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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5541606" data-attributes="member: 4937">Once you have conveinent faster than light travel, then all bets are off.  Distance and indeed even space may be irrelevant depending on the method used (teleportation?).  However, my underlying assumption is that FTL is hard and that even if it is possible, it won't be discovered or utilized until long after a civilization has made space faring central to its identity and economic life.However, typically Sci-Fi and particularly populist Sci-Fi waves away STL travel as uninteresting and in doing so effectively says space travel is uninteresting.   In the vast majority of sci-fi you will encounter, humanity is land locked until we are uplifted either by some friendly passing alien with inscrutable motives and simply gifted with the magic of FTL, or else we find the technology among some alien wreckage and reverse engineer it.  Sci-Fi has largely given up on the idea that we'll work out FTL ourselves, and instead waits for a technological rapture to bring us into the promised land where we can zip the ends of universe in under a week and find friendly ET's there with human physiologies and even remarkably compatible sexual organs.   Even presumably optimistic sci-fi like Star Trek only manages to go halfway now, with its inventor of the star drive happening to meet friendly aliens about the same time he's inventing (plus getting a nice morale boost from time travellers).</blockquote>

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