Most book reviews on this blog are math books, but the Robert Heinlein classic is included because his 1966 classic touches math-related topics. Whether I'm reading science fiction or futurists, I look for how predictions match reality, fall short of reality, or over-predict mankind's advancement.
His book is place in the late 21st century, when colonists of the moon rebel against Earth.
Over-predicting our future - the novel is about second- and third-generation colonists of the moon. While we are currently just a few years from returning to the moon, we are still a full generation from having a habitable colony on the moon.
Under-predicting the future - the novel has a computer character of advanced artificial intelligence that can read publications and books by scanning the printed material. This prediction misses how all printed material can currently be converted to electronic records and can be easily accessed.
Closely predicting the future - the book writes about the use of catapulting material from the moon to the Earth. Just recently, there is a firm working on using a centrifugal sling to place objects into orbit - Slingatron.
Close to predicting the future - one of the characters of the novel is "Mike" who is a moon-based computer that becomes sentient and assists the lunar colonists on their quest for impendence from Earth rule. We haven't quite reached the artificial intelligence singularity, but it is quite possible we will reach that point by 2076.
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