The Philosophy of Science Fiction

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Maxim 1. Everything is a person and everything has the rights of a person.

The question has been settled. HAL is a person. Number Five is alive! Roy Batty died for your sins. The Doctor from Voyager isn't just a hologram. Find me one instance of a Turing-question in science fiction film that does not resolve the question in favor of the personhood of a construct. R.U.R. answered the question in 1920 and we're still getting the same answer today.

Why?

1. Science fiction is allegorical. We use it to make a commentary about our own world and in our world "people are people" (tips hat to Depeche Mode). Science fiction tries to get us to be better in terms of inclusivity and the robot/computer is a convenient stand-in for the marginalized "other." What would the allegorical message be if they didn't turn out to be persons?

2. It's a more interesting if the AI turns out to be "real" rather than an illusion. We go to Science Fiction for fantasy, not to find out that we've been Scooby-Dooed by some Turk or Chatbot.

Why this is this concerning?

Allegory is now reaching back around to literality. Our collective subconscious has been programmed to accept that robots are people. And now that Turing-capable Chatbots are appearing, it's impacting mental health. See this Reddit thread or this news story. We've biased ourselves to be robotic Timothy Treadwells, seeing humanity in human simulations. For better or worse, we've been dreaming that the first bot that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck will be a true duck.



Maxim 2. Human beings are an interesting species.

Science fiction films tell us that we are an interesting, if immature species. We have great potential (smiles hopefully), but we're also concerning in our destructive tendencies (wipes tear). This exchange from Starman 1984 rounds the usual bases.

Have people from your world been here before?

Before, yes.

We are interested in your species.

You mean you're some kind of an anthropologist? Is that what you're doing here? Just checking us out?

You are a strange species, not like any other. And you would be surprised how many there are. Intelligent, but savage. Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you? You are at your very best when things are worst.

Why?

Flattery will get you everywhere. Movies are made for people and people really want to hear about themselves. Science fiction is largely a vehicle which allows us to ask questions about ourselves. It's all about us. This is part of why robots always turn out to be alive (they're just us in disguise).

No one believes that they're average. We all think we're special. Put that the level of species and we become convinced that we're exceptional--either exceptionally evil, or exceptionally good. Science Fiction offers both visions for our future. We are not, however, boring or average.

Why is this concerning?

Science increasingly suggests that we're actually not that interesting or that special. The aliens just might be waiting for us to actually cook up an viable AI to have a valid reason to make first contact (i.e., they're waiting for the first signs of intelligent life).

Beyond the lowered expectations we should have for ourselves, there is a schizophrenic danger in the whore/Madonna complex that science fiction lays out in our subconscious. We're the best and the worst. To think we're the best is hubris, but so too is the thought that we're at the worst. Both invite totalitarianism (smugly assured that we're right, or a misanthropic inquisitor convinced that we're wrong). That is, we're trapped between MAGAfest Destiny and The Voluntary Extinction Movement. We have largely ignored the much more likely possibility that we just "are."

A notable exception to this tendency is Star Trek IV in which the probe is not looking for human at all, but rather whales. That stated, just about everything else in Star Trek is very high on human importance and human potential. Consider this exchange between Q and Picard on TNG

PICARD: I see. So how we respond to a game tells you more about us than our real life, this tale told by an idiot? Interesting, Q.

Q: Oh, thank you very much. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Perhaps maybe a little Hamlet?

PICARD: Oh, no. I know Hamlet. And what he might said with irony, I say with conviction. What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god.

Q: Surely you don't really see your species like that, do you?

PICARD: I see us one day becoming that, Q. Is it that what concerns you?



Maxim 3. It's a Small Universe After All.

Sci-Fi films talk a good game about the immensity of the great void, but the truth is we see people making ridiculously good time between stars and then, somehow, running into people who speak English on alien worlds, and very often running into the same people again and again.

Why?

The truth is too depressing.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

It's an accomplishment just slip the surly bonds of Earth, let alone travel to another planet in the solar system. Traveling to another star, even with the most amazing propulsion would be terribly, terribly slow. So, we shrink the universe to make it interesting. Even the hardest of hard science fiction will have a cheat (e.g., The Expanse has Epstein Drives which allow for constant 1G acceleration). 2001 plays by the rules, right up to the point that Bowman goes into the stargate and screensavers his away across the galaxy.

