welcome now.

Edited by kerbiloid
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2 hours ago, DDE said:

...in the vague - and at this point quite unrealistic - hopes of said "everyone else" multiplying thanks to access to new territory. Spaceflight without a higher purpose doesn't make sense, and you can either sweep it under the rug, or go for mysticism (e.g. cosmists or the Overview Effect worshippers), or just go for pure old-fashioned jingoism.

The issue you highlighted does bring us to a politically hairy topic: is constraining the maximum achievements of individuals, potentially curbing advancement of society in aggregate, in order to prop up those less able or fortunate?

A good riposte to this would be, should you even consider space colonization achievements?

Going to have to be a wee bit careful here - and if you don't subscribe to these views then I'm cool with that. We can agree to disagree or take this to private messages.

Quite a lot to unpack here but in general though, I would say no. Very often the achievements of individuals - which is a bit of a loaded term anyway in my view, as I'll come on to in a moment - are only accidentally aligned with societal needs anyway. And that's without all the documented stories of bad corporate actors such as tobacco companies, or the more recent opioid scandal in the US. Sadly, discrediting evidence of harm, or outright FUD to safeguard profits is, if not a standard corporate tactic, then a depressingly familiar one.

Then we get onto the, admittedly subjective, question of what constitutes 'advancement of society'?  No good answer there and I suspect we'll both have different ideas on the topic.  I think your riposte is a good one though - is space colonization an advancement?

Then we get onto the 'propping up those less able or fortunate' point.  The problem with that statement, as I see it, is that very often those less able (and 'able' is kind of subjective here too. Able or unable to do what?) or fortunate are doing valuable and socially vital jobs that, for whatever reason, aren't as well paying as they could, should, or flat out need to be. I'm thinking of junior medical staff - or hospital cleaning staff - in a capital city, for example.  They absolutely need to be there (unless society is cool with dirty, understaffed medical facilities) but the chances of them being able to afford to live in a capital city is low to zero unless they're financially supported in some way.

There's a side question of what exactly society is for if not for helping those less able or fortunate, but that gets us into very hairy political stuff. Definitely a topic for private messages!

Finally - and it's a little bit snarky - but a so-called captain of industry is no damn use at all without a crew of industry to go with it.  That's not intended as a dismissal - if a company is going to go anywhere, it needs good leadership, a clear sense of purpose and vision, and for any company that requires substantial investment, an executive team who can go out, sell that vision to investors, and raise the financing to make it happen. No bucks - no Buck Rogers,  as the saying goes. There's a whole bunch of skills in there, none of them are easy,  and, for what its worth, they don't overlap much with my personal skillset at all. :) 

But without a team behind them to execute that vision,  all those fine  investor pitches are just puffery and hot air. So, at a corporate level, I would personally question the notion of 'individual achievements' at all.

 

Edited by KSK
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15 hours ago, KSK said:

Definitely a topic for private messages!

It's actually more or less the distillation of the left-right spectrum. Everything else seems to be fluff, often quite nation-specific fluff.

And no, I don't really see a point in a private go-between - the two of us aren't going to figure out world politics :wink:

15 hours ago, KSK said:

Finally - and it's a little bit snarky - but a so-called captain of industry is no damn use at all without a crew of industry to go with it.  That's not intended as a dismissal - if a company is going to go anywhere, it needs good leadership, a clear sense of purpose and vision, and for any company that requires substantial investment, an executive team who can go out, sell that vision to investors, and raise the financing to make it happen. No bucks - no Buck Rogers,  as the saying goes. There's a whole bunch of skills in there, none of them are easy,  and, for what its worth, they don't overlap much with my personal skillset at all. :) 

But without a team behind them to execute that vision,  all those fine  investor pitches are just puffery and hot air. So, at a corporate level, I would personally question the notion of 'individual achievements' at all.

But the opposite is true as well, and it escapes some people.

However, I think the bigger problem is that we're often mistaken in what we treat as the elites. Very few true "captains of the industry" today are public or involved in day-to-day runnings. Meanwhile, CEOs of global corporations are little more than another layer of hirelings.

I guess "tokenization" of corporate ownership in the form of shares can be partly to blame - most of the world's productive power is now owned by an opaque web of various indirect ownership vehicles, not meant to obfuscate but driven by pure profit-making - because the investors of those mutual funds aren't the ones making the immediate decisions, another set of hirelings is. And so you get a world where nobody is in charge and everyone is plodding along within a deeply flawed incentive structure.

Suddenly the idea of a class of economic oligarchs stops being entirely unappealing, since you can at least drag someone ultimately responsible for a screw-up or malpractice and metaphorically hit them upside the head...

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