The Fatal Allure of Yesterday's Tomorrows

What are the precise schematics of a space elevator? How, exactly, do cryogenics work? What about the cold-sleep that keeps humans dormant on the generation-long trip to Proxima Centauri? 

Or: The spinning gravity-drives that allow them to walk the corridors without falling? The just-less-than-light-speed engines that get them there, or the warp drives that will allow future space-commuters to pop from Earth to the stars? The airtight colonies that will sprawl across the surfaces of distant planets? The suite of terraforming tools that allow other planets to be remade in the image of Earth? 

If you’ve spent any time at all reading science fiction, a flicker of specific images just came involuntarily into your mind that — for all that these technologies are entirely invented and possibly impossible — feel both consistent and somehow real. They intrude like the tips of icebergs into the real world. They suggest not simply imagined worlds, but future ones, dancing always just out of reach.

And in trying to chase them, the great men of our age may find that they are chasing mirages towards their (our?) ultimate doom.

This is Heat Death, the newsletter that is grimly aware that the future isn’t what it used to be.

One important announcement: today marks Heat Death's hundredth issue. In honor of that, we are putting together an essay collection that combines the best things we've published, and we'd love your submissions. Send us an email here with your favorites.

On to business. Our guest essay today comes from Nathan Goldwag, publisher of Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization and a keen observer of the gravitational weight that made-up worlds exert on our own. (Check out, for example, his delightful and exhaustive Maps of the Multiverse, a Borgesian collection of alternate earths, from those where pagan Europe never bent the knee to Christ, Han China and Imperial Rome went to war, and the Confederacy’s victory in the Civil War is only the precursor for a series of intra-Southern civil wars of its own).

It’s no great shock to say that there is a certain constituency to the conduct of fictional creations. Look, for example, at Kathryn Schultz’s classic = 2017 New Yorker piece “Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them” which considers the ‘reality’ of creatures like the yeti. “On a scale not of zero to ten but of, say, leprechaun to zombie,” Schultz asks, “how likely do you think it is that the yeti exists?”

She posits that:

One of the strangest things about the human mind is that it can reason about unreasonable things. It is possible, for example, to calculate the speed at which the sleigh would have to travel for Santa Claus to deliver all those gifts on Christmas Eve. It is possible to assess the ratio of a dragon’s wings to its body to determine if it could fly. 

And it is possible to decide that a yeti is more likely to exist than a leprechaun, even if you think that the likelihood of either of them existing is precisely zero.

So is a dragon like a warp drive? Among all the obvious differences, let’s highlight one: nobody is trying to drive bio-sciences (or aerial travel) in the direction of dragon breeding.

The same cannot be said about space travel. In this essay, Nathan argues there’s a reason for that: it’s the way we talk about “the future.” Specifically, he argues that our vision of “the future” is actually a product of a specific suite of fictional tropes that came out of the highly unlikely set of historical circumstances of mid-20th Century American society and industry — a time of staggering, unprecedented technical progress born out of a (similarly unprecedented) combination of cheap fossil fuels, vast state spending on science and engineering research and a new era of global trade within the undeclared American Empire. 

Those circumstances are unlikely to return. But for a generation of young men (and they were mostly men) growing up reading the fiction of that era, wet in the water of prosperous 20th Century America, the fictional tropes of those works lost their note of historical contingency. They came, in other words, to seem timeless, eternal, and accessible. If only one would simply stretch out one’s hand.

This essay goes a long way toward explaining why our era’s technological fixations seem so far removed from our real, urgent problems. In A City on Mars, a long investigation into the actual technology and policy questions involved in space colonization, husband-wife duo and hotdog manufacturers Kelly and Zack Weinersmith argue that for the price of a single ISS-style space platform ($150 billion up front and $3 billion per year) we could build hundreds of Biosphere-type domes down here on the surface to figure out how to actually live in space.

