I asked my friend Mike the other day, “What’s going to happen to science fiction when readers realize that interstellar travel will be next to impossible, and no one will want to live on the Moon or Mars?” He answered back, “Nothing will happen to science fiction; it’s only stories.” But I replied, “But some people read science fiction because they believe that someday humans will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.” And he replied, “Nobody really believes that. It’s just fun stories.” I thought for a few seconds, “Don’t you think Star Trek fans believe in their hearts that the final frontier is humanity’s future?” Mike said, “No, I don’t.”

I think Mike is far more realistic than most people. For most of my life, I’ve believed humans would colonize the Moon and Mars. I wasn’t sure about going further than that. When I was younger, I believed we’d find some way, maybe with generation ships, to reach the stars, but that was very iffy.

The reason I brought this conversation up with Mike is that I’ve been watching several documentaries on YouTube that argue interstellar travel will be so difficult it just won’t happen. I’ve also seen many videos that claim colonizing Mars will be so impractical that it won’t happen.

I assume the U.S. and China will return to the Moon and attempt to set up permanent bases there. But both countries will quickly learn that it’s too expensive and doesn’t offer enough returns. Plus, people will discover that living on the Moon will be miserable. I’ve always had a romantic notion about humans colonizing Mars, but when I study Mars, I realize that it would be a shitty place to live. Given enough time, I think humans will learn that space sucks for biological beings.

I’m not saying the U.S. and China won’t return to the Moon, or that Elon Musk’s Starship won’t reach Mars. I’m saying that the most gungho space enthusiast with the maximum amount of the Right Stuff living on the Moon or Mars will eventually say, “I want to go home.” That Mars will never be like Heinlein’s Red Planet, or even Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars.

Belief in the final frontier was imprinted early in my life, as religion is for most people. I’ve always believed that after I die, I will cease to exist, but humanity will go on for millions of years and spread out to other worlds. But as I’ve gotten older, I realize that’s just a childhood fantasy that I wanted to believe, like how some people believe they have everlasting life and will go to heaven. Human beings have a difficult time giving up cherished beliefs they embraced in childhood.

Science fiction has over-romanticized space travel. When people actually get to live on Mars or the Moon, they will discover that reality just doesn’t match their fantasies.

What will that revelation mean to humanity? What will it mean to science fiction? Can science fiction start imagining different futures for us? More realistic ones? AI is everywhere today. Can science fiction writers imagine futures where we coexist with intelligent machines? Space is perfect for machines. Will we resent our robots when they conquer the final frontier, and we don’t get to go?

Are Americans trapped in old, outdated science-fictional dreams? Science fiction has become a form of escapism from our decaying society. China is quickly transforming its present, which looks like science fiction to us; do their science fiction writers have better visions for tomorrow? Be sure to watch the last video below.

Star Trek always felt hopeful. Star Wars always felt like another Middle Earth, just a fantasy playground. The final frontier was always our highest aspiration. But if it’s unrealistic, what will new positive aspirations involve? It was a mistake to call it the final frontier. What we need are new frontiers that make us feel positive about the future. We will always need new frontiers. But more importantly, we need doable frontiers.

Personally, I think we need to come up with a form of capitalism that’s not so completely greed-driven. If we can’t, every society and civilization will repeat the past. We need to invent societies that coexist with the environment. We waste so much of our wealth on wars. If you think about it, humanity doesn’t really think about the future all that much. We thought science fiction was doing that, but it’s been consumed by too many black holes of fantasy.

James Wallace Harris, 8/20/26

13 thoughts on “What Will Happen To Science Fiction When We Realize Interstellar Travel Is Nearly Impossible and Interplanetary Travel Is Impractical?”

  1. Most early settlers of North America and Australia were prisoners who chose emigration over hanging. Many were kidnap victims, forced to become needed labor. Even the poorest of the poor didn’t see the wild lands far away as a second chance for a better life. The educated elite imagined it would always be so…until it wasn’t & those same people claimed it was always obvious the colonies had more to offer than gold.

    That some day North America would become as good as & some ways better than Olde England was unfathomable.

    Even after colonial living became safer, most European sailors were not volunteers.

    Frontiers are dangerous, life threatening, miserable places that homeless street people would see as a downgrade. Anyone who values comfort would want nothing to do with them. Today’s Earth-bound Harsh Mistresses are deep ocean ‘apartments’ where people live for a week or more at a time, nuclear submarines that don’t surface for over a year, and an Antarctic base in the middle of winter. Life in those environments has a lot in common with interplanetary travel and bases on any hunk of rock that’s not Earth.

    Those who value comfort over adventure, exploration and the opportunity to learn something not learnable any other way — the thrill of being the FIRST to know & experience will never understand the lure of the frontier.

    Shackleton honestly described his proposed Antarctic expedition. He had volunteers.

    I think the first Martian settlers should be people over 55 or better yet over 65 who are physically fit who plan to be buried there as they help prepare the way for younger, childbearing settlers who follow. There will be more than enough volunteers.

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    1. I agree, and couldn’t have said it better myself. Isaac Arthur’s channel has a better take on the realities of the future, where predicting what can an cannot be achieved is subject to the caveat ‘we don’t know what we don’t know.’

      Ask a Victorian engineer how to build a flying machine weighing hundreds of tons and they would’ve said it can’t be done.

