As I mentioned in my post of the first page of the thread, the humans in Outsider have a specific role to play in the story as the reader's point of view, so for all practical purposes, they are essentially modern humans transported 150 years into the future. There are a number of ways to explain this, some of which may even make sense, but it's important to keep in mind that this is a story-mandated decision, not a prediction of the future.Paragon wrote:Say Arioch, what's the view on transhumanism in the future? Do people try to do crazy shit like make human eyes see more of the EM spectrum, or make ourselves more tolerant of gasses (for example carbon dioxide vis a vis alligator genes like in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books)? Or maybe get implants that let us access the internet like in Ghost in the Shell?
As mentioned before, genetic manipulation of humans will still be heavily restricted if not totally banned in most Earth nations, so most genetic experiments will have been exported to the new colonies, where there is less restriction. Anything that you can imagine is probably being experimented with, from super-troopers to exotic "pleasure models"... but this is taking place on the Offworld frontier where it doesn't have that much impact on humanity as a whole. 100-200 years farther in the future, it will become a much bigger issue.
Increased longevity will have significant impact on our social systems, but perhaps not as much direct impact of the individual lives of younger people like Alex and the scout crews. Though it does mean that someone like Hamilton might be a lot older than he actually looks.
As I've mentioned before, I think Ghost in the Shell-type implants and prosthetics are not as near-future as many authors assume, but also for this story we want a human Alex that's easy to relate to, and not a weird cyborg with plugs in his head. So we infer that such things are not yet commonly available.