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I happen to really like District 9 for this reason
There’s no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like “stay the fuck right there, we’ll take all your shit until we figure out how to
deal withexploit you”Humanity is always its own worst-enemy
Also, the future of Elysium (also Bloomkamp) looks more and more likely, with the 1 percent fucking off to a luxury space station in orbit and the rest of humanity living in poverty on the destroyed Earth.
Another interesting thing about Elysium is how the AI is programmed to only recognize rich people as humans. Just like rich people think about it.
I am still hoping for a Halo like future, with civil war in space, war against aliens, the threat of a dark and ancient threat and all of that. Or maybe just a Stellaris future with the same but more megastructures
Covid just made us all realise we know a lot more people than we thought we did who would hide a zombie bite.
More like we know a lot more people that would have zombie bite parties because they “trust their immune system” and simultaneously don’t believe in the zombie hoax.
Also there are people who will intentionally smear their zombie bite juice on you because ain’t nobody gonna trample on their freedom.
Kiss that damned zombie you coward. LIVE WITHOUT FEA—BRAAAAAAAINS
Explains how zombie apocalypse movies happen
Nadine isn’t a zombie, she just likes biting! Don’t you dare kink shame her!!!
You didn’t know that already? The cute to a zombie bite is a bullet to the head and no one wants to be shot.
And yell at you for asking if they have ever been bitten.
Funny, I was saying this for decades about zombie bites. I was such a downer pessimist. Now after COVID hit my family has rebranded me a realist.
This is a great comment
Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.
Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we’re more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.
Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they’re a bunch of losers what can’t get past their weirdo shit.
The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we’re the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
“It’s quite illogical that they can’t understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try.”
“Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!”
Quite a take on it!
Meanwhile, homo sapien are effectively half fighting chimp, half sexy loving bonobo.
We get to choose our own path.
Half sexy? I’m offended! I’m 100% sexy bonobo!
Username checks out.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist who infused his political beliefs into the show. The concept of a peaceful, egalitarian society united under one government, where resources were shared and everyone worked for the betterment of all - this is essentially a communist ideal. In fact, the characters themselves embody different facets of Marxist theory. For instance, Captain Kirk represents the proletariat fighting against oppression while Mr. Spock embodies the need for logic and rational decision-making.
Star Trek’s vision of the future was meant to inspire hope and demonstrate what humanity could achieve when freed from the constraints of class and economic systems. In many ways, the show serves as a subtle form of communist propaganda. As you mentioned, each episode often portrayed humans as progressing towards an idealistic future, while the aliens faced various challenges due to their clinging to old ideologies and social structures. This reflects Roddenberry’s belief that to truly advance, societies must shed outdated and divisive ideas.
By presenting a world where these barriers are overcome, Star Trek encourages viewers to question their own societal norms and consider how they might work together in a more just and cooperative manner. Although the series was never overtly political, its underlying message clearly illustrates Roddenberry’s support for communism, making it a unique piece of entertainment that not only entertains but also educates its audience.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist
Citation needed.
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The enemy must be simple though. Too complicated or invisible or something and the conspiracy nuts will take over.
You wouldn’t be able to see the aliens. The best you would be able to do is get blurry pictures of their ships from telescopes if you’re lucky. Conspiracy nuts would do fine.
Any civilization able to get to us, would be advanced enough that a carrier task group bombing the uncontacted people of the north sentinel islands would be a fair fight in comparison.
We would see a blur in our telescopes followed by death or whatever they want to do to us.You’re absolutely right. I was describing the hypothetical scenario where the aliens just want to fuck with us by blowing up the sun or something. If they wanted us dead it would be lights out before we know they were there.
or whatever they want to do to us.
Anal probing, most likely.
Poor aliens just think our ass is the mouth. Where they come from bipeds are assmouth to assface
There are so many nightmare situations you can imagine.
A single missile loaded up with a highly contagious 100% fatal pathogen, use drones with infrared to pick off the remaining hermits.
Just drones. Self-replicating killing machines that know all the human tricks.
Neutrino bombs, a few million of them.
A horrible digging machine just digs and releases all that poisons stuff from under us. We all suffocate.
Sunblocker, apply for 30 years. The few remaining humans living in cannibalism around geothermal vents get nuked from orbit.
Giant space mirrors. Fry us.
Bioweapons which specifically target or exclude a certain genetic profile. The dark side of gene therapy.
Too complicated or invisible or…
Bing bing bing!
Internal Combustion Engine? Nuclear Bomb? SCIENCE, praise be.
Invisible / long term & murky phenomena? JUST YOUR OPINION, man, I trust Facebook and WhatsApp forwards on this one.
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The pandemic was an opportunity for humanity to kill something, at least to the extent that viruses are alive.
Do viruses bleed?
I guess they bleed RNA instead of blood.
But a pathogen is too complicated to fight and invisible.
Immunology is hard. Let’s go shopping.
On that note, I highly recommend checking out The Three Body Problem books. Without going into spoilers, this is a huge part of one of the books.
I’m halfway through book two and I was thinking the same thing.
That’s the book I was thinking of!
I thought the same thing. I could see the world banding (mostly) together for a fight, but not to just make life better.
Not everyone would unite, but the big governments of the world would at least sit together to form a plan towards a common enemy.
Like how we formed the Allies during WW1.
Your local redneck probably won’t, but that doesn’t matter.
There are so many stories from WW2 about how Americans didn’t unite.
Here’s one of my favorites Patriots complained about air crews painting naked ladies on their planes. They were fine with kids getting drafted and sent overseas, but God Forbid they thought about S*X
The reason for that was because America wasn’t much affected by WW2 before Pearl Harbor.
A threat to the entire planet would include America, even if they like to pretend they are separate from the rest of the world.
