Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec
There is a meme that science fiction is overly optimistic in the short run, but overly pessimistic in the long run (regarding speed of technological advancement). Is TS holding to this rule?
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As Anthony says, both.
The politics of THS are just the politics of 2000 AD, projected forward. As others have noted, things staying the same to that degree are less likely than big changes, but more likely than any particular change. But some particular changes are near-certain in much less than a century.
(As I've observed before, if THS had been written in 1980, the USSR would have been one of the great powers of 2100, too.)
We can't say too much about technological change. Since 1950, technological change has slowed enormously. It might stay slow, get slower, or get fast again, there's no way to predict.
We can be reasonably sure that the combination of 'near-current-day launch tech' won't be around in combination with the extent of space activities shown in THS. We might have that much space activity, or more, but if we do we'll probably be using some better means of getting from sea level to LEO than THS does.
(It's the old line about space flight, that first step is a female canid. If you can get to LEO easily and cheaply, a lot of other stuff suddenly becomes practical too.)
We almost surely won't see the degree of Mars-terraforming (or any other) by 2100 that THS shows, unless some major-league superscience also occurs. Terraformation is
hard, and again, you need that cheaper/better access to space to make it practical. At most, one might expect to see a terraforming project having started by 2100, with many centuries still to go, again, unless some superscience voids all assumptions.
Cheap, reliably SAI doesn't mix well with the rest of the setting, if you're trying for realism. You almost surely would not see cheap, reliable SAI
and extensive use of bioroids, any more than you see a lot of horse-drawn carriages on the freeway with modern cars.
In fact, outside the controlled bounds of fiction, cheap, compact, reliable SAI is a setting breaker. Ghosting makes it worse. Nor is the legal/social block against xoxing terribly believable, it's just necessary for the setting to work.