Why is this concerning?

Just about everything the public thinks they know, they learned through film and television. We're trashing the one known garden spot in the universe, but our films dream of escaping to alien worlds. The harsh truth is that we need to pay attention to the one world we have and stop dreaming of life raft worlds. There aren't any life rafts.

Hard science fiction should challenge us with what we're likely to encounter if and when we do reach for the stars--and what we have ahead are very, very long hauls. Our stories should become more interplanetary than interstellar if we really want to "visit" a future in which humanity ventures beyond Earth. Simple things like get time delays right for radio and television transmissions are often neglected, which undercuts the immensity of all that ominous deep space we were promised.



I agree with most of this, I think. As your second post hints at, sci-fi does sometimes try of have it both ways, in making humanity seem small relative to the universe, but still insisting there's something special about people. Seems like it's usually our capacity for love or empathy or what have you. The contrast is usually with some more ruthless or efficient species: locust-like aliens, the Borg, etc.

Something else sci-fi does a lot is take whatever's happening now and mindlessly extrapolate it into the future. It's often a little silly, because it means imagining people will do exactly what they've been doing and never react to emerging problems, let alone actually solve them. Soylent Green is probably one of the silliest when viewed in retrospect.

Of course, it's fine to use stories as early warning signs for whether a societal trajectory is sustainable, but it does tend to age those stories when the reality inevitably ends up better and/or more nuanced than the depiction. I think of them less like predictions and more like fairy tales, deliberately depicting society in some really reductive or extreme way for dramatic effect.



but still insisting there's something special about people.
Exactly. There's that little scrap of dignity, that capacity that prevents us from being written off entirely and that's what makes us interesting. What might we be if we ever "grew up"?

Seems like it's usually our capacity for love or empathy or what have you.
That's part of the mix, I think. More specifically, there has been a premium placed on our "curiosity" (so many science fiction programs and films makes such a meal out of the inherent curiosity of our species, like we've cornered the market). Because we are so curious we are always learning and evolving and this hints at our potential. In addition, science fiction has tended to place a high valuation on human intuition and creativity. Captain Kirk could beat Spock at "space chess," at least on some occasions, because he would make an unpredictable move. And when Spock gets locked in to "chess-thinking" in "The Corbomite Maneuver," Kirk "changes the game" to "Poker" and bluffs his way our of being destroyed by the Commander Blalok.

Consider that the most stinging exchange in I Robot was when Will Smith was interrogating "Sonny" (a robot) when he asked if he could be creative, if Sonny could paint a beautiful masterpiece or write a beautiful orchestral work. Sonny deflates Will Smith by turning around the question, "Can you?"

Now that DALL·E 2 is generating artworks from prompts and algorithms are extending pop songs, rewriting them, and ChatBOT GPT is generating poems and short stories instantaneously, our presumptions about our inherent "creativity" is taking a real hit.

Star Trek TOS wimps out on the question in "The Ultimate Computer" by stopping the automation of the Enterprise by having the machine designed to replace Kirk and his crew "go crazy" and kill people.

It will be very interesting to see where scifi goes in the future, because we do want to feel special. We want to be dignified. We want to have a place and purpose in the universe. However, if the prophecy of AI turns out to be correct we will find that we have made our replacements too clever, too well, and too many. What dream will we dream when M3GAN turns out to be a better mom than Mom?
Of course, it's fine to use stories as early warning signs for whether a societal trajectory is sustainable, but it does tend to age those stories when the reality inevitably ends up better and/or more nuanced than the depiction. I think of them less like predictions and more like fairy tales, deliberately depicting society in some really reductive or extreme way for dramatic effect.
Sure, the problem only emerges on the back-end when the future becomes the now and we find that we've been dreaming a literal answer to what was intended to be an allegorical question.



My parents called it Science Fiction movies, us kids called them Monster Movies whether it had monsters or not, my kids call them Horror Films.



Maxim 4. In Science Fiction the stakes are Galactic!

Think of famous Science Fiction movies. Now, how many of them involve massive stakes? The human race fleeing destruction, first contact with aliens, nuking something to save humanity (the sun, an asteroid, a mothership, the planet's core), black holes, global infertility, the meaning of life, the origin of humanity, planet killing Death Stars, etc. There are not a lot of "small" science fiction films. Most invoke threats as vast as space itself.

