I too am waiting for VR War of Rights (one of the most realistic Civil War games out there at the moment), and I actually do reenactments as a Union soldier, and even did one at Gettysburg last year, but there are positives and negatives with that kind of thing - we can't replicate dead or dying soldiers easily for instance, but for now it's the closest you can get to being "in" the Civil War like my ancestors were. I have even heard of reenactments where people will cut themselves off from modern society completely for a couple weeks, get themselves lost in a national park somewhere, and then fight a battle.

Augmented reality would be a decent halfway point until we can get the kind of VR I am thinking of (near full immersive), and it could be quickly done also. Anything less than full immersion in the VR kind of sense would feel off to me because I already partially know what it is like.

I think it would be awesome to put on a pair of glasses of suddenly have a full-scale American Civil War battle in your backyard you can participate in.

While the climate crisis is there, so are the solutions, or ways we can deal with the changes in ways that aren't painful. This subreddit alone puts forward many different news articles about technologies that will or already are greatly helping with that, but some are not that obvious are only become noticable after thinking about it for a while.

I am not talking about the big cities. Setting up a alternative transportation system in the more sparsely populated areas of the US is what I am talking about. I have been to Paris and rode their subway everywhere and rode the train out to Versailles and the Musee De La Grande Guerre so I do see that a good train infrastructure could help because I could literally go anywhere I need to go using the train and my own two legs but most of the track and infrastructure to make that work in the US has long since been removed. A great many rail lines would need to be rebuilt and then expanded. This is a map of railroads in my current state in 1920, which is I think the height of railroads in Michigan. This is a map of railroads now, and most of those are freight only also - as far as I know, the only passenger lines left in Michigan are the Amtrak lines I just linked. It is clear to see that using, say, highspeed electric railroads, at the very least would require HUGE investment.

I don't see why not. There is nothing that could stop us except ourselves. It could even be a positive thing. It could enable people who are bad at talking to women the chance to actually be a father, and by that point our genetic tech should be good enough to create the female side of the equation from scratch, perhaps even within the robot itself. It works the other way also. Male robots could spontaneously generate sperm and get a women pregnant who wouldn't other wise be in a relationship. The robot could also be programmed to be an ideal partner, and also programmed to seem like a conscious entity, but not. That way many ethical problems are dodged.

I can't wait to plug in some of the best fanfiction ever written and see it come out as a great movie or tv series out the other end. First thing I might put in is Battlestar Prometheus.

Have fun walking for 10+ miles just to get to the nearest store. Unless you somehow can make rural areas easily accessible without a car and also affordable. This is not easy. You should go and take a vacation in the US midwestern countryside for a few weeks then say this again. I triple dog dare you to do this in northern Michigan without a car. Enjoy.