Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.

Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.

The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.

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codeulike 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.

Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.

What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

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lisper 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones

Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.

> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.

	▲	arcticfox 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think the primary reason why our reality has quickly surpassed a bulk of earlier sci-fi is that sci-fi starts to become less interesting on average as AIs/robots start to dominate the frontier of everything. It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).

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quotemstr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

I think it'd depend on whether we discover new physics. The imaginative gaps you mention were downstream of ignorance of certain physical possibilities. Once it became clear that electrical communication at a distance is possible, people imagined global information networks. Once it became clear that sufficiently energetic fuels were possible, people elaborated on the possibilities of space travel. (Tsiolkovsky was very early! He was sketching O'Neill-style cylindrical space colonies back in 1903!)

Unfortunately, we might not be in store for new physics. So what's left is our failing to appreciate the details of how technologies will develop. Everyone predicted an internet; nobody predicted our internet, not exactly. What will be the impacts of, say, good brain-computer interfaces? Or of clinical immortality? We can imagine them in broad strokes, but we're going to be surprised by the details.