In such domes, Sam Matey of The Weekly Anthropocene notes in his review, 

if we really wanted to create [Earthlike] environments in space, we’d have hundreds such terrestrial biospheres, of various sizes, A/B testing species mixes and agricultural methods and air scrubbers and everything we might need to stay alive on other worlds. We as a civilization are manifestly not doing that, even though it would bring valuable ecosystem knowledge that would likely be really helpful on Earth as well. 

Why is this? The authors suspect it’s because ecosystem design doesn’t bring as much geopolitical, military, or reputational clout as rocketry, despite its arguably equal importance for the future of humanity in space. 

For everyone from heads of state to eccentric billionaires to the average taxpayer [the Weinersmiths write] “blasting humans in a rocket to the Moon is substantially more impressive than creating detailed reports about how to turn poop and food scraps into wheat.”

The Weinersmiths are no doubt right about this. But why are they right? I think Goldwag has the answer: because those are not the myths any of us were raised on. Which means, as we enter a new age of upheaval  — the real-world science-fiction of The Day After Tomorrow, where brute reality upends the old myths of prosperity the works we’re going to talk about rested on — we should be thinking seriously about the stories we tell, the technology we valorize. And the children even now laying on the floor, reading them as they dream of future worlds.

Which may simply be the changed face of our own.

This is Heat Death. Stay with us.

The False Platonism of Science Fiction

Nate here. As the world gathered to watch Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon on July 20^th, 1969 a CBS News hosted a panel discussion of the event featuring two of the world’s greatest experts on extraplanetary travel and the implications for human society: Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. 

The tone of the discussion could perhaps be summed up by host Walter Cronkite himself: "We’ve got earthbound constraints, but it’s as inevitable now as the tides that are controlled by that Moon upon which men landed upon today. You can’t stop progress, and this is progress." The authors were no less effusive. Heinlein called it “the greatest event in all of the history of the human race up until this time. Today is New Year’s Day of Year One. If we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so." Both agreed that the landings were a monumental turning point for humankind, the start of an epochal shift in our very existence as a species. They agreed that this mission would inevitably be followed by further missions further afield and more concrete colonization. Within decades, they said, orbital space stations, hospitals and nursing homes would be built on the Moon to take advantage of the low gravity. By the end of the century, self-sustaining societies throughout the Solar system. The sky was no longer the limit. “We’re going to be at Proxima Centauri before you know it,” Heinlein crowed.

This TV moment seems, at first glance, like an odd spectacle. Isn’t it absurd to promote authors of fiction as authorities on what is undoubtedly one of the most important scientific moments in world history? 

But look at it longer and it’s less strange than it seems. Who better to prognosticate on the future, after all,  than those who are paid professionally to think about it? Isn’t that what science fiction is for? 

Good question. 

Science fiction, as a genre of art, has been around for a long time. Lucian of Samosata wrote his True History in the second century CE, which featured a journey by his protagonists to the moon, and a war between the inhabitants of Luna and those of theSun. The 17th century French playwright and satirist Cyrano de Bergerac published a Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon in 1657, documenting his journey to Luna and his explorations thereof. Even legendary works of the English canon have dipped their toes into this water; John Milton’s 1667 epic Paradise Lost features casual commentary on the idea that the stars are other planets, perhaps inhabited by other creatures, who themselves may have inspired works of Greek mythology.  The origin date popularly given for the genre is usually the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, after which science fiction really got moving: by the century’s end, science-adventure novelists like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had written in books like The Time Machine and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea about the social and political ferment of their era and forecast what might be to come.  

In these works, the technological leaps of imagined machinery are positioned as a metaphor or parable for the radical change in the real world — rather than prophecy. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley tackled the revolutionary era she lived in, in which the established laws of the political and religious order were toppled by ordinary men and women, with all of the fear and excitement that inspired. Wells and Verne explored the racing technological and social turmoil that seemed to be carrying the world inevitably towards disaster or utopia. This is likely true for older works as well: nobody is really sure what Lucian was trying to say about second century Syria, though it seems clear that with his war between the Moon and the Sun he was probably trying to satirize somebody. 

