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Relevant William Gibson commentary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715 "In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was actually about three or four years long," he said, "because in three or four years relatively little would change… The present is really of no width whatever." Our sci-fi present is making sci-fi harder to write.
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People alive today still don't believe we were able to get to the moon; what makes you so sure about your predictions?
Scale perhaps? Moon is 380,000 km away. The nearest galaxy is 1×10^18 km away.
Even if we knew exactly how to build everything in the movie, it would still take a TON of time to build it. Now start in the future and work backwards -- it's simply unrealistic.
That isn't to say that we won't have tons of things even 100 years from now that we can't imagine currently. I just tend to think the unimaginable is more easily attained than the evolution of those things already made.
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The new movies were backward thinking by design. Into Darkness takes place 5 years before TOS and 100 years before TNG. Any radically new federation technology inserted there but not shown in TOS/TNG would just look out of place and be held against it.
New technology like transwarp beaming? :/
I tend to have an opposite reaction -- I get annoyed with futurism that is unrealistic compared to how far in the future the story takes place. Even Star Trek is completely unrealistic - it takes place less than 25 decades from now. There's no way we have space vehicles so advanced so soon. (edit: even ignoring 'warp speed')
Star Trek lore assumes multiple major wars on Earth followed by contact between humans and a significantly more advanced alien race by 2063. It's not our technology 250 years from now, it's our galactic neighborhood's technology 250 years from now.
Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger. If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve…
Read Altered Carbon [1] - this book addresses this question. [1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40445.Altered_Carbon
In the real world, there's no reason to expect any of these limitations to exist. It makes more sense for backups to be cheap(ish) and taken every five minutes.
SPOILERS:
Altered Carbon also addresses the nightmare scenario of state vector theft very well; if the bad guys have a copy of your mind, they can torture you to death, over and over, forever. But in the real world, the precise mechanism of capture used in the book would be unlikely: if you thought you were about to be kidnapped, you'd just suicide, (using a explosive charge in your brain) and let one of your backups figure out what happened.
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Perhaps I'm missing your sarcasm, but 2500 years is a very, very, long time. Never mind the last 2500 years - just think how far technology has advanced in the last 250.
25 decades is 250 years, not 2500.
In immigrant circles, we lament this notion that the first generation works its ass off, the second generation studies its ass off, and the third generation parties its ass off. I think that what we see in cinema is kind of linked. America post-WWII worked and studied its ass off. Then it defeated the Soviets. You ask people today though, what they think of the future, and I think that the picture is bleak not merely…
>but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person 2000-2010 was the greatest decade in all of human history for upraising the standard of living of the human race as a whole. The attitude in this entire comments thread sickens me.
When I was born two big countries had nuclear weapons pointed at each other with the very realistic possibility of exchange. Everything we built could be eradicated in an hour or two. We are quite better off.
Can anyone suggest a good, current futurist author?