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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7397468" data-attributes="member: 996">How so?  Is the earth's climate still borked?  Do they block too much visible light leaving the earth in depressing twilight and not at all good for raising crops, while re-emitting IR so it's still too warm?  Are there just not enough of them to do the ostensible job, but, coincidentally, enough to provide the power needed for...  In orbit around the earth?  There are a lot of challenges to living in orbit long-term.  Oookay... A 'not so distant' future means many extant conflicts.  Billions of highly religious folks, failed states, fascist governments, soulless corporations, nukes pointed at eachother, etc... won't have just disappeared.   Frankly, at this point I find the whole development-of-space thing somewhat implausible.  Space is really big.  Maybe if there's some super-efficient-engine like in the Expanse, so everyone can go around accelerating at 1G all the time - even then the energy being used up to push people & rocks around is insane.  If you have that much time & energy to devote to getting minerals, you could mine anything you wanted from deep in the earth's crust - heck, mantle - you might wreck the environment, and blame it on global warming, but what the heck...That's what it's almost always meant, throughout history.  And, it's definitely a theme in two of your three sources of inspiration.  It's funny, though, because, for all the growing disparity, the lot of all but the lowest of the masses does tend to get better, it's just there's always /something/ keeping them desperate & on the edge...   With all that computing power, AIs seem inevitable, heck the world may be run by them, overtly or covertly, and they may or may not be engineering things to quietly dispose of the surfeit of inefficient carbon units that created them in some reasonably safe (for the AIs) and humane (literally no reason to be cruel about it) manner.  (Maybe keep a few around in a nature preserve on earth?)I'm skeptical about nanotech.  Fusion, oribital elevators, and the other joys of past decades' hard sci-fi & space opera are probably never coming.  Brain-computer interfaces?  Eh, /maybe/, but humans will probably be an increasingly irrelevant input by the time they're possible.  Designer babies?  Only moral/ethical implications get in the way of that.  They'll either be a matter of course, or they'll be highly illegal - more likely the latter if current generations are still alive and influential (which brings up life-extension... along with other potential disparities, those with the resources to do so may live a very long time, indeed).  I could easily picture a split in humanity between the natural set who insist on having babies the old fashioned way and dying of old age when it's 'their time,' and an all-in gengineered homo novus population.  Maybe like the MAR Foster's Ler, but probably a lot more sinister. Funny thing about combat.  Technologies tend to go in a back-and-forth race between offense and defense, at any given point, one will have the edge and combat will either be about being able to afford the superior defense and just pounding on eachother (endurance, dependability of equipment, & discipline win out) or all about speed, agility, stealth, and the all-important first strike.  More often than not, BTW, it seems offense is in the lead.</blockquote>

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