[johndallman]

Originally Posted by antares

Looks like all transhumanists have been working together in order to develop a realistic depiction of the future.

Well, no. One guy, David Pulver, is responsible for the setting, although he took ideas from many sources - see the bibliography.

I am wondering how realistic the positive scenario that is presented in this rpg really is.

Not very. It's extremely optimistic about the success of a huge range of technologies, and about their take-up and the social reactions to them. Some things, such as the partial terraforming of Mars, are portrayed as having happened in implausibly short times.

Something to remember is that most science fiction, including THS, is not about predicting the future. It's about telling a good story that also makes you think; THS provides a framework for a variety of games, and the setting is weird enough to require quite a bit of thought.

SF always reflects the time at which it was written, and THS reflects the rather unfocused optimism of the time between the fall of the Eastern Bloc and 9/11. It's hardly surprising that it seems less plausible 13 years later, after many things have changed.

Europe is being shown as a very well-off power bloc. However THS also acknowledges the fact that Europe was and is rather conservative on emerging technologies (think about GMOs). So is the assumption of a strong Europe really realistic?

There's a trick with technological conservatism: don't waste money on every wild idea, but back the ones that are workable hard at the right moment. However, Europe has failed in the last decade to get its economy organised so as to operate as a single entity, and now has a crisis caused by the resulting imbalances, so its future doesn't look so good at present.

Somewhere I read that big corporations still hire a lot of "cheap" labor from developing countries. Something that is has also been driving globalization over the last years. Again, is it realistic that high-cost countries fare so well?

They could, if dramatic technological progress created the wealth to sustain them. This has not happened. The climate of fear and suspicion produced by the reactions to 9/11 has limited business risk-taking, causing a preference for asset bubbles instead. The lack of co-operation of the laws of nature in allowing that easy technological progress hasn't helped either.

bitcoin is not mentioned at all;)

Well, the name won't be, not having been invented at the time. It might well be an ancestor of the secure finance systems of THS, but it's unlikely the brand name would survive 90 years.

How do financial markets work in general? Any changes here?

Those aren't what the authors were interested in. Again, THS is not a serious attempt to predict the future.

With respect to technology. How does space travel work? I do not see an economical way to get into orbit. How has this problem been solved?

By a combination of mass-produced launch hardware, use of nuclear power, and ignoring the problem, because this is not a prediction, just a game.

Final question: How would you rewrite the THS timeline ten years after you initially designed the RPG?

Realistically? No large-scale space travel at all, no powerful AI, no advanced biotechnology, and a world divided into quarrelling power-blocs with populations largely distracted by the descendants of the Internet. But that's no fun.