scifi loves to invent wacky new sports, and often pretends like everyone just forgot about boring old Earth sports. I'm not sure about that. I think most sports have decent staying power
I don't think american football is gonna make it. it occupies a very particular place in history reliant on grinding people up and spitting them out- maybe in a grimmer scifi universe it can stick around as a parallel to a war with an alien empire or whatever, but in a lot of more optimistic futures I just see it either withering away or turning into something else based on vaguely similar principles.
golf doesn't deserve to exist on this planet, let alone be imported to others. I refuse to countenance a science fiction story where golf still exists. I think it showed up in the holodeck once in tng but that was clearly a work of elaborate fiction
basketball's got a pretty good chance at making it to the stars, I think. every sport's gonna have to figure out the issues with possibly artificial gravity and atmospheric pressures
star trek was correct in that baseball will stick around. it's simply too weird and rooted too deeply. like all space sports the rules and stuff will shift as the centuries roll on but the baseball bat is simply too Iconic to discard. in the year 2374 there will just be guys meeting up to talk about the strange pitching practices of the outer colonies
the guaranteed most popular space sport is soccer, though. in the heavens as it is on earth. you don't need any dedicated infrastructure, just an open space in the cargo bay and a ball