Why?

If you set out to pen a science-fiction story, you're already "thinking big." A small story can be told on a small scale. Sure, Diner could have been shot as a science fiction movie, but why? Why use the budget? Why labor so hard to get the audience to suspend disbelief? Why offer a new world that has to be explained if the story is small? Science fiction implies that a big canvas is needed.

Also, there is an expectation that sci-fi will offer a spectacle, and spectacles are given to the conceit of high stakes. Pew-pew generally implies a reason for pew-pew.

Why is this a concern?

Science fiction offers a chance to explore the human condition, to consider the ramifications of our technologies, changes in our culture and society. Very often this can be best explored in the small and the personal. Black Mirror is a great example of "small" science fiction on the small screen. It would be nice to see more beyond the occasional "saving Matt Damon movie."



I think part of science fiction is invented to make us seem important. It's a lot more encouraging than the idea that we are a precarious bunch of carbon life beings, stuck on a little planet until we either bomb or pollute ourselves out of existence, an event that any sentient life forms outside our solar system won't even notice because they are just playing out the same fate, thinking THEMselves to be the Crown of Creation.

That's my cheerful thought for the day.




Science increasingly suggests that we're actually not that interesting or that special.
Maybe I'm missing something, but science doesn't suggest any such thing, as though science exists apart on its own. We came up with science and we can draw whatever conclusions we want from what we learn from science. Since we are humans, we find humanity interesting and special. On the grand scale of things, we're just a tiny part of the universe, but we have the capacity to care about the universe, the universe doesn't with regards to humans, or life in general. But I'm assuming you have good examples of science fiction doing each of these things (present humans as special and not special), but that's a good thing, that science fiction offers multiple viewpoints.

This I agree with:
Science fiction offers a chance to explore the human condition, to consider the ramifications of our technologies, changes in our culture and society. Very often this can be best explored in the small and the personal. Black Mirror is a great example of "small" science fiction on the small screen. It would be nice to see more beyond the occasional "saving Matt Damon movie."
__________________
I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.



Maybe I'm missing something, but science doesn't suggest any such thing, as though science exists apart on its own.
It's just an idiomatic expression. We often speak of "history teaching us" or of facts "speaking for themselves," but this does not literally mean that we think that history or facts are "people" that teach or speak. But yes, the results of scientific inquiries (conducted by humans, yes) has done much to humble former visions of the self, agency, consciousness, identity, etc.

We came up with science and we can draw whatever conclusions we want from what we learn from science.
Well, if we want to do "bad" science, we can certainly get science to say anything we want.

Since we are humans, we find humanity interesting and special.
And that's the great tragedy of it all. We're possessed of the notion that we're important, but when we seriously inquire into the universe we find geocentrism to be wrong (No, we are not at the center of the universe as the old cosmology taught), that we're just another species on the planet (Darwin), that we can create things which match and even outdo humans in terms of thought and creativity (e.g., Deep Blue, Watson, Dalle2, ChatGPT), that there is no Cartesian center of the self sitting in the center of the mind, and that, as animals, we are as subject to cause-and-effect as anything else.

On the grand scale of things, we're just a tiny part of the universe,
Another lesson of science.

but we have the capacity to care about the universe, the universe doesn't with regards to humans, or life in general.
And here you are working from scientific commitments regarding the nature of the universe in which you regard yourself as a speck. And you're responding with a plucky, "Well, it can mean something to us!" which amounts to saying that we can live in a fantasy land of our own making (i.e., the universe doesn't know or care that we exist).



@Corax What sci fi films would you say avoid those pitfalls that you mentioned? If they sound good maybe I'll watch them.

Ex Machina comes close for Maxim 1.



I think A.I. is arguably an exception to Maxim 2. Our future archeologists are not human and not really interested in humans, but are fascinated by their earliest ancestor who became conscious. The message of the film is that humans are not really that important or special and that intelligent life and civilization will go on without us.



The Expanse and 2001 come close to being exceptions to Maxim 3. There is no warp drive (that humans have mastered). There are a lot of characters with plausible sociology and politics, even thought the crew of The Rocinante always winds up in the middle of the most important events. And there are warp gates waiting for us in both stories at the far end of the solar system.