Yeah bullshit like that happened. But that bullshit didn’t prevent the allies from accomplishing their objective, did it?
So it proves that bullshit doesn’t prevent things from happening. Though I think magnifying minor bullshit problems to the point where people give up on achieving anything may actually prevent things from happening.
99% of propaganda is getting people upset over minor stuff. Right now the GOP is pushing two ideas at once; that Joe Biden isn’t doing anything about the border AND that stopping Biden’s border bill is a priority. Too mad to think straight is the goal.
Yeah the problem is that the internet has made everyone insanely meta about everything. Let’s prevent Biden from solving this problem so he’ll look bad so we can get rid of the guy that’s trying to solve the problem we want to be solved because he didn’t solve the problem because we stopped him from solving the problem because we want to get rid of him because he didn’t solve the problem.
Talking in circles isn’t just for politicians now. A lot of people have roleplaying on the internet as a press secretary for their favorite politician for so long now I don’t think they even know why they’re doing it, don’t know why they support the politician they are fronting for and don’t know or care about the issues.
thats a good point. I bet for an acute existential threat the major powers would nominally ally themselves against it, while still playing politics. So NATO, Russia, China, India, and whomever else would throw their hat in.
We see that if the threat has a long tail though (climate change) that nobody gives a shit.
Forgot the name, but that movie about tentacled aliens invading earth with like 12 monoliths and a linguist tries to understand them
The way world cooperation is portrayed is kinda reflecting. Not perfect, but somehow realistic
Arrival. Great flick.
tyvm 🫡
There is nearly a century of Nebula Award winning science fiction that is in the public domain. Hollywood can’t say, “they’re out of ideas” All they need are screenwriters who aren’t idiots.
Or maybe pay the screenwriters to do more than a first draft?
I also used to wonder why writing in TV shows and movies got so bad in the last decade. A lot of things feel like it’s just a first draft level of quality. Some information came out last year that indicated that they were indeed filming things off of a first draft. Because the studios didn’t want to pay writers beyond making a first draft.
Hopefully that issue has been resolved. Hooray for unions!
I recently watched Utopia, British show about a super secret group putting naughty stuff in a vaccine.
Their plan hinged on every person being so afraid of a pandemic that everybody takes the vaccine. This was made pre COVID of course, because we now know that would never work.
Sounds like right wing porn.
it’s actually a really great conspiracy thriller. I’d fully recommend it. I’m sure right wing weirdos could read too much into it and find a message they agree with, but they do that with everything anyways.
I didn’t find it overtly political beyond money = corruption = shady people being able to get away with shady stuff
If anything it’d probably annoy right wingers because it vocally blames humanity for environmental disaster.
Yeah I’m sure someone who doesn’t think much could definitely watch the show and come away thinking vaccines are dangerous, but that’s not the angle it pulls. It relies on there being only one vaccine manufacturer, that everybody takes it, and that nobody outside the scheme actually tests the vaccine.
Of course in the real world multiple companies manufacture the same vaccine and they’re tested by numerous organisations, so it falls apart pretty quickly.
Still a good show though.
“Right wing” is pretty unhelpful as a description here, do you mean the Brexity types who “don’t trust experts” and wouldn’t touch a vaccine because Darren’s mum’s dog’s friend’s cleaner took one and still got ill, or the stuffy old Tories who just want things to go back to how they used to be and pay less tax on their generational wealth who will do as the government tells them?
One of the iffey feelings I have reading three-body series, even though it’s a pretty dark series that also highlight the dark side of humanity, is that the world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative. May be if Liu Cixin wrote the book around Covid, it might be quite different.
world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative
In that book the ideologies that divided people certainly existed, but they were not geographical.
You could make similar arguments about covid.
COVID, when the world partly united to make a cure and a vaccine in quite a record time?
Academia and pharmaceutical companies united to develop the vaccine while the shitmunchers were rioting in the streets because epidemiology is confusing
And ut couldn’t have possibly been because of your authoritarian reach or anything like that. You were 100% perfect and harmless, and did no wrong whatsoever.
If they had made a cure we wouldn’t be living through the biggest wave since it first started, years later, with hundreds if not thousands of people still dying from it daily around the world (never mind the millions left disabled)… 🙄🙄🙄
It’s pretty much over for most of the world. Now its more like the reoccurring Flu outbreaks every year.
It has become endemic, like the flu, AFAIK people are not dying en mass and the hospitals are not overwhelmed with covid cases.
Yep, scifi will need to amend the trope to “united just enough…”
Individual governments and pharmaceutical companies aren’t enraptured by the same degree of propaganda as your basic idiot citizen.
If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it’s a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.
Aliens are woke
honestly by the time they get the technology to visit planets so far away they’d probably get pretty woke
I wouldn’t have believed you a few years ago but that pretty much happened.
The GOP would become the “Human Power Elite” trope in “They Live.” Literally I swear to God that was a metaphor for Tim Scott and Herschel Walker. For that matter MTG and Boebert, too.
In the real word: Aliens don’t exist.
On Lemmygrad: The Sun deserves it for defecting to the west!
Expeditionary forces is a comedy science fiction in which the nations of the world reluctantly worked together, but only some of the nations, and they’re far from friends.
Expeditionary forces
That’s the one!
…has ruined sci-fi…
No, just ruined the generic good vs evil trope.
There’s a lot of good sci-fi (books/movies/series) out there that has a more nuanced take on humans and society.
OP desperately needs to read The Expanse. 🤦
For me it is that book Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs. My kids favorite. The ending is natural disasters make the town unlivable so the population flees to a new home and are welcomed with open arms.
Yeah that is so fucking bullshit. You telling me that a nice wealthy population would allow foreigners facing death into their land? They would keep them at sea until they all starved and churches would call them rapefugges.
