I like star trek. Mainly because it tries to explore what humanity could be if we stopped fighting over resources and spent our energy trying to hook up with aliens and build paradise planets.

never watched the movie but i liked the book. it was like the dark chocolate of sci fi - not a lot going on besides tech and science but the tech and science was super good.

i feel you on the optimistic vision of technology tho. it's not just him but the decline of musk's reputation feels like it dragged the entirety of the tech world with him, tesla went from being an optimistic venture into future tech to being a stock market grift, we've got peter thiel talking about the antichrist, america as a whole is canceling green energy projects and increasing fossil fuel consumption, sam altman is saying that we need to burn more fossil fuels in order to run more ai chatbots because that will somehow fix everything...

still got a SpaceX shirt in my closet. I think I got it over ten years ago. reminds me of where I was at.

Wasn't a plot point in The Martian an emergency repeal on the Obama ban on doing space stuff with China?

Weir's latest book, project hail Mary, had a scene where the US army and the PLA jointly march into a courthouse to inform the judge and ballifs that the main characters are above copyright law actually.

The second half of the 2010s unloaded an aa-12 magazine into the overall global mood until 2020 arrived and gave it a “mercy kill” via grenade launcher, after which it woke up into the deepest realm of hell

Yeah, seeing the level of US-China cooperation is pretty shocking today

we dont even have bazinga mars nerds anymore just different flavors of "i wont eat the bugs" all clawing at each other to climb out of a pit rapidly filling with water

I've never seen the movie (which I've heard is actually pretty good) but a couple months before the movie came out I did read the book, which I despised. Not really because of the lib politics and optimistic internationalism, I just hate the way Weir writes. A guy gets trapped alone on Mars, surely doomed to die, and he powers through it by going "fuck yeah, I love science."

2001: A Space Odyssey is great because it uses the backdrop of the space race and the visual language of Science Fiction (or I guess literal language in the case of the novel) to explore some big ideas about the human condition: isolation, duty, regression, depravity, hope, the incomprehensible beauty and impossibility of existence. The Martian uses the backdrop of a man trapped in the most horrifying situation imaginable to geek out about how cool it is that potatoes could be grown in a shit-slurry. Which, in fairness, is perhaps mildly interesting but is lacking in the necessary pathos and artistic drive to really make engaging fiction.

I don't know, clearly a lot of people love Weir's whole shtick, but it's very much not my thing. It's far too safe.

It was a little similar in For All Mankind, where the USSR doesn't collapse (because they got the moon landing first - it's a space show so whatever, sure) and the "space race" continues to spur impressive feats.

But it very, very, quickly libs out and stops imagining this leading to a better future, just better technology - and almost all of the American cast are fucking awful liabilities.

Holy shit I saw it for the first time like 2 nights ago and thad similar thoughts. Just made me kind of sad. Like a little misty as I thought "I wish we could have a world more like that instead".

It's a perfectly alright film. I don't have much to say about it otherwise.

It's vision of US-China cooperation becomes more sci-fi by the day, depressing.

Imagine thinking the US isn't obsessed with world domination and could peacefully coexist with a rival foreign power.

The book is really enjoyable. The liberalism is annoying, but I loved the suspense and the Real Science™. I haven't read it since it came out, but the movie was just fine, comparatively speaking

People seriously believed musk would save us all and be on mars in 2023. Like so much that several sci-fi properties (Star Trek, Mass Effect, etc...) mentioned it.

I had the same reaction a couple months ago. "Oh, you sweet summer 2015ers, you thought NASA would have funding? Like, for science stuff? Like, the whole organization wouldn't be cannibalized and privatized?"