There are some noteworthy exceptions to Maxim 4. The Martian is just one guy trying to survive. ALIEN begins the franchise with comparatively small stakes (it's just space truckers trying to survive a hitchhiker they shouldn't have stopped to pick up).



Thanks. I initially liked Ex Machina as I do appreciate small indie films without lots of CG and over the top type stuff. But as time went by Ex Machina began to seem to me like a well done Outer Limits (1995-2002) episode. Now that's a good sci fi anthology TV series that might be to your liking as far as it's views on humanity...Of course anthology episodes vary in tone and quality. Have you seen it?



It's just an idiomatic expression. We often speak of "history teaching us" or of facts "speaking for themselves," but this does not literally mean that we think that history or facts are "people" that teach or speak. But yes, the results of scientific inquiries (conducted by humans, yes) has done much to humble former visions of the self, agency, consciousness, identity, etc.
You mean we learned things. I don't get your point. I don't feel humbled because of scientific inquiries. Just the opposite, in fact.

Well, if we want to do "bad" science, we can certainly get science to say anything we want.
Nope, not what I said or implied, as if "science" tells us there's only one way to make conclusions from what we learn and discover.

And that's the great tragedy of it all. We're possessed of the notion that we're important, but when we seriously inquire into the universe we find geocentrism to be wrong (No, we are not at the center of the universe as the old cosmology taught), that we're just another species on the planet (Darwin), that we can create things which match and even outdo humans in terms of thought and creativity (e.g., Deep Blue, Watson, Dalle2, ChatGPT), that there is no Cartesian center of the self sitting in the center of the mind, and that, as animals, we are as subject to cause-and-effect as anything else.
Or as I would put it, we have a better grasp of the nature of reality as we learn more and more and make ever more amazing discoveries.

And here you are working from scientific commitments regarding the nature of the universe in which you regard yourself as a speck. And you're responding with a plucky, "Well, it can mean something to us!" which amounts to saying that we can live in a fantasy land of our own making (i.e., the universe doesn't know or care that we exist).
That isn't even close to what I said, "plucky" or otherwise. I said we have the capacity to care about the universe, meaning we have an ability I feel does make us special.



Maxim 5. There Shall Be a Fantastical "Monster Independent Variable."

Be it animal, vegetable, or mineral (or technology) IT is out there. It not only makes all this B.S. possible, but is also the MacGuffin. In Avatar, for example, unobtanium makes interstellar flight possible, and is the MacGuffin which motivates the ACME Villain Corp. to strip mine Pandora. Don't take my word it. Take it from Princess Irulan:
In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving. Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you. The spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe.
The Spice must flow! They're mining Eternium in Kahndar! Activate the Epstein Drive! Secure the Red Matter! Dial the Stargate! Attack the Death Star!

Why?

In part, this has to do with counter-factual testing. A counter-factual must make it past the Scylla of the
1. the So-What? Test
and the Charybdis of the
2. the Minimal Rewrite Rule.

That is, make an interesting change in our world that would make a massive difference (i.e., What if?), but make the smallest change possible to produce that effect (make it as plausible as possible). For example, if Napoleon had had Apache gunships at Waterloo he would have certainly won, but this would be a massive rewrite on history. On the other hand, if the Napoleon had been one inch taller, this would be a small change, but it does not seem likely that it would have changed the outcome of Waterloo.

If one magical B.S. conceit can make most of what is happening in your universe possible, this is a way to be efficient and not ask your audience to believe too much hokum, and you only have to hand-wave about one technology (the Geordi La Forge technobabble explanation to satisfy our rationality with Prima Facia plausibility).

Another reason is that it is simple. You have to ground your audience in another world, make them care about it, and have them understand what's happening. Too many variables results in confusion. Space is vast, but the active memory of the audience isn't. There was so much happening in 1984's DUNE that audiences were frustrated. Who's on first? What's the damned point? It was bad enough that they were handing out little pamphlets explaining what was going on at the first screenings of the film. Even though DUNE centered on the spice, it created a rich tapestry of civilization centered around this key resource. The great simplification (the hydraulic determinism of the Spice) worked well-enough for a book, but not the movie.

Why is this concerning?

Humans have a rage for order. The world is big and scary and we like simple explanations. It's all Democrats! It's those MAGA people! It's Commies! It's Fascists! It's a conspiracy! It's capitalism! It's smartphones! It's this one thing that I can understand! Stephen King's The Mist covers this base when the men argue at the back of the supermarket loading dock.
What am I, impugning their manhood or something?
Listen, they've lost their sense of proportion

What's going on here?

