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Sci Fi is so ridiculously optimistic. The future isn’t spaceships, it miserable people living to be 120.

ArishMell · 70-79, M
I've never believed going into Space will solve the world's problems. (To where? How many people? Doing what? Travelling there how, and taking how long to do so? Can any return to Earth or is it one-way to Eternity?). It can inspire good space-fiction though.

I must resume reading a far-future novel I broke off from, at a point where people from Earth were settling on an uninhabited, rather unpleasantly warm and humid but nevertheless humanly-habitable planet.... Doing so with predictable environmental results, even though at that point they had not long started colonising the unfortunate place.

Though a deep fantasy involving very far-flung planets, and the rest of the novel is entertaining but generally even more far-fetched than [i]Star Trek[/i], that part of the narrative is in some ways rather more credible then the Muskian vision of lots of people happily living on the cold, lifeless, near-airless desert called Mars.

Much more starkly and alarming credible is Robert Harris' [i]The Second Sleep[/i], placed 800 years hence after some unidentified apocalyptic collapse of our own civilisations. That breakdown occurred in the [i]narrative's [/i]far past, so roughly in [i]our[/i] near-future. Though the characters and plot are entirely in SW England, the collapse was, and its centuries-long results are, implicitly world-wide. Dystopian? Oh my word, Yes. Science fiction? Far from it.....
DeWayfarer · 61-69, M
No. If we don't go out into space, will kill ourselves over, over-population long before we reach 80 year's old.

We went from 8 billion people to 8.1 billion people this year alone. That's 100 million people or between ¼ to ⅓ of the USA's total population. Who is the third largest populated country in the world.
Glossy · F
There is no shortage of science fiction based around a dystopian future. You should broaden your reading spectrum.
Royrogers · 61-69, M
@Glossy I agree plenty of hope for the future
FeetAreFantastic · 41-45, M
I don't find colonizing space to be very optimistic either.

 
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