by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I generally believe that there will, in fact, be a Singularity at some point in the 21 Century. As such, how humanity’s future in space is depicted in fiction really needs an upgrade.
Two things seem very possible to me — most life in the universe is probably machine in nature and it’s very possible that we haven’t gotten contacted by aliens because they just don’t care. They’re dreaming a deep, eternal sleep in planet-size computers and fuck you.
As such, it’s growing more and more difficult to watch tripe like “Lost In Space” which using the traditional humans-in-space tropes of spaceships and aliens. Ugh. Why not do some updating? Like, instead of a spaceship, humans are just zapped from solar system to solar system.
You could do a whole franchise where humans have to interact with planet-sized machine minds. This grows even more interesting if you flipped the script and said the “Galactic Empire” is really just a bunch of planet-sized machine minds that talk to each other and occasionally take a biological intelligence like humanity under their wing.
Or, put another way, Hollywood really needs to be a tiny bit more creative when it comes to how it imagines humanity’s future in space. They’re so busy strip mining 60 year old IP that that they are really letting the audience down. But the only way this is going to get fixed is someone product a Matrix-level flip-the-scrip style movie, only set in space, or something.
And, then, it would have to be really, really popular.
So, I suppose nothing as fun-interesting as this will ever happen anytime soon.