All of that is to say that while these authors all grappled with the prominent issues of their day, and the implications of technological progress, none of them thought of themselves — and observers certainly didn’t portray them — as predictors or prognosticators. Nobody in 1890 complained that the telegraph was very nice, but they’d been promised a Frankenstein’s Monster — or a Time Machine — of their very own.

And that gets to something unique about the American and British science fiction of the mid-20^th century, what is often called “the Golden Age” of science fiction: people treat its predictions as though they're true.

Definitions as to what exactly the “Golden Age” consists of vary, but it is usually seen as beginning when John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, and for the purposes of this discussion, we can imagine it extending into the early 1960s. This was not just when the genre grew explosively, it was also when the tropes and conventions that we now take for granted were canonized, and when writers such as Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Ray Bradbury wrote the books that still define what the genre means in the popular conception.

The focus of this “Golden Age” wasn’t just stories — in fact, an uncharitable reader might even say that the story was rarely the selling point. Books like I, Robot and Foundation were written because Asimov had ideas about technology, history, and society he wanted to talk about, not because he had an exciting plot or interesting characters he wanted to explore (certainly not the latter). The Golden Age instead can be thought of as the creation of an entire corpus of ideas, concepts, technologies, and assumptions — many of which, to this day, we still subconsciously use as our grammar with which to imagine “the future”. 

There’s some reason for this. Many of the most famous writers of this era had scientific training or expertise; Asimov had a PhD in biochemistry and worked as a professor  at Boston University. Clarke received a degree in physics from King’s College London and was a lifelong member (and two-time president of) the British Interplanetary Society.Heinlein spent World War II serving as an aeronautical engineer at the Philadelphia Naval Yards — where, incidentally he worked alongside Asimov and pulp novelist (and occasional science writer) L. Sprague de Camp. 

It was a time when scientific inquiry and fictional speculation had a tendency to blend together in ways that help explain why the era’s pulp novels took on the air of prophecy. Clarke was one of the first people to propose the use of geostationary satellites as communication relays in a 1945 paper, and his 1951 nonfiction book The Exploration of Space was supposedly one of the sources used by Wernher von Braun to convince John F. Kennedy to endorse the idea of a Moon Landing. Heinlein’s 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress  grapples directly with the limitations of both politics and physics, and how Luna’s brutal conditions might affect any future colonization attempt. (Compare to Jules Verne’s 1865 and 1870 novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, which take for granted the existence of a lunar atmosphere). And perhaps no work of fiction has done more to influence how we envision space travel than the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, co-written by Clarke, which depicts both the inhuman grandeur of the Universe as well as the mind-numbing tedium of an astronaut’s life and the deadly banality of human life in outer space. 

At the same time, working scientists and engineers during these years consistently drew up plans for technologies and endeavors that have since become standard tropes and cliches in science fiction. Consider the space elevator, in which an orbital station would be connected to the surface of the Earth by tethers, allowing the transportation of playloads without needing to climb out of the gravity well. The idea was first conceived of by Russian aeronautics pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Yuri Artsutanov in 1895 and 1960, and a rigorous design was proposed in 1975 by NASA engineer Jerome Pearson, But it  was popularized by Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, and you might know it from the 2004 video game Halo 2.

In 1995, meanwhile, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre wrote a paper outlining a proposed form of warped space-time faster-than-light propulsion that would be mathematically consistent with Einsteinian relativity. Alcubierre has spoken about how he was inspired by the fictional ‘warp drive’ of Star Trek, and the Alcubierre drive has since become a mainstay of science fiction, featured in Mass Effect: Andromeda, Helldivers II, Glynn Stewart's  Castle Federation series, and Marko Kloos’ Frontlines series, to name just a few.  