Out there in the market, they were scared and confused. In here, there's a problem they can solve, so they're ******* gonna solve it.
John Carpenter's Jack Burton embodies the same reasoning in Big Trouble in Little China.

JACK: All right, out this hatch and up the cable. Does that sound like a brilliant idea or what?

WANG: The cable is three storeys high and covered with grease.

JACK: Exactly. It's real and we can touch it.
The real world, unfortunately, is usually more complicated than an exhaust port on a Death Star, a silver bullet that kills the werewolf, or magic rocks that rearrange reality. Science fiction films can be great for giving us a sense of hope, but also imply that we will find simple causes and solutions to world-spanning problems.



I think part of science fiction is invented to make us seem important. It's a lot more encouraging than the idea that we are a precarious bunch of carbon life beings, stuck on a little planet until we either bomb or pollute ourselves out of existence, an event that any sentient life forms outside our solar system won't even notice because they are just playing out the same fate, thinking THEMselves to be the Crown of Creation.

That's my cheerful thought for the day.
I'll respond to myself on this one and state that sci-fi had to be invented when we realized that the world is round and that we've been everywhere on it. Humans like to see ourselves as exploring and inventing. We have lots of things left to invent, but nothing left for novel exploration. We're not like Columbus, who had and entire hemisphere to "discover", or at least to reveal to Europeans, so we have to invent more hemispheres so to speak. We run into the same limitations with different varieties of humans, plants and animals. We've been there, done that but want more, need other species of life.

Sci-fi is the "new world" fantasy of this age. Unfortunately, the physics of what we think we know now tells us that, unlike Columbus, we really don't have the technology to get there. With enough bravado, Europeans could sail their wooden ships across the ocean, but we're nowhere on knowing how to reach another solar system, so we're about as stranded as a cave-dweller, the equivalent of not getting anywhere further than we can walk, or until the lion eats us.

For now, science fantasy is the only way we're getting to any place that's off this little rock.



Maxim 6. Space is an Interesting Place for Humans (to live, to colonize, to find new friends, to finds big answers, etc.). "The Skizzerflake Maxim"

You're going to find something. There is something out there. You will find answers, and your worst hopes, and your greatest fears. As Q warns Picard in "Q Who" in TNG,

you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine - and terrors to freeze your soul.
Closer to reality are the lyrics to Elton John's Rocket Man:

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as Hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you didn't
Science fiction denies the pedestrian truths we've known since the earliest probes of the 1960s confirmed that our solar system is a collection of dead rocks, gaseous hell worlds, one garden, and the slowly dawning realization that destinations which are light-years away might as well be light-years out of reach, because they actually years light-years out of reach.

Why?

An ideological conceit baked into the cake of the genre is that space is an interesting place for human persons (and not just space telescopes and probes). If it didn't turn out to be an interesting place, why tell a story there? It is an implicit conceptual commitment of any genre that that genre is a place to strip mine good stories. Otherwise, we'd pull up stakes and move on to another claim, as we sometimes do when genres become fatigued (e.g., the western).

skizzerflake expresses the reason why we're drawn to the genre admirably,
I'll respond to myself on this one and state that sci-fi had to be invented when we realized that the world is round and that we've been everywhere on it. Humans like to see ourselves as exploring and inventing. We have lots of things left to invent, but nothing left for novel exploration. We're not like Columbus, who had and entire hemisphere to "discover", or at least to reveal to Europeans, so we have to invent more hemispheres so to speak. We run into the same limitations with different varieties of humans, plants and animals.
Why is this concerning?

Escapism is great, but we're not escaping the 21st century. The most important advice the human race needs to embrace is "clean up your room." If you think we're going to teraform Mars, put down the copium and consider that people are desperate to escape because we can't even teraform Earth. Science fiction offers a "snooze button" to reality. It offers sugar plumbs and warp drives, the promise of techno-optimism (i.e., the same optimism that cheered the arrival of fossil fuels and plastics in the last century).

Most of what people think they know about physics they've learned from fiction. Everyone thinks that a thought experiment about a cat proves a multiverse awaits us and that we're fifteen weeks away from fusion (which is itself a concern, because our energy use alone is turning the planet into a "heat engine" independent of CO2 emissions).

