Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like "plasteel" or dilithium or various magical materials.

The periodic table of elements is it. There's nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That's it.

For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they're starting their own civilization.

In the meantime there's one computer handling the police files and it's in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.

In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.

Why? It's quite simple, it's about energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

In other words, we can't keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.

Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.

And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.

In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.

Thank you for your attention to this vital topic.

I just don't see any of that leading to a 'scifi' image. None of those steps would change the sheer time it takes to get to Mars in a practical way, and that's just a deal breaker for manned flight.

On the flip side, we have had great advances in technology that makes unmanned science better, which in a way even more reduces the chances of scifi vision of 'manned' space flight to far places, because it just doesn't make sense.

I think repeatedly hitting the moon would have had the world shrugging, none of the sci fi was 'hey we made it to the moon and... stayed there'.

A mission to the moon was a little under 2 weeks, a similar mission to mars would be well over two years. Sure, we could, but even the most adventurous human adventures in history have been measured in months, we've never displayed the will to commit to years for what would be a token mission.

Yes, the tech could be improved with more investment, but the sci-fi results of even settling mars is just unreasonably far out.

Relevant article regarding NASA's current bureaucratic limits: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

Well, we haven't sent a crewed mission to the moon in a while, because we don't really have any particular benefit from it, and even if that had continued, that wouldn't have fit with the scifi vision of how things should be. A Mars trip is theoretically possible, but that's a multi-year mission for a single trip. That's a lot for what would mostly a vanity project of a manned mission compared to sending probes.

On the concept of a Venusian research station, the question would be... why? Staff would be in practical terms in no better position to study Venus than they would from Earth. All they could do would be supervise instruments in ways that could be done remotely.

The point is while advancements are possible, none that would even tickle the more tame sci-fi visions of expansion within the solar system. The larger impediments to a Mars mission are just "why" not technical impediments, unless a technical improvement could cut that trip down by 10-fold, but nothing even vaguely hints at that being a possibility.

yeah but that's not the relevant part. the list is about pessimistic takes on the future.

also star wars takes place a long time ago so technically that doesn't belong either