If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most likely alter

If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most likely alternative long-term future for our species if we burn all the coal and oil, wreck the climate, and turn our back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. I am reminded of two things. First, Gene Roddenberry's idea that progress would fix the problems the species had. Second, that if your vision of industry is such that it eventually destroys the planet, you're going to have a very difficult time projecting out some scenarios in which most folks would find both pleasing and challenging. There's your cri de coeur: many writers have boxed themselves into belief systems in which they are just rehashing old plots inside of old universes that progress along old lines towards cliched conclusions. Big ideas are born out of wide-open ideological spaces. The more we have groupthink, the less we're going to get real dramatic innovation and the big ideas that come from it. The Enlightenment was born out of the idea of individual freedom and power -- even to the point of "hurting" the world and society at large. John Stuart Mill made an extended argument along the lines that things the majority would find hurtful are actually good for the species in the long run. We progress because we maximize local freedom. Not because somehow reason exists to make the species better by fiat. Or to put it a little more colloquially, if your enlightenment is broken your fiction will be also. ADD: Want to restate this for clarity: we have standardized so many facets of our worldview and what is "good" or "bad" for both characters and society that we are destroying good fiction. The corporate dystopia of Alien in 1970 is so pervasive now that writers don't seem to be able to think of equally horrific possible futures. It's all becoming just so much pre-canned fantasy, because once you take away by dogma the possibility of tweaking your "what-ifs", you eliminate huge sections of possible great sci-fi. We're groupthinking ourselves into two genres: non-fiction and fantasy.