In the future it really sucks to be the Statue of Liberty.
It’s going to have a very bad day. Over and over again. There are many different visions of the future from many novelists and movie makers, but one thing they all agree upon is that the Statue of Liberty has no future.
Benevolent aliens from technologically superior civilizations speak with British accents.
Time travel will be possible but only used in a couple of really extreme situations and ignored the rest of the time even when the emergency seems much greater than the one in which they used it before.
We will not encounter any alien life forms more exotic than an octopus and in fact unlike an octopus they will be bipedal and incapable of breathing underwater, but they will have weird heads.
And those futuristic guns will be less lethal than modern guns. Body armor will still be useless. Helmets never worn.
And despite the fact that nearly every weapon appears to be laser-based, the Red Shirts/Stormtroopers/Space Marines/whoever never wear mirrored suits, or carry mirrored shields to deflect enemy shots.
[Mild NSFW - some hairy chests and big cleavage - not the same person; plus Miley crotch]
[spoiler]Too late. We’re already there. We’ve been there for a while.
I’d almost forgotten. Don’t EVER wear a red shirt in the future or you’re dead meat.
Everyone will speak English, including alien races we’ve only just met.
Babel fish, or a TARDIS-like translation field, will make the very concept of languages obsolete.
Band name: “Kirk and the Redshirts”
As do the malevolent ones, thus it doesn’t even help avoid confusion.
All creatures breathe the same air.
Space stations will have bars and unhappy but wise bartenders.
Spaceships will have systems on board that allow them to maneuver in space as if it were air (banking, etc.) They will have special technology that lets pilots and captains utterly ignore physics of being in orbit, e.g. allowing the craft to burn straight towards the primary in order to leave orbit. Also, even when in orbit, “safety” systems will cause the craft to somehow immediately plunge towards the surface whenever the power goes out or the craft receives light damage.
All craft will also permanently maintain time units and orientation based on Earth (hours, minutes, UTC.)
Overwhelmingly, intelligent life will be humanoid with just mild differences in forehead, ears, skin or eye coloration, etc.
Militaries will forget how to train marksmanship.
All spaceships will be planted with a device that defines down so spaceships can always be at the same angle when they meet in deep space.
Computer systems designed by different races at different levels of technology will overwhelmingly be compatible.
No space war will involve guided meteorites or comets or whatever, even if the intent is to utterly destroy the enemy’s colony on a planet. They will always, ALWAYS try an invasion.
I’ve always been fond of Larry Niven’s Belters.
Many years ago, I was in a play-by-mail space exploration game. All of the players except me were building traditional planet-bound civilizations. They’d colonize a planet, build industry, found shipyards, build spaceships, and go and settle more planets.
I was the only one who had a purely space-based society, with no planets. I was building monster ships, ships big enough to have shipyards inside 'em!
Lovely fun game, and I was driving certain of the other players crazy, trying to find my “home planet!”
To be fair, unless you can build truly ginormous gigastructures out of nanotubes or whatever, a planet can have much larger ecosystems- desirable for multiple reasons- than a mere spacecolony
