tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post3509212473082605358..comments2024-03-18T13:11:39.192-07:00Comments on Rocketpunk Manifesto: The Dun Hills of EarthRickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comBlogger99125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-70015304826380362232012-09-27T02:48:36.321-07:002012-09-27T02:48:36.321-07:00Sorry to dig up another undead thread, but as a de...Sorry to dig up another undead thread, but as a dedicated Browncoat I just couldn't leave this statement alone: <br /><br />"But the great precondition to all this is habitable frontier worlds, whether made so by nature, terraforming, or outright manufacture in the form of habs. Either of the last two demands a very high techlevel... "<br /><br />The <i>Firefly</i> 'Verse did have a very high techlevel, it just wasn't available to everyone. <br /><br />Joss Whedon, in the film <i>Serenity</i>, did eventually justify in-story the large number of terraformed planets by showing huge terraforming machines that did most of the work "in decades" (these may be the atmosphere processors mentioned later in the film). The way that this was presented seemed to imply (IMO) that these were some form of archeotech brought from Earth-That-Was, possibly not reproducible by the Alliance. A couple of episodes of the series stated that the remainder of the terraforming effort was hard, brutal work, and contributed to the short life expectency of the not-often-voluntary workers. The difficulty of terraforming might also explain the predominance of desert on many worlds.<br /><br />The Alliance, with its long-settled and industrialized Core worlds would also seem to have a vested interest in keeping the Rim planets poorly developed and easily conquerable. <br /><br />--Just my 2 cents.Michaelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-5949660793226273272010-09-29T03:09:36.464-07:002010-09-29T03:09:36.464-07:00Interesting blo. Waiting for more info
[url=http:/...Interesting blo. Waiting for more info<br />[url=http://topmusclesupplements.org]Muscle volumizing supplements[/url]Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-74359979105577469022010-09-12T09:57:51.237-07:002010-09-12T09:57:51.237-07:00Except that said symphony is just an analogy...Say...Except that said symphony is just an analogy...Say we have a race of sentient ants. Pheromones and other chemicals released into the air would be communication method used. We'd have messages formed by different ratios of said chemical over another, like a flag system. Us human explorers would use chemical captors (digital noses exist already...) that would taste the air in a certain area of the hive, and with a database set up previously, create a general message. The more ants there is in a certain area, the more concentrated the pheromones become in the air and therefore the message is the most complex. Developping this, we'd have a brain-like organism the size of a city. The individual ants would act as neurons, with nodes being some sort of brain bug, creating a huge, complex parallel network.Turbo10khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03052157965564640932noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-24634101243825703212010-09-11T18:05:21.584-07:002010-09-11T18:05:21.584-07:00So, Rick..."The lyrics of these songs, probab...So, Rick..."The lyrics of these songs, probably very repetitious, might be literally fragments of thought, bouncing around the hive's metaphorical head. <br /><br />Hey, if I were better at describing this I'd be collecting my Hugo, not writing it in a blog!"<br /><br />...ok, that means that you listen to the symphony, and not the soloists, to hear the conversation of the hives. So listening to a conversation between hives is like listening to a concert...That is so cool! Keep thinking about that and maybe you will get that Hugo!<br /><br />FerrellAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-46773022884099848822010-09-11T16:02:33.453-07:002010-09-11T16:02:33.453-07:00If you have a hive entity that's eusocial in t...If you have a hive entity that's eusocial in the sense of ants and bees, then I think it would be best to think of it in terms of human extended families, in a culture where loyalty to your clan is highly valued. Except here the loyalty is hardcoded into their genetics.<br /><br />The queen is mommy. The neighbors are your sisters. Even if you have the occasional quarrel with your family, you love them and will support them through thick or thin.<br /><br /><br /><i>"Suppose - this is being simplistic, and a bit precious, but it does for an example - that the individuals in the hive sing as they work."</i><br /><br />Heh. When did Disney design a hive mind?<br /><br />Perfectly sensible, though.<br /><br /><br /><i>"As for the hive's ability to have 'dialog,' presumably the species forms multiple hives, and the hives may interact."</i><br /><br />Definitely. Every eusocial creature in real life has numerous hives, and the idea of a only-one-queen-for-the-entire-species system was perpetuated by science fiction authors who have no idea how an actual hive works.<br /><br />A single-hive system would be far too vulnerable to extinction if something happens to your one queen and her handful of replacements. Furthermore, a single-hive system could <i>never evolve</i>, because evolution works by survival of the fittest - which only works if you have multiple competing organisms/hives/whatever it is that actually reproduces.<br /><br /><br /><i>"Hives might even have sex, in effect, by exchanging drones/princesses - who ever knew diplomacy could be so much fun?"</i><br /><br />Heh. Especially fun if those drones are of the "mate once and then die" type. And are sentient, and completely at peace with their role.