Progress in forty years:
Donner spies on men who depart not in a ground vehicle called a car or an automobile but in a flying vehicle called a boat, also described as a shell;
they depart from a landing flange on an apartment building three hundred stories high and two miles long, effectively a single-structure city, maintained by continually audible machines;
from his balcony, Donner sees the park surrounding the building, farm land to the horizon, an old (i.e., no longer used?) highway and airboats overhead.
That is a lot of progress and the text will soon introduce space travel and a well-established Martian colony. Progress was rapid in our version of the twentieth century despite two World Wars but not an all-out nuclear exchange. Maybe the periods between Psychotechnic History instalments should have been longer?
2 comments:
If they ended up with a world that has no serious risk of international war, they'd have a lot more resources for things like space travel and civil R&D.
OTOH, that -is- rapid progress.
OTOH(2), progress comes in bursts. We've made more progress on launch rockets in the past 10 years than in the previous 40, where things plateaued after the 60's.
Kaor, Paul!
Stirling beat me to making more or less the same points he did in his first two comments, except more clearly than I would have.
And I ENTHUSIASTICALLY agree with his "OTOH(2)" comment! I just hope Elon Musk doesn't get too side tracked by the Twitter controversy that he neglects SpaceX and the effort to get to Mars and the Moon.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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