Notes towards a future history:
(i) A technology that enables people to
live and work throughout the Solar System, generating energy from the materials
available, while recognizing that the System is electromagnetically and
gravitationally a single environment, not merely a number of bodies with empty
spaces between them. Colonies on the outer satellites.
(ii) Stories showing the exploitation of the System over several decades with political opposition
symbolized by a stylized spectral figure occasionally drawn on walls or
machinery. Capitalist conglomerates with names like "Solar Empire" and private
space navies.
(iii) Philosophical debate between
scientific materialists and Sol-worshippers. New art forms in low gravity
environments. Speculative literature about an alternative history in which,
although space was probed, humanity itself remained Earth-bound in the late
twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
(iv) Large-scale industrial production,
economic slumps and military conflicts. Continued co-existence of wealth and
poverty although it is technologically possible to produce abundance for all.
(v) A novel describing a
successful workers' revolution in the industrial centers of Earth, Callisto,
Titan, Rhea and Europa. Socialist Parties in these centers uniting Bolshevik
revolutionaries and "karma yogis" against the exploitation of humanity and the
destruction of the Solar environment. Sympathetic characters on both sides of
the conflict. Scientists who try to maintain their research while ignoring
political controversies as much as possible. Revolutionaries and
counter-revolutionaries who respect science and do not try to annex asteroids
occupied only by astronomers, physicists etc. Others unleashing unnecessary
destruction.
(vi) Flight of capitalists in
self-sustaining mobile environments towards the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. The
capitalists and their followers believe that the successful revolutionaries will
fight among themselves and that this conflict will be resolved by the imposition
of a dictatorship and an end to all freedom in the Inner System.
(vii) Further works showing an emancipated
society in the Inner System and the continued struggles and achievements of free
enterprisers in the space between Sol and Proxima Centauri. Space is big enough
for diverse civilizations that no longer interact. Humanity becomes more than
one species.
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