As an initial comment on this, I want to remark on religion as well. I tend to envision futures where religion really doesn’t have much role, because I don’t have any belief in any religion and don’t experience this as a lack. But on the other hand. . . .
I look at my feelings about space and humanity venturing into it, and they seem to me to have a lot of “religious” character. If I listen to Anne Passovoy’s Harbors or Echo’s Children’s Outward Bound I’m deeply moved, and I share the feeling that in some way humanity is MEANT to be out there, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civlizations, and expanding through the cosmos. And I can’t offer any rational justification for that; I see that there are major problems to be solved, I don’t know if it’s possible to solve them, and I’m not sure anything would be gained by doing so. But I still feel that humanity ought to be trying, and that there’s something deeply lacking in people who don’t want that. It’s not an individual salvation faith like Christianity or Buddhism—more like the Judaic idea of the Promised Land—but it seems to be something like a faith.
I’m not sure how relevant that is to Flat Black, when I set it down. But I think I want to say that a future might have very little supernaturalist “religion,” but still have things that mobilize people in comparable ways. (Another one that appeals to me is uplift, the intentional creation of other sapient races from apes and elephants and parrots and ravens and octopods. . . .)
Incidentally, I’m not sure that Theraveda Buddhism is a religion. In some ways it looks almost more like a science, if largely an applied one. Certainly it seems to disavow belief in the supernatural in favor of a relentless agnosticism.