[jocon307]

Well I'm very glad to hear you are not an atheist. Now it can be told: I think all atheists are fools.

It's still not accurate what you say about battalions, the Americans, I guess I should say Colonists, won the revolution.

I'm not sure we've sold our souls, I think we tainted them in the garden of eden. What's always interested me is how if you watch sci fi it always takes a pretty conservative view on the unlikelihood of the perfection of life.

[epigone73]

Why is sci-fi fairly conservative in portraying the future?

Three reasons:

1) Fiction must be, at least in principle, believable. people have an ear for bunk, and generally bunk is dull;

2) In a perfect world, nothing is very interesting, really. Strife, etc., is the basis of a good story;

3) If most of previous human experience shows man to be a fool, people to be reliably greedy, and warfare to be almost an instinctual behavior, we have little right to expect that the future will look much differently.