<br /><br />(Termites are more sexually emancipated than ants/bees, by the way. They have both male and female workers, and the male reproductives tend to stick around.)<br /><br />Sex would probably not be a private affair in a eusocial hive. The continuation of the family line is in everyone's interest, and for sterile workers, watching porn is the only thing that really stimulates them in "that" way. Everyone will be happy when a young princess starts contributing to the hive by mating for the first time.<br /><br />Though maybe it might be private in terms of not letting people from other hives watch...<br /><br /><br /><br />Of course we're actually discussing two different scenarios: (A) a eusocial hive of sentient but closely-knit individiduals, and (B) a eusocial hive where the hive as a whole is sentient, but its constituent individuals are not. And <i>neither</i> of those is completely on-topic for the idea of an R-strategist civilization (rabbits might come in large numbers but they aren't eusocial), although they're certainly fun too!Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-66709432034917211532010-09-11T15:05:47.747-07:002010-09-11T15:05:47.747-07:00We might experience the hive entity's mixed (a...We might experience the hive entity's mixed (and other) feelings directly, and more readily than its finished thoughts. <br /><br />Suppose - this is being simplistic, and a bit precious, but it does for an example - that the individuals in the hive sing as they work. The moods of their singing vary; they respond to each other, and somehow their interaction becomes the higher thought processes of the hive-city itself. <br /><br />The lyrics of these songs, probably very repetitious, might be literally fragments of thought, bouncing around the hive's metaphorical head. <br /><br />Hey, if I were better at describing this I'd be collecting my Hugo, not writing it in a blog!<br /><br />As for the hive's ability to have 'dialog,' presumably the species forms multiple hives, and the hives may interact. Probably they have to for the race to become fully sentient. <br /><br />Hives might even have sex, in effect, by exchanging drones/princesses - who ever knew diplomacy could be so much fun?Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-63196828407605726802010-09-11T12:44:21.237-07:002010-09-11T12:44:21.237-07:00Humans can have mixed feelings too, so that isn...Humans can have mixed feelings too, so that isn't a showstopper for hive entities.Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-13698418407030751712010-09-11T10:21:09.033-07:002010-09-11T10:21:09.033-07:00"Since the hive is an intelligent entity, it ..."Since the hive is an intelligent entity, it can have dialog lines, even if learning how to identify them is difficult, let alone translate them. Where's the real babelfish when you need it?"<br /><br />It probably wouldn't use 'dialogue lines' as such, but a hive mind could have several emotional states (if one third of the colony is happy and the rest feel menaced, the colony is in a 'feeling menaced' state)Turbo10khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03052157965564640932noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-81350058310870719352010-09-07T15:21:00.258-07:002010-09-07T15:21:00.258-07:00Since the hive is an intelligent entity, it can ha...Since the hive is an intelligent entity, it can have dialog lines, even if learning how to identify them is difficult, let alone translate them. Where's the real babelfish when you need it?Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-25115312064501083722010-09-04T17:34:42.004-07:002010-09-04T17:34:42.004-07:00Wouldn't that be like writing a story about th...Wouldn't that be like writing a story about the adventures of a faceless corporation? I'd try and figure out how to write an interesting story about a human city (as opposed to the people living in it) before trying to do the same with an alien city.<br /><br />(I am assuming that that beehive here does <i>not</i> have a telepathic hive mind..)Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-71628017933703641112010-09-04T15:32:08.712-07:002010-09-04T15:32:08.712-07:00People can and do ascribe a personality to places,...People can and do ascribe a personality to places, from sacred groves to modern cities. So we might be able to learn to relate to the beehive more than to the transient individual bees.Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-46538466872292029342010-08-28T14:30:49.968-07:002010-08-28T14:30:49.968-07:00Interesting...but not impossible I guess. Weber di...Interesting...but not impossible I guess. Weber did it with his ant novels successfully, but only by giving great individualism and intelligence to the characters. I'll try one day to write the same event, but segmented into 'vignettes' and through the viewpoint of many characters.Turbo10khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03052157965564640932noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-55074849470354927512010-08-28T09:57:13.195-07:002010-08-28T09:57:13.195-07:00As for keeping an individual alien alive, there ar...As for keeping an individual alien alive, there are human stories that follow the viewpoints of many different characters, whether because the stories take place over many generations or just because they like showing multiple sides of an issue.<br /><br />An R-strategist novel may well end up like that, with many short vignettes from the points of view of different characters, interlocking to form a larger story. Characters would be individually sympathetic but only play a small part of the whole. A human reader would still be turned off if many of the vignettes ended in death, but the style doesn't seem categorically impossible.Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-14542949137960901442010-08-28T09:51:55.768-07:002010-08-28T09:51:55.768-07:00Yeah. It's very hard for us to truly portray ...Yeah. It's very hard for us to truly portray a realistic alien mentality, especially since we've <i>never found any actual aliens to study</i>. While fixing this annoying problem is my main priority in space travel, it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, so we have to make do with what we've got.<br /><br />All of SF is essentially about trying to realistically portray something that doesn't actually exist and can't be studied. But doing so with aliens does seem to be harder than it is with anything else. (Which, of course, is exactly the reason why aliens are such an intriguing research subject if we ever find some.)Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-84963257666982180172010-08-28T07:57:26.872-07:002010-08-28T07:57:26.872-07:00I think a big problem with such types of civilizat...I think a big problem with such types of civilization is that even if they develop otherwise energy-intensive sentience, our human minds cannot be wrapped around a society who's individuals only live for a few years without some kind of magical 'memory transmission stuff', or in other words, a way to keep the individual alient the reader gets attached alive for the length of the story.Turbo10khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03052157965564640932noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-6886045758037790242010-08-23T14:47:34.480-07:002010-08-23T14:47:34.480-07:00Is it likely?Is it likely?Turbo10khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03052157965564640932noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-4022322039370907222010-08-18T08:37:21.783-07:002010-08-18T08:37:21.783-07:00In an R-strategist society, with billions of membe...In an R-strategist society, with billions of members all in the agrarian age, how can research develop at all? Without a magical 'memory transmission stuff', nothing person A discovers would be built upon or benefit person B. Unlike K-types, who have the benefit of longetivity, so a loong to time to think about anyhting, specialize, and whatnot, R-types would die before university in our terms. I think the natural evolution for any sentient species would be a K-type strategy on a hive mind level (it's already happening with globalization and the Internet). K-type strategy because that is the only way technology would develop, hives because it allows for extreme specialization therefore maximum resource efficiency.<br /><br />Oh and it'll still be fun for readers. They'd get to follow the adventures of a whole hive, identified as a single individual, and not the day-long-lifetime of the sci-fi equivalent of a mayfly.<br /><br />Plus, I don't see any species developping sentience at all if following an R-type strategy. It's too expensive to be used in a shotgun way.<br /><br />Sentient species strategies would differ as in everyone is getting to the same end-point and just doing it in different ways ie aliens could very well have R-type strategists as ancestors but their descendants only have traces of that behavior...Turbo10Knoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-87143008102665149972010-08-16T19:25:17.622-07:002010-08-16T19:25:17.622-07:00Interesting suggestion on the R-strategist rabbit ...Interesting suggestion on the R-strategist rabbit conundrum. Nice insight.<br /><br />The biggest problem with this is that at a certain point the rockets themselves are going to be more costly than the people you're putting on them. Any rocket that has even a small chance of landing safely on the moon is going to be quite expensive. So no matter how many astronauts you have, you still have a serious incentive to cut down the number of rockets you launch, by increasing the success chance of each one.Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-81096400559585575482010-08-16T19:16:52.933-07:002010-08-16T19:16:52.933-07:00Correction: gold digging can work in a non-monogam...Correction: gold digging can work in a non-monogamous culture, if that culture is instead polygamous. It doesn't work in a culture that has no long-term bonding at all, with people choosing a new mate each year. Sorry about the terminology mixup.Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-82667080957789512442010-08-16T19:09:11.784-07:002010-08-16T19:09:11.784-07:00Thucydides: You mean to address jollyreaper, not m...Thucydides: You mean to address jollyreaper, not me. He's the one with mice. I brought up a different (but related) issue regarding fast-breeding life-is-cheap aliens... let's call 'em rabbits.<br /><br />Anyway, yes, females would tend to choose the best males in their vicinity. So some males will be in much higher demand than others. This isn't really an issue as long as your culture doesn't value monogamy, which would most likely be an alien concept to these mice. A male can fertilize a large number of females in relatively short time, and I can't see many males (especially who were brought up in this culture) refusing to do so. Among humans this would cause serious discontent among the males who aren't being chosen, but apparantly the mice are more tolerant of this, especially if they get to promote their genes by helping out relatives who did get to breed. Of course, this does start to suggest a eusocial scenario where a few males do all the breeding...