On a functioning ship or station there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem with getting well oxygenated air, and given the need to constantly extract carbon dioxide, scrubbing the air for the particulates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons would be far easier than that simple molecule. The resource which appears most scarce is fresh water. There also appear to be a lot of unemployed and refugee people who are easy targets for addictive substances, and tobacco is a fairly shade-tolerant plant (assuming that what they are smoking is tobacco).
Also, the only smoking I recall seeing is in the first couple of series, well before Amazon picked up the show as an in-house production (or at least funded by Amazon Studios), so your beef on the portrayal of smoking is with SyFy, Alcon, and Hivemind, not Amazon Studios. I suspect that the rare scenes of characters smoking were intended to evoke a noir-ish, I’ll-die-soon-anyway-so-I-may-as-well-indulge-now atmosphere in the Belter community rather than a propaganda effort by tobacco companies which have largely given up on trying to expand their consumer base in the US and Europe and have figured out that they can still coffin nails to kids in developing countries where nobody gives a fuck about predatory advertising for am addictive carcinogenic product.
I was thinking more in terms of implantable technology and biological enhancements. It exists in the world of The Expanse because we see it used occasionally, but it seems to be quite rare and largely the provenance of shady underworld figures and planetary governments. It appears to be highly restricted on Earth for security reasons and perhaps on Mars, but there is no reason that Belters, who don’t have a central authority and largely would ignore it if they did, wouldn’t implant themselves with every enhancement and self-preservation technology they could buy or build. Instead, they walk around with just slightly futuristic cell phones and watch conventional-looking newsfeeds like we do today. It is the one area that I think the show (and presumably the books) fall short in terms of making a plausible-seeming future world.
They put it in the background, but various options for limb replacements are mentioned right at the starting portion in the very first episode, and various cybernetic and biological implants are plot points throughout the series. That and whatever the “focus drug” is that Martian interrogators use.
Here’s a trope that I see all the freakin’ time, and in much more than science fiction, though I feel like it’s used a lot in sci-fi because of the juxtaposition of high tech and old-school: all typical forms of communication have broken down, but one group that desperately needs to get a message to another group figures out they can communicate Morse Code through some sort of primitive tapping or pulse transmission mechanism, and not only does someone know Morse on the sending end, there’s always one who knows it on the receiving end. Hmm, is there a TV Trope for that? Yes, there is:
Sire, it it is very much “in the background” rather than in regular use. Given the utility of certain types of implantable technologies or modifications, such as an mesh communication device directly connected to the retina and auditory nerve or an implantable device that monitors blood oxygenation and perfusion would seem to be technologies that would be crucial in hazardous and information critical society such as Mars or the Belt, and yet, they have people walking around with what are essentially cell phones that can be lost or broken. We don’t see anyone with radical body modifications even though working in space would definitely be easier with a few more grasping appendages, and some kind of endocrine stimulators would definitely benefit a MCRN Marine regardless of how naturally buff and skilled at hand-to-hand combat they are. You can make the point that Belters are poor ice scrabblers which explains why they live in cramped spaces and enjoy few luxuries but they are still rich enough to build ships and large habitats, so enhancements that would make them more functional and survivable would not seem to be a big stretch.
Of course, if you take this too far, or have major characters who are no longer identifiably human it becomes difficult for viewers to relate, and it is easy to rely on these innovations to resolve the plot instead of making hard choices and sacrifices, but it is still somewhat anachronistic for a setting that is a couple centuries in the future. It is like an modern urban drama but everybody rides horses and sends telegrams because the automobile and cellular telephone haven’t been invented or are too expensive for normal people to own.
It’s a pretty minor quibble to be certain, but every time I see a person pull a communicator out of their pocket with a cracked screen, it makes me think, “Haven’t they figures that out by now?”
This article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information talks about the impact of smoking on submarines
“Prior to the total ban, there had been progressively more stringent restrictions on where smoking was allowed. In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward.”
Former submarine officer here…so my cite is my post.
When I was first on a submarine in the late ‘80s. Smoking was allowed just about everywhere on board. It was not allowed in the wardroom (officers’ mess) because none of the officers smoked on the boat I was on.
The smoke was removed by the normal atmosphere control equipment (CO-H2 burners, CO2 scrubbers, and filters for the particulates).
A couple of years later (early ‘90s), submarine commanding officers were allowed to make their boats smoke-free at their discretion, and some did. This caused a lot of hate and discontent. I actually knew a friend of a friend who was a heavy smoker who went a little nutty when his boat went smoke-free. He actually went AWOL (aka UA, or “Unauthorized Absence”) because of this, which ended his career.
Then a policy came out that all submarines had to have a designated smoking area. For most boats this was back in the engine room on the lower level right above the bilge. I used to always run into a half-dozen smokers there when I did my rounds.
I don’t know what the policy is today. I also don’t know what the policy was back in the WWII diesel boat era. On the nuclear-powered submarines I was on, we had unlimited power for atmosphere control equipment, which was not the case on a diesel boat (which is actually battery powered when submerged). I will say that the fan room filters got pretty dirty from cigarette smoke, and it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to allow smoking in a closed atmosphere environment.
BTW, one way to piss off the smokers was to let the oxygen levels drop a bit below normal. They then had trouble lighting their cigarettes.
I think you assume a social acceptance of radical body modification that might not exist. Note that the endocrine acceleration implant is illegal, for one thing.
One, many, doesn’t matter - just moving towards the shooter will stop the projectiles.