We can go on. In 1986, Professor Gerald Kulcinski proposed mining the lunar regolith for deposits of helium-3, an isotope that could (theoretically) be used as the basis for radiation-free nuclear fusion. This idea has since become a perennial proposal for the commercialization of outer space. Interlune, a company formed by veterans of the Bezos-founded space-tech outfit Blue Origin, hopes to launch a mining mission by 2029 — and has signed contracts to do so with the US Department of Energy. Professor Ouyang Ziyuan of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has cited the possibility of such extraction as a key component of any long-term presence on the moon, claiming that there is enough helium-3 present to "solve human beings' energy demand for around 10,000 years at least." Major questions continue to shadow the entire concept — beyond the fact that nuclear fusion remains experimental at best, researchers have estimated that you’d need to process one hundred and fifty tons of moon rock for each gram of helium-3 mined. But that hasn’t stopped the magic isotype from becoming a recurring motif and plot element in hard and near-future sci-fi; from Homer Hickam’s Helium-3 series of novels, to the 2009 Duncan Jones film Moon, to the (underappreciated but excellent) anime Planetes. 

Want some more? In 1976, the Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill published a book called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, exploring the potential for further extraplanetary exploration and settlement. In it, he included the designs for ‘Island Three,’ an orbital colony consisting of a pair of cylinders, eight kilometers in diameter and thirty-two kilometers long, that rotate to create gravity. These ‘O’Neil Cylinders’ have since become one of the most ubiquitous designs for space habitats. You might be familiar with them from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise (over fifty anime series and movies, running from 1979 to the present) nearly every iteration of which centers around a war between Earth and a faction of orbital colonies. Or, you might recognize the design from the 1993-1997 television show Babylon 5, in which the titular station is based on an O’Neil cylinder. 

The sheer ubiquity of these ideas can seriously trip you up. A while back, I was watching Babylon 5 with my dad, and trying to explain the concept of the O'Neil cylinder and how it worked. All of a sudden it struck me how strange this was. I was, after all, describing a technology — not just an idea or a drawing from a movie or novel, but a comprehensive suite of designs that have “existed” for nearly fifty years, the subject of decades of discussion, debate, planning, analysis , and study, traveling a long arc from “exciting potential of future development” to “mature concept,” to “almost a cliché”— that has never actually been built. And probably never will! 

Every genre, of course, has its own list of conventions and shorthands that can be deployed at will to rapidly set a scene and build out its fictional worlds. Science fiction is no exception.  But what’s genuinely unusual about this particular set of shibboleths is that they aren’t merely plot dressing or vehicles for character dynamics. Instead, they’re  fully-formed things: physical objects that could theoretically exist, that were designed by people who thought they would exist, and that have been subject to a considerable amount of speculation and analysis about how to bridge the gap between reality and imagination. Science fiction writers and space exploration advocates confidently refer to ideas like the Kardashev Scale, proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardasev in 1964, to catalogue alien civilizations and guide SETI work, ignoring that it remains entirely speculative. Whether or not (currently fictional) helium-3 mining is feasible is a question that millions (billions!) of dollars hang on — something that makes “helium-3 mining” a very different kind of TV trope than, say,  to “there was only one bed” or “enemies to lovers.” 

Given all that, should we be surprised that people start to believe that these things are “real” already — whether or not material reality agrees? To understand this, we have to return to the Theory of Forms, one of the most important legacies of the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Everything that we can see and feel and interact with, Plato writes, are simply shadows, or echoes, of the original unchanging Ideals that exist outside of the physical universe. Everything that will or can exist, in other words, already does, in a perfect, idealized Form that we can only strive to emulate.

Accordingly, a space elevator, O’Neil cylinder, or helium-3 mining rig is real, in the sense that those words refer to a discrete concept, one independent of any source that features it. They are persistent and consistent, having “existed” in the intellectual sphere and popular culture for decades with fixed definitions. If I say those words, you know what I am referring to. At the same time — and quite crucially — they are not real, in that they have never existed in the world of atoms and matter. Yet the former definition tends to outweigh the latter; on a subconscious level, we assume that if there is a shadow on the cave wall, something must be casting it. The Ideal Form must exist, somehow, and so the concept takes on a sort of phantom inevitability. We start to think of life like a video game tech tree; just because some of the options are greyed-out until we unlock them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. 