      As you say, most people are homebodies. They don’t want to leave the comforts of home. But there are always the outliers who risk their lives and go places no normal would go.

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      1. I think there will be plenty of people who will go to the Moon and Mars, but I doubt there are many who will want to stay. My guess, in the long run, that number will be zero.

        My prediction is that China and the U.S. will return to the Moon. But they won’t stay. The tremendous cost of building a permanent settlement will overwhelm their economies. I also imagine Musk will have some success before the realities of Mars doom his plans.

        There are reasons why the U.S. abandoned the Apollo program. The costs were just too much compared to what we needed to spend elsewhere. I think if you polled Americans and gave them a choice: settle the Moon or have universal healthcare, I think they would overwhelmingly pick the second.

        Our country is 40 trillion in debt. We can’t afford the final frontier.

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        1. Whoever controls the high ground of space will control Earth. For purely selfish reason, I’d rather my country control space than someone else.

          The moment you have a lunar base, there will be an advantage to having someone there all the time. Expect more volunteers then initial positions.

          Years ago I read a sci fi short story that mentioned in passing, that lunar residents hated visiting Earth because it was so dirty — insects and pollen in the living quarters, it was all just too primitive.

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    2. But the frontiers of the Moon and Mars are many magnitudes different from those of America and Australia. Science has doubts about whether humans can reproduce off Earth. We really are custom-designed for this environment.

      But my main point is people just won’t like living on the Moon and Mars. People travel to the top of Mt. Everest and the South Pole, but they don’t stay there. And both of those places are much more livable than the Moon and Mars.

      Think about our world, and then imagine deciding to live on a world where rocks are the main attraction. Colonists on the Moon or Mars will face death constantly. If their suits or habitats fail, they die. All their machines have to work perfectly forever. Even with backups and redundancies, there will be failures.

      And then there’s radiation. The only long-term safe places on the Moon or Mars are underground. Essentially, if humans are to become citizens of those worlds, they will become moles.

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      1. First, we all face death continuously — but modern life hides that fact from us.

        Second, given the differences in tech, the survival rate of colonist will probably be about the same as in the 1500’s and early 1600’s North America and Australia. Which means undertakers will prosper.

        Third: Gravity is probably necessary for reproduction, but we haven’t a clue how much gravity is needed. Is Lunar enough? Or at least Mars? If Lunar, people doing space station work will find it more effective to rotate shifts with the moon than with Earth — a big economic boost to microgravity manufacturing & research.

        If Mars has sufficient gravity, that will make asteroid and comet mining affordable and Big Industry.

        Fourth, if you find the midwestern desserts such as Utah, Arizona, Eastern Wyoming & Nevada and Death Valley beautiful — and many do — you’ll love Mars and the Moon.

        Fifth, probes will never be as reprogrammable as people, or as responsive to the unexpected. We’re learning comets entering the sun to sometimes ignite solar flares — and therefore affect Earth weather. How much? Is it like a chemical catalyst, where a drop of the right thing has a result out of all proportion to the input? We do not know. There are many such mysteries that affect Earth life and the answers are best found off Earth. Martian and Lunar and asteroidal colonies just might prove essential to human survival.

        Unmanned probes would be cheaper to build and launch from any of those positions than here on Earth.

        I predict your great grandchildren will wonder how anyone could have doubted the worth of colonizing the whole solar system. I also predict some of them will argue one solar system is enough. It’s a waste of money to even think about going interstellar…and the pattern will repeat with your great-great-great grandchildren who will wonder why we took so long to go interstellar.

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        2. Hopefully enough of us to make it a reality.

          Nothing ventured, nothing gained is as true for societies as it is for individuals.

          Playing it safe is sometimes the most unsafe thing you can do, because clinging to only what you “know” is safe equals thinking you can have total knowledge of the situation.

          Ain’t possible. Neils Bohr and his friend Heisenberg taught us that on the subatomic scale. History has taught us that on the macro scale.

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  2. Wow what a great post! For my two cents I would predict a lot more introspective science fiction – eco sci-fi etc. I suspect that in each era science fiction queues about the issues of the day.

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  3. Pingback: IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE: – Brothers Judd Blog

  4. Science fiction has always been guilty of (or perhaps I should say, disposed to) a tendency to what I call overprediction.

    It’s always been the case. Stories about settlements on Mars have been with us for decades. Stories about flying cars probably even longer than that. In science fiction stories, we’ve been in contact with aliens for over a century. Downloading human brains/minds is pretty old hat since the 1980s.

    And yet, we are nowhere near any of those achievements. And we aren’t going to be, anytime before the end of this century. People love the dreams, but they’re reluctant to see the problems. When America was poised to land on the moon in the late sixties, the year 1976 was quite seriously mooted as the date for a possible manned Mars landing. I wish I’d kept the press clippings.

    Maybe these things will happen, and maybe they won’t. But if any of them do happen, it will be on a time scale of centuries, maybe millennia from today. It’s not a case of the moon, and then the next hop is to Mars, and then the stars. As Jim points out, the difference between those things is orders of magnitude greater than the average Joe realizes.

    Except aliens. I’m a skeptic as far as aliens are concerned. Don’t get me wrong—there have to be intelligent aliens somewhere, perhaps millions of different alien races. But “millions” is nothing compared to the scale of the universe. We’ll never meet aliens, or hear from them.

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