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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4996751" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, we don't.  We know something about the past, but its pretty easy to recognize that we have no shared conception of the past just by reading several different historians takes on periods of history.  We don't even know say 'The Great Depression' which is a very recent event, much less know 11th century France.   The average geeks ability to imagine say the interior of a 17th century proto-ship of the line is no better than their ability to imagine a cyborg.  We have a fuzzy conception of tropes about the past and tropes about the future.  But we have nothing like a clear shared past.Wow, two logical fallacies in the same sentence.No.  Often the author doesn't believe that this is a possible future at all.  The reason you don't load dozens of different ideas into the same story is that you'd either spend the whole novel in exposition or else leave the reader utterly lost and confused.That's nuts.  No one actually says that.  It's not even logical.  It would be like saying, "Never mind nuclear weapons, that doesn't matter because of the computing revolution." or some other nonsense.  What someone might say is, "Between nano-technology, AI, cybernetics, bioengineering, machine-mind interfaces, cloning, and space travel, I can't begin to imagine what society would be like, and even if I could, I couldn't communicate it, so instead I'm going to imagine as civilization that is otherwise mostly like our present world, except I'm going to imagine one big change and then think about the implications of that."</blockquote>

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