And you can see how that phantom existence — transmitted by the very Golden Age science fiction we’re been talking about — exerts a gravitational pull on some of the richest men on Earth, potentially towards an unscheduled rapid disassembly. 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX currently plans to launch its first unmanned mission to Mars in 2026, though Musk has admitted that this may be optimistic, especially given his rocket’s tendency to violently explode. As writer Jon Kelvey notes in Aerospace America, many of the design choices made by Musk’s team seem more inspired by the classic designs of science fiction than the tried-and-true iterations of Martian exploration worked out over decades of NASA probes. 

Start with the landing, which Kelvey writes could be fatally compromised by the height of Musk’s Starship, which at 52 meters would tower over the Martian landscape like the rockets of Bradbury. There’s a reason, Kelvey notes 

that NASA utilized parachutes and airbag-cushioned landings for many of its landers and rovers, which were relatively squat vehicles with low centers of gravity.

“Landing vertically looks very slick,” [former NASA first Mars Program director, Scott] Hubbard says, “but look at the failures to land on the moon with a tall, slender vehicle.” He pointed to the Odysseus lander built by Intuitive Machines that “tipped right over” in early 2024 after a laser altimeter failure led it to land faster and on a steeper slope on the lunar surface than anticipated.

“A lower center of gravity would always add stability,” Hubbard told me in a follow-up email, noting that there are no flat, well-prepared landing pads awaiting the first Starships landing on the moon or Mars.

Musk’s bipedal robot design — the entities that might eventually crew such an unmanned mission — also come in for scrutiny. 

Hubbard has doubts Optimus can do the job. He notes that many of the demonstration videos show the robots in well-prepared environments — a sharp contrast to the barren Martian surface. Tesla has also been criticized over videos it’s shared of Optimuses seemingly cooking or interacting with people at events, where it later turned out the robots were at least partially remote controlled.

Instead, “Why not take a whole bunch of rovers of a design you’re pretty sure will work?” Hubbard asks. The six-wheel design used for Perseverance and Curiosity has proven “capable of adapting to almost any kind of surface with enough clearance.”

That one’s easy, Scott: the rovers don’t look like they rolled off of a Golden Age pulp sci-fi cover, do they? 

While less flamboyant than Musk, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has been quietly forging ahead on his own plans for extraplanetary colonization, focusing instead on the  dream of endless archipelagos of orbital O’Neil cylinders. His vision is explicitly following in the footsteps of The High Frontier, Matt Novak writes in Paleofuture, and he explicitly cites the speculative designs of men like O’Neil and Asimov as his template. After giving the usual discussion of how humanity’s movement out into the solar system would unlock “unlimited resources” and massively expand human populations — which are huge and unproven assumptions — Bezos gets down to, as it were, brass tacks. 

 “What O’Neill and his students came up with was the idea of manufactured worlds, rotated to create centrifugal force,” Bezos said.

Bezos says that these artificial space habitats would be many miles long and hold a million or more people each.

“This is a very different colony” than the International Space Station.

Bezos said that his new space colonies would have “high-speed transport, agricultural areas,” and says that “we added a little drone there” while showing the animated video of his space colony idea.

“Some of them would be more recreation,” Bezos said while an image of a space colony filled with wildlife appeared on the presentation screen.

“These are really pleasant places to live,” said Bezos. “Some of these O’Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way.”

“There’d be whole new kinds of architecture,” said Bezos. “These are ideal climates. These are shirt-sleeve environments."

“This is Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storm, no earthquakes. What does the architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary purpose of shelter? We’ll find out."

Bezos then played a clip of an interview from 1975 with Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill.

 Note how Bezos, perhaps unconsciously, drops into the present tense, when talking about these hypothetical dreams of a 1970s future that had yet to come to be.

