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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#61

Post by cindyllm »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #32
chasil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression…

[dead]

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#62

Post by wiredfool »

foobarbecue wrote: post #31
chasil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.

And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#63

Post by pfdietz »

chasil wrote: post #15
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

> and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).

Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.

A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#64

Post by mygrant »

wiredfool wrote: post #6

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there. Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal. To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the…

Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all spaceships.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#65

Post by pfdietz »

Ekaros wrote: post #33
flohofwoe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Barnes and Noble ...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash. The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).

Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.

There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had a big effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss...

"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."

Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#66

Post by bot403 »

chasil wrote: post #15
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?

Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#67

Post by deadbabe »

People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.

But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#68

Post by Animats »

anovikov wrote: post #2

Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it. Many people don't get the origins o…

It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.

Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.

There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#69

Post by Timshel »

thomasguide wrote: post #4

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Like none of The Expanse books would appear...
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