by evilgenius » Sat 21 Dec 2019, 14:07:37
Thanks. When I was a kid I fell in love with science fiction because of reading Asimov. He talked about human relationships, and the human condition. He got it that those things would always he a part of our story. But Asimov did, largely, fail to see that nationalism wouldn't dominate man's reach out into space nearly as much as he would have thought, only viewing the post WWII/Cold War story's impact as making up a larger segment of the way that people thought about our future in space. We might, just as well, turn space into the new suburbia.
About space, people actually felt all sorts of ways. But the grand victory over the Russians to the moon, gave the US some leeway. NASA was still relevant, even if they did wind up having to pay the Russians to get their astronauts into space. I think Asimov would have been very surprised to find that space had so many independent actors so soon. You know, because United Asteroid Mining Corporation would probably only have ever existed as some company providing for the military.
I liked reading his stuff, but he never would have guessed that some entrepreneur would have wanted to mine an asteroid and have absolutely no relationship with the government whatsoever. You know, not a single government uniform to be found, and no ex-government workers, to boot. I think we can see that now. I guess, but who knows what the changes in society which will happen as we go even more information age, will also have upon our way of looking at what is before us? And the gaps taken up with life like entertainment.
A wider and wider gulf between shooting a gun on screen, and ever shooting one in real life. Automation taking over so much more military functionality, like surveillance drones which also carry weapons. People are only there to prevent some logical absurdity from launching war. Kind of like they are in the self driving car experiments. I'm mindful that the woman who was supposed to be doing that in the last experiment let her car run over a jaywalker. The look on her face, as the police confronted her over whether she was on her phone, priceless. We insist we won't let the machines take over that much of what we do. I guess some people probably said the same thing, when the automobile came out.