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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

I think one thing that is missing from modern Hollywood sci-fi is the feeling of the vastness and emptyness of space. Foundation certainly had that. It seems like everywhere they go in new sci-fi is crowded. Maybe this is because the overcrowded eco-doom dystopia trope is so deeply embedded in our culture recently or it could be because there's too much temptation to use CGI to create baroque environments.

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In "The Expanse" (the books) vastness of space plays crucial role (ships can't get anywhere instantly, communications take hours)

I was going to post the same comment, having just recently finished the 7-book series.

Stoked to have discovered the handful of prequel novellas providing backstory.

The books have that, but the first season or so of the TV series lacks it.

It's also one of the few books that made me want to throw it across the room when I finished it.

I'm confused. Once you develop technology to travel to a bunch of different star-systems in a lifetime, space isn't so "vast" anymore.

In foundation, the "vastness" came from the fact that humanity has colonized thousands if not hundreds of thousands of planets, to a point where the location of the "origin" of humanity(Earth) and first colonies became lost to history and myths. When the plot revolves around finding this mythical and ancient "Earth" planet, one of the issues is that it would take them thousands of years to visit every inhabited solar system in our galaxy, and that's assuming that the records indicating their positions were accurate. In that way, yes, you could "warp" from one system to another in days, but the galaxy is still incredibly vast and largely unknown. It's just like right now you could hop on a plane and reach pretty much any point on this planet within say 72 hours, but it's still an incredibly vast place and if you were looking for something it's inconceivable you could visit every city on Earth to find it.

Responding to your own commnent only, I don't think that is necessarily true. Read some stories from the Revelation Space universe by Alistair Reynolds for a good example of how space can be as vast as it is, yet still traversed within human lifetimes and within known laws of physics.

Think, for a moment, about an empire that spans millions of planets and about 500 quadrillion people.

Even if we don't count the empty space, it's pretty enormous.

Stargate: Universe spent its brief run exploring desolate planets and bickering while hurtling through uninhabited space. It didn't work too well.

It was a terrible show about sad millennials who were stranded in space, without their anti-anxiety drugs and marijuana, lacking the basic survival instincts and common sense to tie their own shoes. And every episode ended in sad play out music. God I hate what they did to stargate in that show.

Did we watch the same show? The only drug-addicted person on the ship was well past millennial, and the various skills of the crew were what allowed them to survive.

It wasn't what I expected of Stargate, but it was watchable.

Star Trek (the various series) certainly did a good job communicating the vastness of space to the viewer.

Not very consistently, but Voyager revolved around it taking a lifetime just coming back home, hurtling full speed.

Yeah, and then at the end they did some time travel nonsense and hacked into the Borg transwarp network and got back to Federation space in no time at all, and were one-shotting Borg cubes to boot.

That show never really had the courage of its convictions.

Trantor was friggin crowded.

Only at the very beginning of the series. Trantor is basically Rome. It is densely populated to an unsustainable extent. It needs a huge empire to supply it. Once the empire collapses, Trantor collapses too. When it is visited later in the series its population is only a tiny fraction of what it once was.

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