The best fiction tells the truth, carefully edited..

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:

saber964 wrote:Yesterday's Science Fiction is today's technology.

Yes, I remember how I shot a mad dog with my laser pistol while returning home in my aircar. I was coming back from the spaceport after a tour of our Lunar and Martian colonies.

Having lived through the heady days of lunar landings, and seeing what an egomaniac Nixon was proven to be... I have to wonder what the space program would be doing if the president at the time of the Apollo landings had not harbored a burning hatred of the president who not only start the effort but who humiliated him in public debate on his way to winning the election. Every time he heard the word Apollo, he did not think of the victory for the nation and mankind, he thought of the sweat melting makeup and a national TV audience.
If Humphrey were president, would we have built on the early success and established the base you mentioned above???

Of course, we will never know but we do know that advances in robotics and computers advanced exponentially as a result of the space program...
That the communicator that James T Kirk used looks a lot like cell phones of pre-iPhone era. That your smart phone is more capable and robust than computers (with punch cards) that were used to plot the course to the moon so... as you state below, at least one area has seen science out pace fiction.

Yet at the same time, the computers and "AI"s of nearly all science fiction more than 20 years old seem hopelessly obsolete by today's standards.

Technology and science do not always advance in predictable or expected ways.

Rincewind wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:
I think you're confusing the European Council with the European Commission. The Commission is the EU's civil service bureaucracy. The European Council is a body made up the heads of state of the member nations, plus representatives of certain EU bodies.

My bad. You are right; I had confused the two although it shows how easy it is to confuse them.

I still stand by my comparison of the Solarian League to the EU though.

Rincewind wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:
I think you're confusing the European Council with the European Commission. The Commission is the EU's civil service bureaucracy. The European Council is a body made up the heads of state of the member nations, plus representatives of certain EU bodies.

My bad. You are right; I had confused the two although it shows how easy it is to confuse them.

I still stand by my comparison of the Solarian League to the EU though.