Name Sci-fi Tropes/cliches that you HATE

[AceRagz]

I don't know if this has an official name but it is a scene I see often and it bothers me each and everytime I see it! Mc (often human or human sized characters) stumbles onto the scene of a super predator that is either hunting or has already killed something that will feed it for days! Bonus points if the predator is already chomping down bites off the kill.

The second the predator sees the MC it drops everything to try and kill and eat them! Bonus points if this leads to a scene where predator and MC are in a life or death struggle and the predator -still- continues to try and eat the MC even if they are almost drowning, falling off a cliff etc.

[Darth_Biomech]

if you wanna tell me that as the author but then you should full commit and tech should be doing most things if it's that good.

But Burnside's Zeroeth law is still in effect: "Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips".

Like yeah, sure the soviets had fully automatic spacecraft, but that doesn’t make the craft reliable enough it needs no form of monitoring, and you can’t monitor it when everyone is sleeping and not doing the half and half routine the Americans did during the apollo missions.

Buran flew in 80s. Apollo missions flew in 70s (and 60s), and the entire NASA back then had weaker computation power than a smartphone in my pocket. Nowadays probe's electronics are good enough that the ship's basically fly on their own, humans just receive telemetry from them most of the time and send commands back. You can't have any damage repair on them even if you wanted to, since they're on the other side of the solar system and we currently struggle to even return to the moon... So either you make them reliable, or you just wasted millions of dollars. This is why we get stuff like the Opportunity rover, that was intended to work for 90 days, and ended up being operational for fourteen years instead.

Ships we're talking about are from the future. They ought to have even better automatics. and 99% of a spacecraft flight is basically just coasting along in idle mode, not doing anything. In the end, if you don't trust the ship to get from point A to point B without any issues, that ship doesn't belong in the interstellar space to begin with. Let alone with people on board.

[HGohwell]

But Burnside's Zeroeth law is still in effect: "Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips".

That's not just science fictions fans though that applies across the board mostly. People relate to people like them more than other, doesn't stop there being plenty of great stories where people are forced to relate with people who aren't like them. And if that's a worry, then a story should probably not be taking place in a time when people are in stasis and the tech is doing everything.

Point stands, people should commit to their idea whatever it is. If the tech is good enough to be doing everything, you shouldn't go back on it. If you've established a bar, you shouldn't then duck under the bar for plot purposes without a good reason.

(Also there are plenty of decent human drive stories that can come out of automation doing everything, that is the basis of the cyberpunk genre and it's whole "automation does everything now human have no jobs except creativity because machines don't have souls" thing)

[vfinnigan]

The cliche of making every new scientific discovery into some big boogeyman. In the advent of space travel, it was fear of space aliens. In the advent of nuclear research, energy, medicine, and, sadly, weapons, it was all things radioactive. Now, the latest technological boogeyman is genetic engineering.

Yes, in the real world, we should tread carefully regarding new scientific discoveries and their applications. The ability to use a new technology is itself neutral, and one should be very careful to avoid unintended consequences, and I love science fiction that comes with cautionary tales. Also, I oppose making inter-species chimeras and gene editing. But at some point, it becomes just plain fear-mongering.

[skicoak]

Ships we're talking about are from the future. They ought to have even better automatics. and 99% of a spacecraft flight is basically just coasting along in idle mode, not doing anything. In the end, if you don't trust the ship to get from point A to point B without any issues, that ship doesn't belong in the interstellar space to begin with. Let alone with people on board.

You're arguing against a trope by contemplating a hypothetical efficiency that would remove the situation(s) that created the trope. You're making my brain hurt man.

We're aware of the trope because in these stories, something goes wrong and everyone is sleeping /In stasis. Everyone wakes up in panic and tries to address the problem in a dramatic matter.

You're arguing that the tech will advance to the point that automation can handle the "something goes wrong" part of the story...that doesn't negate the trope, it negates the story.

The suggestion to leave some crew awake doesn't negate the story, it just layers the problem. The dog watch alone can't handle the rogue meteor/alien invasion/ black hole... they wake other crew up. It's logical ...doesn't negate whole story.

[vfinnigan]

Regardless of who it came from, we do have debris in our orbit. And that has been cause for concern on space missions.

[DiegoPalacios]

While it makes sense to have some advanced developments democratized in futuristic settings, there may still be a technology gap between different sites and ships due to the massive costs of the more advanced tech.

real life example: 3D printers.

Maybe a luxury space airport may use the stasis thing, but a cheaper one may have to settle with making it comfy enough and with enough food for the journey

[MrTwennysebben]

You reminded me of the Robot Chicken sketch about the Enterprise's night crew.

[Darth_Biomech]

Ah, that's Hollywood for you. It always was firmly luddistic for some reason. Robot? KILLER robot! Scientist? MAD scientist! Aliens? INVADING aliens! DNA editing? Results in MONSTERS. And so on.

