I’ve come to the conclusion that most perspectives in life are completely relative and purely in the eye of the beholder. Too much self-criticism is thus an overemphasis of one side of the coin. It is not healthy and in most cases not valid
I wished there was SciFi without this magic stuff (I’m talking about the protomolecule). Because other than that I loved the show because I had the feeling it was a realistic view of our potential future.
In all honesty, this is an outlook I've heard a lot and never really understood.
In any society, there is old science, modern science, cutting-edge science and then theory. To depict a realistic society of the future, the Expanse must have all of these things, and it does:
People drink coffee and read books and talk to each other on devices that are essentially thinner smartphones. That's their old science.
They travel through space using the Epstein drive and communicate with other planets. That's their modern science. (It's worth noting, by the way, that the Epstein drive itself is impossible by modern scientific understanding; it's actually the "magic" of the show well before the protomolecule is at all explained.)
They encounter ships that can't be tracked doing human experiments of questionable morality in order to produce super-soldiers. That's the cutting edge science.
And, finally, they come face-to-face with something they don't totally understand or know how to interact with, something beyond even what they fully believe to be possible. That's the theoretical part.
Missing any one of these parts, the Expanse wouldn't be as realistic, to me, because the bigger point is that no matter how far we've come, there is always something we don't yet understand. Limiting ourselves in the fiction we create to what we consider "realistic" on the grounds of what we, right now, consider to be absolutely within the realm of understood science is as silly now as it was two hundred years ago (and try explaining how the Internet is a real thing to people from that time, and imagine how patiently they'd explain to you that a network of mathematical rocks communicating via trapped lightening is impossible).
Is the "it can do ANYTHING" nature of the protomolecule sometimes a little rope-pull-ish? Yes. But it doesn't matter, to me, because the way everything else in the show responds to that magic is the realistic part. People try to understand it, or weaponize it, or profit off it, or some combination of all three. The storytelling around the magic is what makes the show realistic, to me, not the other way around. Given all that, why is the idea of glowing blue space alien rock any harder to stomach than hyperefficient fusion drives?
They sell the graters too. (You don't want to use an ordinary grater.)
I haven't tried their wasabi myself, but heard about them a few years ago and have been meaning to order some ever since, so this thread reminded me to look them up again.
