In order to make space cheaper (escaping the tyrannical law of gravity) you'd need space manufacturing. Mars is no place to raise a kid, and there's no one to raise them if you did! It just doesn't seem likely that there would be anything worth fighting over in space to begin with. Most real wars are fought for political control (not for resources, though that's a secondary factor). So assuming (quite reasonably) that energy is never so incredibly cheap that platinum asteroids are worth mining, and that biological species simply cannot cope with long-term spacing, and that the speed of light is real and not some kind of conspiracy to keep humans bottled up in the solar system - what will science fiction be left with? Almost all science fiction is unrealistic on any number of grounds, but what happens if 400 years from now humans are still using fission power and living on Earth? What will sci-fi be left with if reality pours cold water on the astronomy nerds? What happens to science fiction when it becomes increasingly apparent that neither mankind nor anybody else is going anywhere beyond their own solar system - if that far? At present space travel is totally unfeasible in terms of any economic returns and humans have serious problems even surviving in space (it makes the arctic regions look like the Bahamas).ĭespite the futurist religious conviction that technology is magical and unlimited the material realities of our solar system and the limits of energy production and transportation may be far more 'down-to-Earth'. There are plenty of reasonable people who think that a lot of the technology space travel and colonization depends on (super-materials, useful fusion engines) are just not possible, or at least not practical. Mostly here I am thinking of space travel and (relatedly) aliens.
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