Terraforming the Solar System

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

People are still people, even though the 'past is a foreign country.'

If you are going to argue that people aren't still basically people in the future, with societies we can understand, then aren't you moving well outside Traveller?

This has moved beyond Traveller already.

And yes, I'm saying that a society capable of fast terraforming (say, less than a couple of centuries for Mars) is incomprehensible to us today in terms of their motivations and economics, even if they are still mark 1 model 1 humans.

For comparison, to a person in a tribal culture from 1000 B.C., a modern Western high-technology liberal democracy would be utterly incomprehensible. We're as human as he is, our fundamental natures are the same, yet he could no more grasp our society, our motivations, our economics, etc than he could fly by flapping his arms. A citizen of urban Rome at the height of the Empire could come rather closer, but there still many aspects of our society totally outside anything in his reference frame.

We, from our POV, can see the continuities between their societies and ours, they could not unless they first absorbed our frame of reference. Things we do trivially would be, by the standards even of the Roman, an unimaginably extravagent expenditure of resources and money. Our motivations, politics, economics, even some aspects of our religions, would be totally alien.

Yet they are as human as we are.

We are, I suspect, that Roman, to a society capable of fast terraforming.