ChrisJ

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• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Secondly, any novel about virtual reality in which humans can become trapped or lost in VR is just confused. People minds don't "enter" VR. Our minds stay inside our brains where they always have been; the VR equipment merely fools...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  The theme of some kind of human-specific weirdness being the primary determinant of the nature of human/alien relations is one he has used more than once, although the only variant I can remember off the top of my head is...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  There are two obvious candidates. One is peculiar chemistry; we don't have the resources in the other solar system to figure out how that particular bit of the local biosphere is making that stuff, but it does something very valuable....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Tourism. There's something special about experiencing things directly, for humans anyway. Fair point. Agree that even if there aren't unique raw materials worth trading, seeing alien vistas and cultures would drive demand from Earth. Of course, we'd need to hope...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Huh. That's interesting. Reading other articles in the mainstream tech literature, I was under the impression that Intel was having real challenges seeing a viable path for anything below ~ 7nm. NextBigFuture last year had an article (http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/10/ieee-panel-agree-moores-law-via.html) about the...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Greg - Thanks for the specific recommendations. I tried tackling The Peripheral last year, and found myself totally "at sea" trying to figure out the setting. I'll give it another shot. Never heard of The Red: First Light, off to...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Bingo! I'd read that book in a heartbeat :). I'm happy to go along with the old tropes (the Special Child) if you make it plausible in a near-future society. OGH's plot hook here reminds me of something Heteromeles was...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  My question is what could possibly be physically traded that couldn't be created at home once the informational pattern is known? Presumably, the same elements exist everywhere in the galaxy. I loved James Cameron's artistic vision of the interstellar starship...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I'm surely expressing an embarrassing degree of ignorance here, but what about dark energy and dark matter? I find it hard to reconcile the statement that we understand nature to N number of decimal places when you look at these...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I would have said the same thing before reading KSR's 2312. That struck me as a plausible extrapolation IF we don't develop human or near human-scale machine intelligence. KSR's future has a great deal of control over human genetics (transhuman...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Sorry, coming in late to the discussion. I first stumbled into the GURPS Transhuman Space books back in 2009. Was deeply impressed by their extrapolations of technology, politics and culture (particularly Fifth Wave). Later learned that James Cascio was involved...