There is nothing wrong, or particularly unusual, with taking inspiration from fiction. But it’s worth pointing this out explicitly: the fictional archetypes and conventions that continue to dominate our visions for the future are not rooted in any transcendent or universal truth. They come instead from the very specific milieu of the 20^th century, one of the most tumultuous and transformative eras in human history, in which the very shape of the world seemed to be shifting under our feet.

When Clarke and Heinlein sat down with Cronkite that day in late July, 1969, one could forgive their giddy prognostication of unending progress towards the stars. After all, that had been the story of all their lives so far. On December 17^th, 1903, the Wright brothers carried out the first heavier-than-air flight in North Carolina.  In 1907, H.G. Wells had published The War in the Air, a novel about fleets of airships and airplanes waging an apocalyptic war for global domination, and it is little doubt that many military pioneers saw what followed as proof of concept. A few years later, the warring powers were deploying squadrons of planes across Europe, and projectiles fired from the German superheavy 211 mm artillery in the bombardment of  Paris became the first man-made artifacts to pierce the stratosphere. By the Second World War, fleets of hundreds — sometimes thousands — of aircraft turned into cities to ash and rubble, German V-2 ballistic missiles became the first man-made objects to cross the Kármán line into outer space. The war ended with the unleashing of nuclear bombs by the United States. 

This mad rush only sped up after the war's  end. In 1957, the first artificial satellite. In 1961, the first human in space. In 1965, first spacewalk, and first orbital rendezvous. In 1968, first uncrewed and crewed flights around the moon. In 1969, first landing on the moon, a mere sixty-six years after the Wright brothers first launched into the sky. In one lifetime, in other words, man’s relationship with the Universe had changed immeasurably. Scientists like Werner von Braun and Robert H. Goddard, who had written speculative work about the uses of rockets and the exploration of space, lived to see their ideas become reality. 

A person born in the late 19^th century, in other words, could have lived to see heavier-than-air flight go from a dream to a banality of everyday life, and to see mankind take their first steps onto another celestial body. Those same decades witnessed mass urbanization, and the ubiquity of automobiles, household appliances, and other forms of modernity, as well as the rapid spread of “civilization.” Lands that had been the destination of exotic Victorian adventurers only a few decades before were now integrated into the global economy, and reachable by jumbo jet. 

Little wonder then, that the witnesses and writers of those decades saw a linear progression of human civilization, in which the settlement of the Moon, Mars, and the Galaxy was simply the inevitable continuation of the same trends that brought Europeans to America and Africa and Australia. Writers like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein weren’t just daydreaming, in other words: they seemed to be documenting a future that was catching up, nearly as fast as they could write. 

This apparently dizzying race to the stars must be seen in the context of the other dominant trend of the 20^th century: extraordinarily rapid and exponential population growth. Over the course of a hundred years, 1.6 billion humans grew to 6 billion, a quadrupling in number that saw nearly a billion added each decade following WWII. Attempts to extrapolate these trends further led to alarmism and fear about unavoidable famine and societal collapse, as seen in works like Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, which itself can be seen as a bit of unacknowledged science fiction. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this conundrum than the so-called “Fermi Paradox.” which treats the fact that alien civilizations have not inexorably and inevitably filled up the Universe (“Where is everybody?”) as a problem in need of a solution .

It is impossible to overstate how influential overpopulation fears are to the genre conventions of classic science fiction. It’s most obvious in works of dystopian fiction, such as the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, made into the more famous 1973 film Soylent Green. It’s a spectre that haunts Phillip K. Dick’s 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and to a lesser extent, its 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner. But as a foundational assumption of the genre, it is everywhere — the nine billion spacers of Mobile Suit Gundam, or the overcrowded ecumenopolis of Trantor in Asimov’s Foundation series, to the universal two-child limit imposed by the World Government in Orson Scott Card’s classic 1985 novel Ender’s Game, to the rigorous birth control and licensing arrangements of Beta Colony and all other “civilized” planets in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga (1986-2016). So foundational is this idea that it remains inescapable, even today, particularly in military sci-fi series such as John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (2005-2025) and Kloos’ Frontline (2013-2022), which continue to feature the specter of authoritarian governments desperately attempting to settle excess population on new colonies to relieve the strain of resources at home. 

