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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harold as a Verb" data-source="post: 1936656" data-attributes="member: 11874">I think it was Stephen Barnes (is that the right name?) who wrote a rather extensive article at one point about how he came up with the future setting of one of his series of sci-fi books. I forget which books ... my memory is really letting me down today vis-a-vis details.Anyway, the guts of his hypothesis (as best I recall) :- Assumption 1: Pre FTL-travel, colonisation is messy and vastly uneconomic. It doesn't really "work".- Assumption 2: The technological breakthrough that yields FTL-travel has far reaching socio-economic consequences. In a nutshell, the very nature of the FTL technological breakthrough means one or both of the following has been mastered (even if only in an embryonic form) : (a) manipulation of energy to such an extent that all former means of energy production are rendered utterly outdated (nuclear power to the "new thing" as wood-fire is to nuclear power) ; (b) manipulation of matter to a whole new level (quantum physics gone spooky wild).- Consequences 1: Either way (or with a combination of both) the new technology renders traditional methods of manufacture and production completely obselete. As such, trade (as we know it) no longer exists. The new tech means that any society with access to it can produce whatever they want/need through a mixture of the mastery over energy/matter. Who needs purple widgets from Norway when they can make them just as easily on Ganymede?- Consequences 2: Now he lets this run for a while in time and tries to imagine what happens to human society. What he ends up with is a possible future which I find extremely interesting. With no need to trade in goods and services, a new trade evolves: in cultures and ideas. The overpopulated earth becomes subsumed into a massive, bland meta-culture where most spend a large portion of their lives hooked up in Virtual Realities to escape the boredom (they're probably playing D&D in there <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) and the new colonies which are founded out in space are created along cultural lines: the French-Quebec colony, the Sikh planet, the reinvented Aztec cultural world, etc etc. (Naturally all this is perfect turf for an author to play in.) And the "new trade" takes the form of cultural exchanges, and conflict arise from the clash of ideas and creeds between the (largely) independently evolving cultural groups and between them and the Earth's shallow meta-culture.... sounds like a terrific setting for Planescape-In-Space, don't you think? You can have your hard-SF but largely ignore the intricate rule-making required for the physics and the hardware of such a setting and concentrate on the conflict of ideas in a 'fantastic' yet largely plausible (at least to me) possible future. (Add aliens in bad makeup if you wish, but they don't strike me as immediately necessary with so much else to "play" with in such a setting.)</blockquote>

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