I have been recently watching Battlestar Galactica on netflix, and I think I might be ruined on Science Fiction forever. I nuance over the technical probabilities of the worlds people inhabit in these settings rather than actually getting engrossed in them because of their technological improbabilities - and the most notorious culprit is the macguffin crystal of hyperspace, warp, or long jumping as the refugees of Caprica like to call it.
It isn't the existence of faster than light travel that bugs me in any of these cases - that is fine, and is often mandatory for a space-faring story to make any sense or have anything reminiscent of human characters, especially relatable ones. At least ones bound by traditional mortality rules to make the story interesting. Which is the root of the problem I have with vast swathes of the space frontier genre - they possess star-ships made out of more steel than any city on Earth with propulsion systems consuming orders of magnitude more power than every person on the planet right now to move at ludicrous speed, but they still get sick, die of cancer, and grow old.
In terms of general science, solving the "problem" of human mortality ends up being at least a few orders of magnitude less complicated than breaking the physical limit of speed. As a species we seem to think ourselves very special when we really are not, in both positive and negative ways - we treat our ball of rock in space like it will last forever and destroy the ecosystems that enabled our existence, while overestimating how complex we can be some times. We are still just a giant puddle of cells barely different than how they were ~600 million years ago when kingdom animilia began. Our DNA is a mess of nonsense mixed with enough logic to enable us to grow enough cells to punch each other in the face when intoxicated. Our brains are just a hundred billion 10hz computers and they control the body with the same electricity modern technology does. (plus hormones, which are released due to signaling.. )
There are quite a few things you can realistically predict to befall mankind before the advent of a means to either warp space-time to place a collection of matter at a different point in space, or to move faster than the fastest possible thing according to the standard model. If the standard model stays right, it is impossible, as "impossible" as it is to stop the loss of entropy in the universe. Those are both bigger questions than preserving a human mind indefinitely, or creating a technological singularity, or harnessing the power of stars to create matter.
So yeah, I'm a terrible dreamer when it comes to embracing Science Fiction. It is like how watching Starship Troopers shows people still stuck with physical bulky phones to communicate. Huge changes will happen all the time, and completely change everyones perspective on everything, and we can't see them coming, so all these distant futures containing even just the classical Homo Sapien seem ridiculous.
I am pretty sure once we hit the technological singularity the need to keep fleshy bodies will become antiquated just like the land-line telephone or CRT tv (cough, or tv in general, cough). It isn't even something to be all that concerned about - exponentially increasing machine power mandates that they come up with something better than what random cell mutation did.
Any who, point is, science fiction as a genre drives me insane because of the improbabilities and magnitudal problems that are passed to the wayside to preserve traditional humans in the plot. I am absolutely certain the first spacecraft that can manipulate spacetime will not be piloted by obsolete meatbags. Of course, I can get behind any Sci-Fi set in the next few centuries involving generational ships :P
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