Manned spaceflight will end

For what NASA spent on the space shuttle during its thirty-year career, balloon probes could have explored all the seven nearby worlds with atmospheres. Subs could have investigated three alien seas, joined by hundreds of landers and satellites.
 A space interferometry telescope network could have begun to explore the universe from solar orbit.
 The first expendable space robots could have started exploiting asteroids. There must be some surprises out there.
 If NASA had been serious about developing manned spaceflight instead, it could have prepared high-risk missions to a nearby asteroid (where the resources are), instead of making vague plans for the moon and Mars.
 Until SpaceX, the American space agency spent over $1 billion on each astronaut it orbited, so that their relatives wouldn't complain that they hadn't spent enough when things inevitably went wrong.
 The politically incorrect truth is that human lives aren't that valuable. On this planet they're often worthless. At the same time, there is nothing humans could do in space that machines can't do better.

 The long-term vision of terraforming planets may be the dumbest idea ever, but it's an excellent motivator for SpaceX's "Big Friendly Rocket", so I won't complain. By converting empty planets into swarms of space stations instead, one million times the usable living space could be generated. That won't happen either, of course. It will be software all the way, a quantum energy swarm of organized pseudo-matter. The problem with manned spaceflight is that humans will be obsolete before the 22nd century.
 

The future is alien

A list of common scifi movie errors that make every movie instantly look familiar:
 -It's dark and grimy in here.
 This began with Star Wars and Alien. The film 2001 got it right the first time.
 Future environments will be profoundly disorganized, but they won't look that way. On the surface, everything will seem polished and immaculate. The order will only be a local maximum, like rows of white boxes in a hoarder's mansion.
 -The characters are too cool. Real humans from the future would seem bizarre.
 -The 'Jurassic Park Syndrome'.
 The books of Michael Crichton, and the films 2001, Back To The Future 2, and Strange Days, featured impossibly advanced technology (time machines, nuclear spaceships, AIs, antigravity, ways to play back perceptions) in otherwise recognizable societies.
 The most dramatic changes won't be technical but social, and they'll be too weird to show in advance.
 It's easier to legally emancipate and desegregate women and blacks than to build flying cars. The Cold War ended because after seventy years, Soviet bureaucrats realized it was easy to just stop doing something.
 -In reality, 99.999999% of future effort will be bureaucratic.
 -In fiction, characters always solve mystery phenomena without alerting every scientist and journalist they can contact.
 -Spaceships accelerate but don't decelerate (Star Trek: Into Darkness).
 -Galaxies and nebulae are visible to the human eye.
 In reality, they're barely brighter than a ghost. Even the Andromeda Galaxy appears dimmer than most stars. Find the three bright stars in Orion's Belt, and link them to the five stars that look like an M or a W. Around the middle of that line you may just barely see the Milky Way, made of billions of stars and gas and dust clouds. It can be surprisingly three dimensional if you stare long enough.
 

A list of things that won't ever happen (85% confidence and rising):

-A third supersonic airliner. (Update 2023: not so sure, now only 65%)
 SSTs were technically successful, but burned way too much fuel. The Tupolev-160 would have made a cool long-range airliner, but there are not enough millionaires.
 -Humans living on another planet.
 -Flying cars.
 -Blaster guns.
 -Biological humans meeting biological aliens.
 

All Is Lost

In this century, mankind will face a long list of unimaginable threats. There's barely enough time to prepare:
 -fanatical hackers will infiltrate everything, including nuclear deterrent forces. That's because most hackers are actually employees.
 -new transnational organizations and alliances.
 -superviruses, 'macrobes', smart bacteria, terminator worms, post-biotic nanoids.
 A small swarm of replicators evenly distributed and quietly multiplying worldwide could reach a critical mass everywhere at once, and atomize the biosphere in ninety minutes flat.
 -perception experiments.
 Victims could be controlled and enslaved without understanding what was happening.
 

The Singularity may be less than fabulous

 Just one more year and then you'll be happy
 But you're crying now
 (Baker Street)
 
 All the good stuff is still far off. If only we could skip the next thirty years.
However, the replacement of humanity by uncontrollably multiplying software networks may not be completely without risk. Can every problem be solved by making reality more complex?
 It will take many eons to create a universe of pure computation. Every posthuman agent will only understand a tiny fragment of the total plan.
 Then there's the scaling problem: to make a system twice as powerful takes exponentially more effort as it expands.
 
The first concern of posthumanity should be maximum safety for its society. Even the tiniest risk to the system is unacceptable. This strange civilization will be designed with massive redundancy, spending most of its efforts terminating imperfect processes.
 Knowing that they can be effortlessly replaced, expendable individuals will sacrifice themselves when necessary. They will be less important than individual cells to humans. Digital euthanasia and resurrection will become a way of life.
 

---

Be the first to read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.

The book that took a quarter century to plan and write.
With more original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.

Buy the book

Read chapters for free