Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.
Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we're more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.
Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they're a bunch of losers what can't get past their weirdo shit.
The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we're the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.
So the reason why an ideal future isn't possible is because we can't get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can't advance because they're stuck in the rut of doomerism.
"It's quite illogical that they can't understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try."
"Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!"
I happen to really like District 9 for this reason
There's no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like "stay the fuck right there, we'll take all your shit until we figure out how to deal with exploit you"
Also, the future of Elysium (also Bloomkamp) looks more and more likely, with the 1 percent fucking off to a luxury space station in orbit and the rest of humanity living in poverty on the destroyed Earth.
If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it's a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.
More like we know a lot more people that would have zombie bite parties because they "trust their immune system" and simultaneously don't believe in the zombie hoax.
You wouldn't be able to see the aliens. The best you would be able to do is get blurry pictures of their ships from telescopes if you're lucky. Conspiracy nuts would do fine.
Any civilization able to get to us, would be advanced enough that a carrier task group bombing the uncontacted people of the north sentinel islands would be a fair fight in comparison.
We would see a blur in our telescopes followed by death or whatever they want to do to us.
You're absolutely right. I was describing the hypothetical scenario where the aliens just want to fuck with us by blowing up the sun or something. If they wanted us dead it would be lights out before we know they were there.
