On Wed, 4 May 2016 10:29:47 -0400, you wrote to Freelance Traveller:

>If I'm understanding the question, it's "What things that are
>perfectly reasonable extrapolations will not turn out like that, or
>what things will we be totally blindsided by?"

Not necessarily, though if you want to "attack" the question from that
angle, I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with. To some
extent, that's been done in Traveller, with the early computer
descriptions, including the hand computer (which never quite got to the
smartphone level, although I think we can credit it with getting to the
level of the Apple Newton (remember those?).

>For example, the various sci-fi books where they have a bulky radio to
>contact the ship in orbit... and considering that the NSA has sats
>that intercept cell phones, a starship should be able to work with a
>smartphone held by a crew member.

Yes, those would be examples of AFtech.

>If that's the case, Traveller is chock-full of AF (grin)

>I think the biggest thing that is missing from Traveller, in the same
>way no Lensman has a smart phone, is Makers of various sorts.

This isn't so much AFtech, as a _lack_ of reasonably-extrapolable tech -
but also, remember that Traveller is starting from a viewpoint date of
about 1977, and makers or 3D printers weren't even really on the horizon
at that point.

>I keep looking at the game Eclipse Phase, and playing with the idea of
>stealing from it for details of TL14+ worlds.

Write me an article about it!

>I think body modification is going to be bigger than Traveller makes
>it out to be, but smaller than some views of the future push. Most
>people aren't going to hack themselves into walking monstrosities, but
>implanted computing will probably happen so long as it's cosmetically
>neutral. I can see the Imperium having an emergency medical dispenser
>implanted along with the computer run it, do translations, VR
>training, and enough comms to work as an emergency beacon. The
>implanting would be the equivalent of getting tons of vaccinations
>during basic that we have now.

It's already been touched on during the Rebellion era in the OTU;
different factions had differing views on when a person more-or-less
stopped being a person (with rights and freedoms and all those other
nasty things) after they started replacing body parts with robotics/
bionics/cybernetics. I agree that by and large, the OTU tended to be
more conservative than transhumanistic about it.

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