You may ask why I have freestanding buildings on a space station, why anything is made of brick 2k years in the future, and where are the flying cars!
Simple. I can sum it up in a word:
Poverty.
In this future money rules everything, but there's only so much to go around. It's not cheap to run a national corporation, sustain a military, or build a station that can hold 38 million residents. In this day and age there is no deficit. If your country, colony or moon runs out of money, your population becomes subject to a merger/takeover. If creating a third of your buildings out of low-cost brick saves a few million credits, who's to argue?
For an individual citizen it's even easier to explain. As lifespan and the median age skyrockets, fewer jobs are available for the future's youths. Their elders live among them in ageless prosperity. Birth rates have plummeted making this disastrous social undertone something more bearable. Even still, most people live paycheck to paycheck making pricey anti-gravity vehicles something of a luxury/joke. They'd rather have food and rent.
Throughout the Age of Limitation, overcrowding caused major tensions on a micro and macro level, affecting everything from homelessness to interplanetary mining rights. Dark Energy Theory has offered an ease of burden, even if it isn't instantaneous. Lower energy costs and new homes (and jobs) across the galaxy are incentive enough to abandon the Sol System.
Which brings us to travel-induced dementia. I'd go stir crazy living in and endless series of corridors and control rooms. We are animals, after all. Not everyone may enjoy the outdoor experience, but open skies and sunlight have a potent psychological effect. Abandoning that for decades would be unbearable for a percentage I won't bother to pin down. Humanity's third leading cause of death is insanity (via murder/suicide) and a terrestrial setting helps alleviate that problem. Replicating it on Anatali Station cost a lot of money and space, but the mental stability of its over-sized populous was a key concern of its designers.
* * *
I'll close this out with some background information. The year 4128 brought an interesting problem: how do we fill two thousand years and still keep us humble?
That was also simple. In a word:
War
Too easy, right? Jensen-Almay and Apocalypse Eternal helped, adding a major stall-point that lasted a millennium. Point being, we're prone to shooting ourselves in the foot, and the more powerful we get the more disastrous the consequences. I don't truly believe we'll end the world in 2012, but six years down the road I certainly wouldn't be surprised. When it doesn't happen this will simply become an alternate history, which is fine by me. It's better if my future's babies-babies-babies aren't struggling in my timeline.
So humanity's had a hard road. But it doesn't matter in the end as long as art and love lives on.
That would be the point.
Next up, we're taking a break into my shit-ass webcomic, Aarin's Desk, but afterwards I'll go into smoking, race, panties, aliens and my skew towards the paranormal in the following article: Thematics.