Imagine what humans will be doing in 100 years from now. You might think that 100 years is a long ways off, but it wasn’t that long ago.
If you think of how things were in 1917, World War I was being fought in Europe. In that war, tanks and airplanes were used as weapons for the first time. It was also the last major war to use trench warfare. Chemicals were also used as a weapon in that war.
It was a time of changes. Monarchs feared losing their power to republics, and nobility feared losing money and land to industrialists. The phone became an indispensable technology as well as the motorized vehicle, cars and trucks. The horse and carriage were being used less and less. Highrises were being built thanks to steel, and women marched for the right to vote. Cameras captured daily life instead of painters. Motion pictures were under development. Electricity replaced whale oil burning lamps. Family farms still covered the prairies, but they started to get their own electricity to add to their growing technology that included steam tractors. It was also the era of the industrial tycoons.
All of these things are clearly the basis of our United States today. So, the world if today is the basis of the world of 100 years from now.
In that world, I imagined humans venturing out beyond Earth into the exploration of the inner solar system because of our commercial space efforts today. I'm talking human explorers, not robotic just systems. I'm also talking about a colony on Mars, albeit embryonic. And I'm talking about mining. Asteroid, moon, and planetary mining and ore processing taking place routinely. In all these situations, humans and machines work very hard together doing dirty work. Such work I showed in the story Letters to Olivia in Mels Shorts, set in 2110, where young people are recruited to do hard labor on a processing ore space station near the Asteroid Belt. What made these young people take a job like this? Well it's quite simple, there was a lack of jobs on Earth. It's a classic situation that repeats itself throughout history, bad conditions at home make people move away forever to a new promise land. What's the promised land for Olivia and her fellow crewmates? Ah, that's something I'm keeping under my hat for now.