Delusions of grandeur. Heck,we should have had colonies on the moon by now. The real challenge to humanity and it’s positive advancement is communism and all its forms. It’s a rot that needs to be stopped. The real paradise was the Garden of Eden and we screwed that up. Terraforming and interstellar travel sounds great but Christ will return before we even start on the first probe mission.
One thing neither the author or reviewer mentions about human society is the role of religion in influencing human affairs and indeed proscribing certain actions. Perhaps we are reaching a point where God needs to “revise & extend” his Word so that some of these technological advances will be acceptable in some applications and taboo in others? I’m sort of reminded of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” (if you can get past of the Islamic flavoring).
There’s an entire web site devoted to scientific speculation and associated SCI-FI stories about the future of space colonization called the Orion’s Arm Universe Project.
Terabytes of speculative data in thousands of pages and graphics...
Very interesting article.
Three of the most interesting SF space series are:
1. Cities in Fight by James Blish
2. The Pournelle-Niven Universe (including the excellent book “The Mote in God’s Eye”)
3. The Dune universe (Frank Herbert)
All of the above series deal with some of these issues, but not quite all of them. They also deal with the politics associated with space travel and trying to maintain an Interstellar empire. Interestingly, Blish saw space travel as a way to escape the tyranny of a worldwide bureaucratic (Communist) state.