When we started plotting out the book, we decided that it would be set roughly twenty years in the future. This would give enough time for all the technological and scientific things that needed to happen to make asteroid mining viable, but also put the timeframe close enough to the present that we could extrapolate what that future would look like. There’s a very fine line between ‘so close to the present that everything in the book is outdated by the time we go to press’ and ‘it’s too far in the future and we should be using magic communication cubes instead of cell phones’. We attempted to thread that needle as best we could.
Predicting the future comes down to considering the push and pull of fundamental forces in our society – technical, political, financial, societal and religious – and balancing these to make an educated guess as to what the near future would look like. Just because a technological problem is solvable doesn’t mean it will be if the political or financial motivation isn’t there.
We started by extrapolating from the present, anticipating things that were most probable, and built out a timeline of events between ‘now’ and ‘20 years later’. A sample from the timeline that describes the adoption of ‘rocketjets’:
“City to city rocket travel is introduced. Initial routes include Hong Kong to Singapore in 22 minutes, and various China to Dubai-type routes in under 30 minutes. The reusable rockets travel at speeds of 18,000 miles per hour. China and the UAE rightly claim this as a milestone.
The U.S. gets in on the point-to-point travel, with the first route being New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. Initially this is a Chinese operator, but quickly a U.S. company launches too. That’s because —
Fearing that America is going to fall behind in this new space race (of sorts), and with NASA scaling back its activities for budgetary reasons, the U.S. decides that it will take proactive measures to grow the private space industry. This includes scaling back things like tort liability and regulations to avoid scaring off investors. (If this wasn’t done, lobbyists point out that the liability would be considerably higher than the challenges previous cutting-edge industries like airlines and railways faced.) (Google document: Houston, We Have a (Liability) Problem, University of Michigan Law School for more.) It works, and commercial space travel: both bespoke tours for the mega rich and day-to-day travel like the point-to-point system booms. Fortunately, no disasters. But this lax legal framework, intended for commercial travel, is what spurs the surge of interest that DeWaal capitalizes on with his company.”
Having said all that, I have to admit we failed to predict everything. COVID, the global pandemic that tore through the entire world in a few months and reshaped the entire world order was not in our cards. We’d generally toyed with the idea of a Chinese pandemic to help define the state-of-the-union for the Shanghai parts of our story, but we failed to extrapolate that globally.
We also did not anticipate the AI gold rush that was triggered recently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well – I guess y’all are just gonna get AGI faster now.
Mahalobay 
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