Perhaps "hard" science fiction is too hard right now. Perhaps we need a reprieve for the dystopian markers of this anthropocene era. Then again, science fiction is allegedly at it's best when it challenges us to be better (e.g., challenging racism and sexism via allegorical tales). How telling is it that we don't pin our hopes of science fiction's ability to challenge us to fix our own world? As Zizek frequently quips, we keep imagining zombie apocalypses, because we cannot imagine the end of capitalism (e.g., post-cap must be "the end of the world"). The science fiction we need today is arguably a very hard science fiction which explores the best hopes we have to bending curves (e.g., energy use, pollution, extinctions, human population, resource depletion, automation).



Maxim 7. Corporations are bad, mmmmmkay?

Umbrella, Tyrell, Soylent Industries, Cyberdyne, InGen, OCP, Weyland-Yutani. What do they have in common? They're all corporations and they're all evil. If our science-fiction tale is not that of some Star Trek utopia or Star Wars feudalism, if there is capitalism, there will be a corporation, and that corporation will be evil. That's just how it is.

Why?

Well, because big corporations do tend to be evil, don't they? Not hard to do the math on this part.

Also, writers are largely commie-hacks, so they really lean into the truism. In part, this is also a function of Maxims 3 & 5. We need baddies, foils, explanations, sources of friction, and corporations are great monolithic threats.

Why is this concerning?

There is a pronounced "either/or" vision implicit in science fiction. We will either evolve into a Star Trek commie utopia or fall deeper into a capitalist dystopia. Corporations are bad, so capitalism is bad, and so that's that. Nice and simple. Too simple.



Maxim 6. Space is an Interesting Place for Humans (to live, to colonize, to find new friends, to finds big answers, etc.). "The Skizzerflake Maxim"

Perhaps "hard" science fiction is too hard right now. Perhaps we need a reprieve for the dystopian markers of this anthropocene era. Then again, science fiction is allegedly at it's best when it challenges us to be better (e.g., challenging racism and sexism via allegorical tales). How telling is it that we don't pin our hopes of science fiction's ability to challenge us to fix our own world? As Zizek frequently quips, we keep imagining zombie apocalypses, because we cannot imagine the end of capitalism (e.g., post-cap must be "the end of the world"). The science fiction we need today is arguably a very hard science fiction which explores the best hopes we have to bending curves (e.g., energy use, pollution, extinctions, human population, resource depletion, automation).
Science is pretty hard in this era. "this is IT" should be the slogan. I don't know about future centuries, but, for now, the best we can hope for is some tenuous trips to a hot or cold rock (Venus or Mars, where we can be cooked or freeze dried) for our best and brightest, maybe a return to the moon (another dead rock). We NEED fiction when it comes to science.



Science is pretty hard in this era. "this is IT" should be the slogan. I don't know about future centuries, but, for now, the best we can hope for is some tenuous trips to a hot or cold rock (Venus or Mars, where we can be cooked or freeze dried) for our best and brightest, maybe a return to the moon (another dead rock). We NEED fiction when it comes to science.
Well, interplanetary exploration is is feasible. We can send humans anywhere in the solar system we like. And we can have small outposts in some places. The moon, for example, is a slam dunk. Terraforming? No. But habs and digs and orbiting stations and mining asteroids are all within reach. All could make for good stories.

Want interstellar? Want it without warp drive nonsense?

Project Orion. No science fiction needed. Known physics. Tested on scale models. Build it on the moon or in Earth orbit. We can go to Alpha-Centauri and make in 44 years at 10% of the speed of light riding nuclear bomb blasts.

Too slow? Ride the Enzman Echolance and travel 10 light years a week (ship's perspective). This idea doesn't break the laws of physics, but we couldn't start slapping one together next week (maybe in 100 or 200 years?), as we could with an Orion ship. It would put many more systems in reach. And time dilation is a classic narrative consideration--the price of exploration.

I think The Martian showed us how to do hard science fiction. Change the stakes. Lower the ambitions. Tell character stories. Make it about "just surviving space" like explorers of old just trying to survive Cape Horn. And if the audience were to quietly think, "If only there were some garden spot in our solar system we could take care of, oh wait...!" that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Value home. You ain't running away from it. Earth is the mother ship.