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In your opinion which of these, science Fiction or history will have the greater effect on the future of humanity?


Question posed as at times over the last year or two, it's felt like I'm living in the opening chapters of a dystopian novel.

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I am not sure I understand the question.

Quote from: Tamas on August 13, 2022, 08:31:27 PMI am not sure I understand the question.

I know that I don't.

My best guess is that this is an incredibly awkward way of asking which, between SF and history, we think is the better guide to predicting the future.  But that's just my guess.

There will always be technological change, so science fiction.

But human nature doesn't change, so history.

Quote from: grumbler on August 13, 2022, 10:10:37 PM

Quote from: Tamas on August 13, 2022, 08:31:27 PMI am not sure I understand the question.

I know that I don't.

My best guess is that this is an incredibly awkward way of asking which, between SF and history, we think is the better guide to predicting the future.  But that's just my guess.

Classy.

Sci fi in general.
History if things go very very wrong.

Neither.  In the future we will communicate in the language of flowers.

I think there is a non-zero probability of one or more major transformative events in the future that will change fundamental aspects of the human experience, and that way make things harder to predict using history.

Voted "even".

I think the answer depends on your timescale of reference. In the short term - history, but the further out we get - science-fiction.

... though that does suppose "history" being defined from the view of today. I expect that the future of humanity in the year 5,000 will probably be more informed by the history of the preceding centuries of 4,800 to 5,000 than will be the science-fiction of the times (whatever that may be). Though that future history surely would seem like science-fiction to us.

Youtube comments and "I heard from a friend" will still be the most critical sources of information in the future.

For history to inform our future people need to study/understand it, but our little enclave may be an outlier in that regard.  For scifi to inform our future people need to actually read, but again our little enclave may an outlier in that regard.

Voted niether.

Quote from: PDH on August 15, 2022, 10:04:11 AMYoutube comments and "I heard from a friend" will still be the most critical sources of information in the future.

:lol:

Almost 100% history - but that's just my very crude materialism :blush: :ph34r:

In retrospect you can find speculative fiction that predicted the present, but there's no way to separate the accurate SF from the inaccurate, so it cannot serve as a guide.

As an extreme example, Edgar Allen Poe told a story in 1838 about a shipwreck in which the four survivors found themselves forced to murder one of them, Richard Parker, and eat him to survive long enough to be rescued.  Knowing that story would not have helped a man called Richard Parker, in 1884, avoid getting killed and eaten by his three co-survivors from a shipwreck so that they could survive long enough to be rescued.