So what I want ? Excatly that.

And more. Like Leaving 5 digits years with Instant learning in a Larry Niven Universe.

Like Utopian Culture, with abundance of energy, technology and even Minds.

PS :
I tried in a earlier post (in french! Sorry) to link our apparent loss of imagination with the fact that in our cities stargazing in not anymore the popular evening activity. Think, how fascinated and inspired our ancestors got watching the sky. And us wacthing TV!

Posted by hibiscus

And where are my flying cars, already? Surely we’ve gotten our techno-shit together enough for that? 

Posted by Gern

Where are we going? The dark side has clouded my vision! I think we are heading for the same old things - World War III or the next ice age… We are appeasing those two futures well enough anyways.  

Posted by Anshul

where do i think we’re going? it seems easy to predict another moment of people depopulation, which i was just reading, would be something like the fourth time homo sapiens has been knocked down to nearly nothing. this time we seem to have stacked like every deck in the kitty like we want  to see a godlike hand to get dealt just for the show of it. with that wreck of possibilities ahead it’s really hard to predict anything.

even though i was a rabid fan, i never thought much of the space travel stuff, partly because it was usually presented as a walk in the park and the reality was ridiculously nervous and expensive even before the first space shuttle explosion. seriously, take skylab, which was supercool from 1973-1979, and then they/we let it fall out of the sky and burn. not worth fixing it, they said. a real blow after star wars and close encounters provided such vivid visuals.

i’ve felt for a little while that our greatest future was scientific - learning more and more about everything, now in a bit of a race to keep from prematurely triggering epochal change. oceans, weather, biology, energy, giant lists. i think that’s impressive. i like it better, too, because we acted on cultural instinct - kind of a universal lebensraum thing - nature and its laws must bend to our will - and look where it got us. this is a good moment to think.

i think the coming couple of centuries will see a big change in the human species. if it’s something of our own choosing, i guess i’d prefer that. it really depends what we put on the menu. self-destruction or permanent biological class division, i’d rather have a salad.

where do i want us to go? i still believe in the universal declaration of human rights. that’d be a good one. i don’t want to have to get a chip (or a critter) in my head to be in the loop, i want “everybody in the loop” to be the goal. i want the slum population to decrease by its own choosing, and for something that is nicer. i want to live to see the first dolphin prime minister of the world.

i want solar power for everything because if it’s good enough for billions of years of biomass before us, we can make it work, too. i want much less stress and much more generosity. i want the first city on the bottom of the sea to be a prison for gray and black market small arms dealers. i want all knowledge available to everybody, for free, everywhere. same with beer. same with curry. i want people to stop building big systems that are too expensive to change.

oh, and, i REALLY want to be able to have already learned to play a musical instrument without passing through the practice in real time. of all the things in science fiction that haven’t come true, instant learning is the thing i really feel is missing from my life. 

Posted by hibiscus

1) You should check out one of Halo’s biggest influences: The novels of Iain M. Banks. I just read _Excession_, and it’s obvious that Halo stole its wacky ship naming scheme form it. (Compare Halo’s CCS Truth and Reconciliation, SCS Pillar of Autumn, etc., to Banks’ GCU Fate Amenable to Change, GSV The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, etc.) The AI minds of the ships in Banks’ novels also exhibit a lot of personality and quirkiness, much like the AIs of Marathon and Halo.

2) Also, on your note about the future of humanity, again, Banks’ novels have one of the most interestingly realized future societies I’ve seen. As far as I can tell, his civilization called “The Culture” is an attempt to depict a somewhat realistic technological Utopia, where technology has given us full mastery over our bodies and our environments, but where human instinct is still roughly the same.

3) I grew up on the space operas of the Golden Age of science fiction. (I just started re-reading _Foundation_, as a matter of fact.) And I think we’ve not so much lost our imagination so much as lost our faith in space travel. Ever since manned space exploration died with Apollo 17, we’ve kind of lost hope in seeing any extra-terrestrial colonies in our lifetimes… And so science fiction moved on to the latest technological developments: computer networks and biology.

The scary thing to me is that science fiction has been dying altogether in the last decade, as people have been enraptured much more by fantasy.

So this is all just a long way of saying that I agree with you: We have lost our hope for the future, and we need to dream again and find some direction.

Oops, one more point:

4) There’s been a lot of talk in the science fiction community in the last couple decades about The Technological Singularity . One interesting fact about space opera is that, while technology has typically progressed a lot in those worlds, people are still basically people. In a sense, space operas exhibit a LACK of imagination: We get to fly around a bit, but people are still basically people, and technology in space operas often stays stagnant for thousands of years.

These days, a lot of people think that maybe that won’t be the case.. that maybe AI and genetic engineering research will lead to fundamental changes in human nature itself. Scary thought… but that’s probably even more reason to dream about hte possibilities and direct ourselves to where we want to go! 

Posted by ToastyKen

Posted by El Chelas