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Comment by CipherThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Older people bemoaning the pessimism, fatalism and short-termism of the younger generations really ought to try engaging younger people in meaningful dialog and attempting to understand their points of view. Younger people are interested in the future and they are passionate about tackling emerging global problems. Market research shows gen Z place a huge emphasis on sustainability for example.

Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all. They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-utopian optimism which was disconnected from the actual future and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity's future than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.

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There was the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War, environmental concerns around overpopulation, deforestation and acid rain. And there were dystopian movies like Terminator, Alien and Threads with fears around technology, corporations and world war. Older people did have to deal with the possibility of bad future outcomes. It seems to have been forgotten in the 90s and and the first decade of the 2000s when those issues didn't seem so world ending in the absence of the Cold War and the failure of environmental doom predictions from the 60s though the 80s.

My point isn't that older generations didn't have problems worth worrying about. It's that younger generations have their own unique problems worth worrying about. I wouldn't expect someone who grew up in the 00s to really understand the Cold War, so why would I expect someone who grew up in the 80s to understand the unique challenges of Generation Z? This is why dialogue is important.

The environmental comparison is very shallow. Climate change is a higher stakes and larger scale environmental issue than we have ever seen and will require radical changes to modern life and modern economies merely to limit the damage. Compare it to a past looming disaster like ozone depletion where the risk was bad sunburns and all we had to do was stop spraying Freon into the air. I remember actually being worried about the ozone layer. Boy does that feel quaint now.

I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there. Everything feels like "blind techno-utopian optimism" because you're intentionally blinding yourself to progress and focusing entirely on the negatives.

I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other.

> I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there.

Perhaps you read "reversing cause and effect" on a blog and assumed it was just a very smart way of saying someone is wrong. In fact it has a specific meaning.

In this case the cause and effect I was positing was that Star Trek et al were a product of techno-utopian optimism. The reverse cause and effect would therefore be sci-fi producing techno-utopian optimism rather than the other way round. This reverse relationship does seem plausible since there is an unmistakable sci-fi influence on the outlooks of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others.

> I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other.

No one is saying that Mars dream-chasing won't have any benefit to real problems on Earth. The objections of scientists, economists and environmentalists are instead based on a concept called "opportunity cost" as well as feasibility and priority.

How much work have you done to try to understand the costs and physical quantities involved in terraforming and transporting people to Mars?

It took you less than a day to flip from "trying to engage younger people in meaningful dialogue" to a holier than thou tone over the mildest of disagreement. I was initially bothering to properly respond to you, but given your demonstrated lack of interest in meaningful dialogue I don't think it'd be fair for me to respond to you earnestly.

My bad. Your reply didn't register as an earnest to me. The tone and content felt too similar to bad faith commentary from e.g. Elon Musk fans who aren't actually interested in understanding the issues. If that's not the case than I apologize.

You sound like a teenager "You don't understand me! You're too old!"

Or, we've been there, and have a different perspective after having walked through it.

Solarpunk isn't new. It strongly reminds me of the 1960 to early 1970s graphics.

And yes, StarWars is an opera. Also, opera can be fun.

>"You don't understand me! You're too old!"

If a younger person said this to me I would find it quite reasonable. As an older person I don't presume to automatically understand the unique problems and circumstances of a different generation from my own. That's why I put effort into engaging younger people in dialogue. What I'm suggesting is that others do the same.

I think this is why I liked DS9 so much more than TNG or Voyager. It put less of a fourth wall between the conflict on the screen and the real-world conflicts it tried to map to, and it handled them without cynicism or easy, unrealistic solutions. When a chunk of the station got blown off, you saw people working on it in the opening of the next episode. Conflicts weren't always solved with a good speech.

Q finally got his ass kicked. Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.

> Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.

Duarte tries that in The Expanse and it doesn't go so well.

I've only seen the show where the gate builders and their enemy are still, and forever, a mystery. I don't think even Holden knows that much, but he at least has the good sense to not anger them. Q is more like a bored puppy.

Right now, Solarpunk feels more like an aesthetic than a genre. It also seems to be getting bogged down in political cruft around what it means to be “punk”.

Edit: I’d love to hear why I’m wrong. Are there prominent Solarpunk authors I’m not aware of?

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