But all evidence suggests that the skyrocketing population growth of the last century has ended. Fertility rates have collapsed in most industrialized countries, and are falling worldwide. Whereas Clarke and Heinlein imagined (and Jeff Bezos still does) a scenario where offworld colonization is inevitable to avoid the collapse of scarce resources under unsustainable growth, now policymakers face acute shortages of working-age people and a “greying” population. Putting aside the many technical challenges of space colonization, it is not clear that we will have any actual need — or potentially even the ability to spare the necessary personnel — within decades or centuries.

Technological growth has not stopped, or arguably even slowed. But neither has it  evolved in the ways that writers necessarily expected. Gravity remains a mistress as harsh as the moon: It is harder to get into space than we thought, the gains are far more speculative, and the dream of economical surface-to-orbit transport continues to elude us. Many other confident predictions have run into similarly inconvenient realities. In Issac Asimov’s Robot stories of the 1940s and 1950s, he makes frequent mention of speech as one of the most “advanced” and difficult tasks for robots to do, compared to ambulation, articulation, and industrial use. In  reality, the exact inverse has been true. The advances in speech and language processing have been explosive and unexpected, to the point where we are now drowning in robot-talk. Meanwhile, every effort towards functional humanoid robots continues to stumble.

And yet! The shadows of warp drives and lunar colonies remain cast tantalizingly on the wall. The weight of cultural consensus; the corpus of genre conventions and analysis and speculation; decades of fictional inertia; all continue to shape our dreams and our hopes.

In the absence of knowledge, we turn to the next best thing: a coherent slice of fantasy. For those who now dream and plan of mankind’s future endeavors beyond the atmosphere, it is nearly impossible to not be influenced by science fiction: it’s what’s there. It’s the main place you can find the descriptions and discussions and analysis of the world we’re trying to build. But those books and movies and diagrams — however inspiring they are as art — do not depict a glimpse of some Platonic Ideal. They are, like everything humans produce, just lower-case ideas, firmly rooted in the assumptions and attitudes of their time. In trying to use them as a compass to guide us, we run the risk of steering in circles.

 I do not want people to stop thinking about space, or exploring, or finding ways to expand our knowledge of the Universe and our capacity to live in it. I do not think it is impossible that we will eventually find some way to permanently settle off-world, though the problems to be overcome are clearly far more vexing than usually believed. But I do think that, in going forward, it is important that we fix our thinking firmly in the future, and not the past. If the Universe isn’t really open to our command, if our mastery of the physical forces of creation aren’t as comprehensive as we imagined, if this “tiny blue dot” of a planet really is all we’ve got — then maybe we need to start trying to deal with that, instead of comforting fantasies. Scientists are now regularly talking about the “inevitability” of "irreversible changes” to the biosphere, but I promise you, trying to grapple with that is going to be a lot easier than trying to terraform Mars.  

I don’t know what the future of a hundred years from now will look like. It may be better or worse. But with all respect to Clarke and Heinlein, I bet it won’t look much like they imagined either: the silver ships are not likely to glide out to Proxima Centauri anytime soon. 

The 20th century was not what the 19th century dreamed it would be, and we’re already seeing that the 21st will not be a reflection of the dreams of the 20th. Wherever we’re going will  be someplace genuinely new, for better and for worse.  

Musk and Bezos may never figure that out. But it’s up to the rest of us to  get us there.

Nate Goldwag has written for Mondoweiss , the Journal of Cartoon Overanalyzations and Liberal Currents. You can find him chatting about science fiction, history, and other esoteric topics at his blog, Goldwag's Journal on Civilization, and over on Bluesky at @goldwagnathan.bsky.social.

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