It's very easy to show things being different 250 years from now.
You just have people running around using numbers instead of names, have
people eating pills instead of hard food, using personal flyers, having
their children raised entirely by machine....

In fact, all of that has been done...in an SF musical called "JUst
Imagine," made in the 1930s, about life....in the 1980s. And it was
completely, totally off-base.

There's plenty of extrapolation in this show...phased plasma weapons,
hyperspace, the Psi Corps, other political areas, on and on...and that has
some great interest for me. But for me, what the show is *most* about is
how we are the same, not how we are different. A key theme in this series
is that this is US out there, in the stars, recognizeably US.

You cite the date 1721 as how things were "different." People got
married, held jobs, raised children, separated, had affairs, fought in
wars, read books and the few pamphlets that were available, corresponded,
on and on. We do those same things today. The *chrome* of technology has
changed, but our basic human nature has not. Nor will it in the next
250 years.

Re: "Universe Today." It's recycled material, light and portable,
read it and trash it. Even Asimov noted that there is nothing quite so
portable as a piece of paper, or as efficient. Computers were supposed to
end the paper mountains inside corporate offices. Have they? No. One
look at my (or any) office shows that computers have cause MORE paper
mountains, not fewer. So why not extrapolate to "newspapers" that are
tied into a major web, printed fresh in your quarters or thereabouts every
day, with all the news you'd like to see printed, and the stuff you don't
much care about left out? Customized newspapers, skewed toward your
interests. THAT is "UT." I just don't much want to sit there and explain
the darned thing because it's just more exposition.

And who says the Dodgers won't be here 200 years from now? They're
still going (reasonably) strong after nearly a century already. What
will suddenly happen in the world that all the world's baseball teams will
simply vanish? There seems to be this sense that at some point in the
coming future, somebody will throw a switch, and suddenly 90% of the
things we're familiar with will just vanish...and I think that's nonsense.

What I want to do with this show is to connect our past, our present,
and our future, melding familiar images with new ones. This isn't what
you're used to seeing. But it's what I want to *do* with it. Otherwise
all you have are unattainable futures about people who we barely recognize
as being humans, doing things we can't relate to. I'm sorry, but that
just doesn't interest me.

There's plenty of extrapolation coming down the road. The first and
foremost mistake people make about this show is seeing one or three
episodes, that this is all there's going to be. Wrong.

jms