19th December 2006, 11:12 PM
That may be the best way to go. The word survived several hundred years to today. No reason to think it couldn't survive until this era, right? Consider it this way. I doubt that in the future all the devices suddenly modified for space will ALWAYS be called "space this" or "space that". Likely that prefix will be dropped. We still call our space vehicles "space ships" but that'll likely drop if we actually start travelling far more often to just "ship". Consider that we used to say "air plane" (as in the wing is a plane) but now we just say "plane" and people know what we mean from the context. No one assumes we're talking about a ramp or a device for shaving wood. The same could be said of events. I mean the olympics is global and no one bothers saying that, it's likely that in any distant time with terraformed and colonized other worlds, any olympics that include them all is simply going to be called "the olympics". Solar olympics might come about when travel between the first Mars colony and Earth becomes commonplace enough that the "first ever olympics competition between two worlds" takes place, but once it's common place, as it would seem to be in your story, I doubt the prefix would stand for over a century.
So yeah, it may be a good idea to drop it.
So yeah, it may be a good idea to drop it.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)