Covid just made us all realise we know a lot more people than we thought we did who would hide a zombie bite.

I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.

The enemy must be simple though. Too complicated or invisible or something and the conspiracy nuts will take over.

I recently watched Utopia, British show about a super secret group putting naughty stuff in a vaccine.

Their plan hinged on every person being so afraid of a pandemic that everybody takes the vaccine. This was made pre COVID of course, because we now know that would never work.

If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it's a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.

I happen to really like District 9 for this reason

There's no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like "stay the fuck right there, we'll take all your shit until we figure out how to deal with exploit you"

Humanity is always its own worst-enemy

Covid proved to me any libertarian hope/dream I had wouldn't actually work because people would never get together to do the right thing as a group.

For me it is that book Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs. My kids favorite. The ending is natural disasters make the town unlivable so the population flees to a new home and are welcomed with open arms.

Yeah that is so fucking bullshit. You telling me that a nice wealthy population would allow foreigners facing death into their land? They would keep them at sea until they all starved and churches would call them rapefugges.

COVID, when the world partly united to make a cure and a vaccine in quite a record time?

Forgot the name, but that movie about tentacled aliens invading earth with like 12 monoliths and a linguist tries to understand them

The way world cooperation is portrayed is kinda reflecting. Not perfect, but somehow realistic

Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.

Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we're more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.

Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they're a bunch of losers what can't get past their weirdo shit.

The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we're the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.

So the reason why an ideal future isn't possible is because we can't get past our weirdo loser ideas.

I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can't advance because they're stuck in the rut of doomerism.

"It's quite illogical that they can't understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try."

"Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!"

Not everyone would unite, but the big governments of the world would at least sit together to form a plan towards a common enemy.

Like how we formed the Allies during WW1.

Your local redneck probably won't, but that doesn't matter.

…has ruined sci-fi…

No, just ruined the generic good vs evil trope.

There’s a lot of good sci-fi (books/movies/series) out there that has a more nuanced take on humans and society.

In the real word: Aliens don't exist.

On Lemmygrad: The Sun deserves it for defecting to the west!

Change "the world united to.." to "The US decided the world would..."

More like the world unites and then the United States turns it into some pointless political issue.

I hate that COVID makes the Star Trek utopia so much less likely. We're living in the mirror universe.

I would have turned the movie off if the narrator said, "The people were terrified, remaining six feet apart. And everyone was hoarding toilet paper."

Fun fact, the sun is already blowing up. Checkmate Aliens!

This is more believable, I think.

Humans require an external threat to unify against. An alien invasion could provide that. Without some great enemy to oppose, I do not think we would come together willingly.

Alien invasion is probably the only thing that would make (most) humans band together.

When you have giant spiders trying to eat everyone, people will stop caring that their neighbors leaves blew into their yard, or your skin tone is a few shades darker than someone else's.