Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?

[Flyndaran]

It may or may not be hazardous for the majority of us, but that's not everyone, and at worst, it would be long term.
TS has loads of biotech to make that a non-issue long before 2100.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by zenfrog

People really complained about that? Given that Traveler 2300AD is a continuation of Twilight 2000 timeline and France was the only large European country survive WWIII intact, then it makes perfect sense that France would be a world leader.

Oh, yes. I was at a seminar on the Great Game in 1988 (GenCon), and Lester Smith (I think) said "look, guys, you're supposed to dislike the French" to general amazement - lots of gamers had assumed that, since they were the power largely in charge of things in the area that the game depicted, they were supposed to be the good guys.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by zenfrog

One of the bigger concerns about Mars is that its gravity may be low enough to be a serious health hazard. We won't know until we send someone there or we create a small spin habitat in Earth's orbit to replicate gravity on Mars.

My Transhuman Space books are back in the old country, but I think I remember that this is a solved problem for humans with the right gene-mods, nanites, and medical treatment.

Does anyone know much about biotech? Has any of their tech moved from 'maaybe if we are lucky and people do some horrific experiments' to 'nah'?

[sir_pudding]

• The rates given for nanogenesis are probably impossible.
• The Ares Conspiracy cannot have caused the specified effects which are off by several orders of magnitude.
• Europeans are pretty dubious. Mostly because the setting underplays how harsh that environment actually would be.
• The basically decanonized Doolittle virus is silly.

[Anthony]

To be fair, none of those things have 'moved'. They were all pretty much 'nah' when THS was first published.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

[*] Europeans are pretty dubious. Mostly because the setting underplays how harsh that environment actually would be.

Was that meant to be "Europans"?

[Flyndaran]

Maybe he's just suspicious of Europe in general. What with their funny way of speaking. JK

Europans though... I'm really skeptical of altering the human genome to something capable of surviving as a "cold-blooded" non-Earth seawater breathing fish form. But at least it doesn't break any laws of physics that I know of.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Europans though... I'm really skeptical of altering the human genome to something capable of surviving as a "cold-blooded" non-Earth seawater breathing fish form. But at least it doesn't break any laws of physics that I know of.

Gills for anybody anywhere are pretty dubious. It goes back to the turbo-pumps for liquid fuel rockets in a way.

Air carries 30x as much oxygen as water can so a set of gills for a human-like being have to move 30x as much water as lungs for them would move air. Cut that in half for "cold-blooded" and it's still a question of "How?" and "Why aren't they using if for propulsion too?".

Like the turbopumps there may be an "extreme" answer but that extremeness might be pretty obvious such as "gills" that are larger than the organism they supply

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Does anyone know much about biotech? Has any of their tech moved from 'maaybe if we are lucky and people do some horrific experiments' to 'nah'?

Even if nothing changed about bio-tech futurological knowledge, it seems to me that THS' attitude has changed, and that modern THS is ashamed of the optimism and radicalness with which it was conceived, and wants to push the genie back into the bottle. Probably the most blatant example is the amount of effort in the Bioroid Bazaar to make pheromone glands either illegal or useless, even though comparable fully-synthetic aerosols of the setting are both legal and effective. Or how about the attempts to deprive memetics of its revolutionary usefulness by making their effects weaker. Other examples would be more subtle and/or subjective, but I'd say that newer books seem to be less inclined to include signs of radical technologies or ideologies (as compared to 'oldies' such as Cabals, Hamlin, a major chunk of bio- and stellar-tech and Eidolons from Deep Beyond, Wiper Treatment etc.).

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Even if nothing changed about bio-tech futurological knowledge, it seems to me that THS' attitude has changed, and that modern THS is ashamed of the optimism and radicalness with which it was conceived, and wants to push the genie back into the bottle. Probably the most blatant example is the amount of effort in the Bioroid Bazaar to make pheromone glands either illegal or useless, even though comparable fully-synthetic aerosols of the setting are both legal and effective. Or how about the attempts to deprive memetics of its revolutionary usefulness by making their effects weaker. Other examples would be more subtle and/or subjective, but I'd say that newer books seem to be less inclined to include signs of radical technologies or ideologies (as compared to 'oldies' such as Cabals, Hamlin, a major chunk of bio- and stellar-tech and Eidolons from Deep Beyond, Wiper Treatment etc.).

I don't know the later THS books, but that kind of thing is why I don't put too much weight on assessments of the plausability of distant technology. Beyond some very basic things which people have been arguing about for a long time (so interstellar travel by anything but tiny robotic probes is 'almost certainly not'), usually there are a lot of assumptions and simplifications involved, and those assumptions and simplifications reflect our culture. There are quite a few areas of science where engineering runs ahead of theory: I have seen a case where a metallurgist declared in print that something was impossible, and a few decades later several people went out and did it in a backyard forge because their techniques had advanced enough.

I think that THS has about the right amount of weirdness. Our 2100 will have different weird, but thinking about THS helps to prepare us for the fact that the future will be strange and alien and full of things we never imagined and things we thought were impossible.