Even the most unrestrained accelerationist futurism seems unable to sustain a vision of faster-than-light travel of the sort that would make a truly galactic civilization possible our futures today seem earthbound, inside the computer, rather than “Out There” beyond the stars. We’re stalling out at Wollheim’s first stage, long before we make the jump to lightspeed. Our interstellar probes? They’re 3.5 centimeters wide. Current plans for Mars manned missions, only fragmentary, typically involve one-way suicide trips - hardly the stuff of our intergalactic dreams - and such trips very rarely satisfy anything like a rational cost-benefit analysis in terms of what we on Earth might get out of such projects. And of course it’s a story, in various ways, we still tell: just think of how every failing US presidency eventually tries to prop itself up by promising manned missions to Mars.ĭespite its prevalence in NASA’s branding and self-promotion, however, manned space flight is no longer a priority for the organization missions to the Moon stalled after only a few years, and the anticipated follow-up missions to Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and beyond have remained only dreams. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).įrom Robert A.
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