[AVXP]

Yeah, but give 'em a puppy seal, and they ALL just melt away. It's easier to empathize with non-human things precisely because they're non-human.

We GIVE HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS to these non-human beings so that we can empathize with them. When it comes to your examples, you're confusing pets with people. R2D2 is Luke's pet droid, NOT another human character. C3PO is the hated-nuisance, so we can laugh when he gets damaged in every movie. We also laugh when R2 or BB8 gets damaged. You wouldn't dare do that if they reached human-levels of acceptance. You'd have to have a pure comedy for that to work.

"Then they won't be able to care about the character" is an excuse for lazyness, and an extremely weak one at that.
I have no idea where you got this idea from - since it's very hard to make people care about non-humanoid characters.

[AVXP]

And half the point of 'hating' another race is to- first strip them of their humanity.
Get them to be something other than human.
Replace US with THEY is the first step.

[Darth_Biomech]

We GIVE HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS to these non-human beings so that we can empathize with them.

So? You'll need to attribute human characteristic to a creature in any case, if you want it to be a character.

C3PO is the hated-nuisance, so we can laugh when he gets damaged in every movie. We also laugh when R2 or BB8 gets damaged.

Considering that watching other people getting hurt was a staple of comedy since time immemorial, I don't see your point here. And I doubt that you were laughing your ass of when K-2SO died.

[AVXP]

So? You'll need to attribute human characteristic to a creature in any case, if you want it to be a character we care about.
There, I fixed it for you.
That's the point.

And I doubt that you were laughing your ass of when K-2SO died.
Did you not see the HUMAN PERSONALITY / DRY WIT of K2S0?
Did you not see his humanoid shape?

At this point, I sense circular arguments coming.
Look into all the research identifying humans locking onto humans and even creating humans when they need to.
Why do we see human shapes in trees?
Why animals in clouds?
Why do we watch videos of spiders eating flies and comment on what the spider was saying or the fly was thinking?

[Cavechan]

the asteroid belt for instance has only 4% of the moon’s mass and there exists on average roughly a million kilometers between each asteroid.

That's it. That's the one I hate. The one where the asteroid belt is really dense and people are swerving their ships around the asteroids.

Also happy to say that the crew in my comic sleep at different times and each crew member can cover the other's work, at least on the bridge. We don't see much of it though.

[vfinnigan]

The reason I'm personally cautious about gene editing is not fear of us giving birth to monsters, but what kind of monsters we might become if people start treating having babies like a trip to Build-a-Bear. Plus the very real possibility of long term consequences like unintended genetic illnesses that the two "customized" babies born in China might experience as they grow up... and then pass with their edited genes to their children.

Scientific progress is like driving a car. Just because we can drive willy-nilly anywhere doesn't necessarily mean we should. We need brakes and steering, and sometimes we might need to slow down or stop and turn away from whatever we're doing. But fear mongering gets us nowhere, while genetic engineering has given us biologic medications for things like psoriasis, arthritis, and (kind of important to me) systemic lupus. And the ability to regress ethically sourced adult stem cells to embryonic pluripotence.

[Darth_Biomech]

Well, I mean yes, those are legitimate issues to worry about (and this is why genetic tampering of people in my setting is overregulated up to gonads and restricted to primarily medical service, and if you want to do something other than to cure a genetic disorder, you'll need to fill out a ton of paperwork and get a bunch of medical tests and evaluations to prove it won't have any delayed nasty side-effects in your descendants, in order to greenlit it).

But instead as a result we have people convinced that you will be infected with carrot genes if you'll eat GMO food.

[Trevor]

one of the worries that I have for gene editing is if a totalitarian state like North Korea starts making generations and generations of unbeatable super soldiers with it

[vfinnigan]

Even editing out (not really curing) a genetic disorder can cause other problems down the line. For example, editing out sickle cell anemia could also edit out the sickle cell trait, which gives carriers of one copy of the allele a natural resistance to malaria.

[nscomics]

the assumption that the human race will become more sophisticated in the future when we clearly have a much better chance of bombing ourselves into extinction before we start inhabiting other planets or even cleaning up our own mess (the ocean, prison systems, the institution of money and class, politics, etc.).

pretty much the massive pat on the back people give our species for being productive by default considering how historically short sighted and destructive we are as a group. don't get me wrong, the original star trek might be my favorite show of all time but it is so naïve to think we will ever rise to that level of cooperation. worst case scenario, I'm totally wrong and everyone lives happily ever after, but come on. the numbers don't lie.

even in a movie like star wars where the world looks like a spaghetti western in the future implies that even when sentient beings got their shit together eventually the other foot dropped and somebody ruined it for everybody.

[azzy-m]

There's also the "AI becomes sentient and plots to destroy the human race trope" because it's formulaic and has been done the same way in every single piece of sci-fi/futuristic media I've seen.

No, Detroit: Become Human isn't any better, for very different reasons from the one above, but it boils down to: David Cage is a hack.