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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I think it was in Skyfall where Q says to 007 "We don't do that kind of thing any more" ... because it wasn't really possible for the writers to come up with exciting tech gadgets. It was just entirely believable that there was already an app for anything they could think of. We have jetpacks, flying cars are going to show up literally in a year or two, Internet comes from space, "AI robot vacuum" is an entirely mundane product, we've got government investigations of robot cars running people over... what kind of thing could a sci-fi writer imagine that you couldn't see a startup selling in a couple of years?

Science fiction is hard to do now.

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Gotta hire some physicists, and pay them great salaries to get them away from the kind of contributions to society they like doing... If you paid me $400k++++ a year to do it, I could go wild coming up with seemingly plausible, as well as just on the edge of disbelief required from STEM educated people, sci Fi technologies.

The problem really is those who have the background to do it are (1) struggling to survive in the current market with their degrees without selling out to finance, (2) desiring to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge... So yeah, to get some solid sci-fi ideas you would have to share an alluring slice of the pie... The people who could do it, aren't going to do it for salaries comparable to those in their fields, or even 20-30% above their salaries. It's gotta be multiples with some level of security in the long term.

> Science fiction is hard to do now.

You may want to check books in the Culture universe by Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds' House or Sun or the Commonwealth universe from Peter F. Hamilton (which also as a fantasy like arc). Not sure we're getting humans meshing into spacetime soon.

General nanomanufacturing and the genius who founds a new nation in the pacific because of it, complete with geopolitical intrigue and a war because of an upset in the balance of power.

Not dystopian, not utopian, just an adventure.

Maybe we don't dream as much as we used to.

That or most of the things we thought were sci-fi are sci-fantasy. "Actually no, we can't rip open wormholes in space".

This said, the converse may be true. "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense". There is such a massively huge amount of fiction now that it's like being tossed into the middle of the Pacific without a raft. We're not looking for an escape from reality INTO technology. It's more likely we are looking for an escape from reality FROM technology.

No, 100 years ago there was all of this brand new fundamental science and technology and it was easy to imagine things that could be... today we're in the late stages of filling in all the gaps, we've explored all of the spaces and the most exciting things we could imagine are the things we already have working somewhat better than they already do. The scifi that gets made is either fantasy (this will never exist because it's impossible) or retro-futurism (old scifi imagining, essentially, the present).

Sorry, we have jetpacks? I don't have one!

Yup, apparently they're doing races in Dubai now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn5W19sdyf4

Lots of videos of military applications, etc.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-m...

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