Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History opens during recovery from World War III in the 1960s in a still devastated Europe where street lights have not yet been restored, tattered people dwell in caves in the rubble, Liberators wear patchwork uniforms of a dozen armies, river pirates waylay barges and the Americans will ship a new blight preventative next year whereas the same author's Technic History opens during recovery from the Chaos in the mid-twenty-first century with exploration of the Saturnian System.
So there can be progress in future histories. What a contrast between these two beginnings. In both cases, history eventually progresses to interstellar civilizations unimaginable to those living at the beginnings.
Will we survive the Chaos and avoid World War III?
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A hopeful good start in possibly recovering from the Chaos of our times would be if Elon Musk manages to found his Mars colony. The beginning of new nations off Earth would at least mean no longer stupidly keeping all our eggs in one basket!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We need:
weather and communications satellites;
a laser defense system against comet and asteroid strikes;
mining of the Moon and asteroids;
self-sustaining space habitats;
exploration of the Solar System.
That said, I strongly suspect that Musk's Martian colony any time soon is a pipe dream, especially the idea that it would be the beginning of a new nation.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with all the things you listed. But that necessarily means human beings permanently leaving Earth and settling elsewhere in the Solar System if they are going to be achieved.
Nobody thought, when they were founded, that the wretched little settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth would help lead to the rise of the US, but they did!
So I am not going to be so dismissive of what might result from Musk founding a colony on Mars. He certainly seems to be dead serious about actually trying to do that.
We need real world DD Harrimans, Anson Guthries, or Nicholas van Rijns!
Ad astra! Sean
In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, space development was on the moon & asteroids mostly, with Mars a neglected backwater. That doesn't seem implausible to me, and I don't see it as a bad thing as long as we do get lot's of space development.
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