crewdude48 wrote:For me, it is the prevalence of religion in the Honorverse. Most people seem to have one and actually believe in it. In the modern world, you see religion well into the process of atrophy and fading away in the more developed part of the world. Even when people hold onto their religion, it tends to become more cultural than actually religious. Heck, there is an entire branch of Judaism that doesn't actually believe in a god. I know it is Mr. Weber's world, and as he is a preacher, he and I are probably not on the same page at all, but I suspect that very little in the way of modern religions will survive in any sort of recognizable form even half as far into the future as the Honorverse.
That´s probably the biggest "objection" for me as well. Places like Grayson? Sure, of course they´re going to have religion as a bigtime thing.
But Beowulf or Manticore having such massive presence and normality of religion?
The probability of that is just ridiculously low.
Even more so when you look at how there is a clear link between high education, techlevel and general level of societal affluency, and low religiousness.
And then you think about exactly what kind of people are the ones who are most likely to afford an "exodus" alternative.
Oh yes, exactly the groups and nations least likely to be religious.
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After some 23 centuries, I don't expect to see a recognizable human culture at all
Why not? You can look back in our own current history and find obvious similarities in ancient grafitti and modern culture without even the slightest need to adjust.
Of course there´s change, but one thing you note if you start looking a lot at history is that people remains people.
Relatively retarded medicine and computers are harder to believe than the gee-whiz economics.
Actually, i´m having a problem seeing why so many people here point out how dreadfully bad the computers are?
Honorverse essentially has a modern PC(minimum) in less size than a USB memory. Considering how computer development in the real world is slowing down, with very little real progress in the last decade or so beyond dieshrinks that are starting to become unrealistic(as blatantly shown by Intel´s inability to launch Broadwell, troubles with Skylake and the 1 year delay added to Cannonlake, while NVidia and AMD have had massive trouble progressing with shrinks at all).
I could even make halfdecent argument about how Honorverse computers are overly optimistic and therefore unrealistic.
And medicine that can cure most things(given enough resources and effort) and even regrow body parts? How the heck is that retarded?
Consider the fact that today, medicine is in many ways fumbling in the dark with 4/5ths of diseases. Lots of medications are used without being anywhere near understanding how or why it works.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of diseases known today which modern medicine have not the faintest clue how they work, and many more that they only have very rough understanding of.
I think a lot of people are blinded by all the "amazing discoveries" or "wonder treatments" and dont understand or realise that those are barely a drop in an ocean.
Most people don´t realise that "modern medicine" is actually quite primitive, lacks understanding about most things and use guesstimates(or simply wild guessing) far more often than facts.
Just as one example, it was only last year that it was found that contrary to what everyone knew, the human body actually DO have a lymphatic system that goes to the brain area of the head.
This was discovered by CHANCE, a physically present mass of "biotubing" that noone had noticed until just recently.
And that isn´t even an isolated incident, just the most recent one i heard of, as things like that keep happening every few years.
So no, i see no reason to think RFCs computers and medicine is unlikely.
Not having advanced aliens is easy.
Extremely easy indeed! As it is probably not so easy to step up to be "advanced", and the number aliens found so far, well they might find advanced ones in another thousand years or so, given current progress.
Maybe.
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For me, it's got to be the mind-control nanotech.
Extremely unlikely indeed, but not completely impossible i think. Intelligence agencies have shown that "programming" people in a very limited way is possible, just utterly unreliable and doesn´t work >9 times out of 10.
It still has been done without the use of any biocircuits or whatever.
So, probably unrealistic but not entirely out of the question.
The nanotech just doesn't fit - they can't make decent AI or even smart control software given tons of molycircs
Actual AI as opposed to a wellwritten program trying to fake being intelligent, is vastly harder to achieve than commonly thought today.
What´s called AI today is nearly completely rubbish and has almost nothing to do with real AI.
As I wrote in my other post, Honorverse automated heuristics are pathetic - computers seem unable to recognise the most obvious and predictable things without human intervention - when implemented on a shipful of known hardware with purpose-built sensors.
The problem with heuristics on a warship is that it´s more dangerous to get a false positive to act on, than it is to not act.
And if you look at heuristic software today, just look at how often you get false positives from antivirus software!
And AV software still works in an environment that is drastically less complex.
Oh, and the unfakeable tongue-barcodes.
Did anyone actually claim that they were unfakeable?
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For me it's the fact that somehow humans managed to come up with the babies to populate thousands of worlds with populations into the billions. It's pretty clear that the major controlling factor of human population growth is the level of female education (absent the use/threat of force). If your women are educated enough to contribute to a star-faring civilization (college minimum) then you are going to really struggle to just maintain replacement level baby production, much less manage to fill up thousands of planets.
Nah, nothing strange at all about that.
Easy access to resources and space, as well as positive pressure, and probably intentional, organised matchmaking setups to make sure colonisation doesn´t fail, people have a tendency to be much more interested in multiplying if they can see very little negatives with it.
And then of course, there´s prolong and much better medicine.
And i might mention how some current real world researchers state that if people today stopped eating so much crap, we would instantly add 10-20 years to average life expectancy.
And that if we got rid of all the nasty chemicals we surround us with today, we would instantly add another 20-50 years of life expectancy.
And yes, they figured that right now today, an average human when born ought to have a potential life expectancy somewhere in the 130 years area. Before future fictional prolong is even mentioned.
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The religious aspect actually makes perfect sense to me. From what I can judge, there are very few 'religious' planets. Grayson, Masada, etc.. True Zealots. Most (like Manticore) could probably be compared to the modern day USA only slightly less.
The problem with that is that modern day USA stands out in the developed world as being hyperreligious.
And the feel you get with Manticore is more bible-belt USA than California or NY.
Basically, religion is something that 80% or so say they believe in, with maybe 10% being a deep believer and another 10-20% going to a worship once a week or once a month because its how they were raised and its a community building thing and they want their children to be raised that way.
And for me as a north European, that is nigh-on religious fanaticism.
10-20% going to a worship once a week?
Try 1-2% and you get closer to the levels you find in most of the developed parts of the world. Still probably too high.
The Islamic middle east and Arabian peninsula is about the only place you get those kind of numbers outside of USA.
