The next season of For All Mankind is out. On Apple TV, it's an "alternate history" in which the Russians beat the U.S. to the Moon (barely) and the Space Race never stops, forcing technological advancements.
It's a world both familiar and strange. In some ways, it's the future the adults promised us during my childhood -- but in the real world, we'd stopped going to the Moon before I started High School. Because of that, at times it's almost painful to watch the show: they've got science bases on the Moon and a settlement on Mars!
In other ways, it's clearly fiction -- and remains on a timeline that would result in the setting of The Expanse. Politicians exhort, "Earth first!" in both shows, Martian settlers are determined and resentful, asteroids are mined for minerals (just beginning in For All Mankind and an ongoing industry in The Expanse). Some of the fractious nations of Earth have come together in the Apple TV series as the "M-7," which runs Mars and oversees the exploitation of space-based resources.
It's a timeline based on the Sunday-supplement articles and TV specials of my childhood, but the showrunners aren't looking through rose-colored glasses. "If only..." is a wistful dream and the TV series eschews wistfulness for a sprawling cast, a storyline as wide as history and a past that feels like a future. The story hasn't quite leapfrogged the calendar -- the current season is set in the 2010s -- but the technology certainly has.
Update
1 year ago
1 comment:
I'm sure smart people have already been calculating the potential effects, but have any of the shows that portray asteroid mining discuss the possibility that an asteroid could be mined so heavily that it's mass could change just enough to alter it's orbit and turn it into an Earth hazard?
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