<br /><br />Anyway, remember that an advanced society might have many measures of fitness. Is fitness health, or intelligence, or creativity, or sociability? Do you care if your supergenius dream mate is a quantum mechanic or a rocket scientist? This can help spread out the male breeding load, although there will still be a minority of mice who do most of the "work". Also I said "vicinity", which depends on how sociable they are... even (or <i>especially</i>) if you live in a dense city, you don't actually know most of your neighbors. But these mice do seem to be pretty sociable, from what I can tell, so this doesn't really apply to them... <i>much</i>. It's still hard to know everyone in a city.<br /><br />Gold digging doesn't work in a non-monogamous culture... you're just having some sex with him, you're not marrying him, you're not getting any of his assets (unless he gives them to you to show off his fitness, of course).Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-26080482982339781302010-08-16T18:51:47.470-07:002010-08-16T18:51:47.470-07:00Everyone is posting faster than I can keep up (or ...Everyone is posting faster than I can keep up (or delete the multiple posts Blogger is inflicting); which suggests another advantage of an R strategy species: they can simply try everything at once.<br /><br />If there is some organizing principle (sea turtles who have survived past the danger zone), then they can organize the thousands or millions of immature members into teams to carry out actions in parallel, trying out millions of possible premutations until a successful one is found. Land on the Moon? Send hundreds of rockets, artillery shells, mass driver pods etc. until one gets there. <br /><br />This massive parallelism would allow specific problems to be swarmed unti a solution is found, although it would also probably be heavily biased towards short term solutions (long term problems would be solved by another burst of parallel processing looking for a quick fix, with the next iteration solving the new problems created.)<br /><br />In many ways this sounds like the classic free market and the meme of "creative destruction", or perhaps biological evolution.Thucydideshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09828932214842106266noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-66326972747424040612010-08-16T18:41:30.568-07:002010-08-16T18:41:30.568-07:00I think Milo overlooked one factor in his alien mo...I think Milo overlooked one factor in his alien mouse model: The females would be in competition for the best males. Which sleek furry mousess wouldn't want the husky male who had collected the most nuts and berries over the year?<br /><br />(In humans this behaviour is quite common as well, sometimes known by the pejorative term "gold digging")Thucydideshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09828932214842106266noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-60967124140536922962010-08-16T18:38:34.107-07:002010-08-16T18:38:34.107-07:00Nice point about our past R-strategism. Still, we...Nice point about our past R-strategism. Still, we seem to have mostly left that behind as technology advanced, with hard labor becoming less valuable and advanced skills becoming more valuable. Even so, we took quite a long time doing it - even during the industrial revolution, we were still using child labor. So that shows that R-strategism isn't particularly inconsistent with technological development. Would it be possible for a species where such behavior is more strongly ingrained to hang on to it longer, even to the point of, to pick a completely arbitrary yet contextually appropiate example, performing an Apollo-style moon landing (on their moon, of course, not ours) while still considering life to be cheap? What kind of advantages might a high-tech civilization gain from cheap unskilled labor? Also keep in mind that our reduction in death rate was in large part due to increases in medical and sanitation technology, something that any other high-tech society can presumably also do, unless they have some really difficult biology, or life is <i>so</i> implausibly cheap that people aren't worth the cost of medicine.<br /><br /><br />I wouldn't say that hive minds are actually that alien - actually, they're less so than individual minds with a eusocial mentality. A hive mind is simply a single organism with multiple bodies, but that has the mind and personality of a single (possibly very smart, possibly not) organism, and can be understood as such. Discussion of such an alien's "socialization" would need to look at how one hive communicates with another hive, not how individual units within a hive stay linked. This might prove to be different from humans, but is not <i>necessarily</i> much different from interactions between non-hive-mind organisms. (Some authors make the mistake of having the entire species be united in a single hive with a single queen. Nonsense. No system like that could ever evolve naturally.)Milonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-19964484794071865612010-08-16T17:17:04.851-07:002010-08-16T17:17:04.851-07:00Reading this discussion, I keep thinking that a lo...Reading this discussion, I keep thinking that a lot of these speculative behaviors are well within the human range. For that matter the 'Murrican range. The clever prey outwitting predators? Bugs Bunny?<br /><br />R-strategies imply that life is cheap. Societies in the agrarian age operated on that premise to a significant degree. It was common for half of children to die before age five, and their parents were necessarily fatalistic about it.<br /><br />Human wave attacks have often been successful, and formations such as the phalanx aren't really much different - yes, they're wearing armor, but they're still marching into rows of spears.<br /><br />Hive entities are <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-observatory.com/spaceguideA-E.htm#really_aliens" rel="nofollow">really alien</a> to the contemporary liberal west, but Western tradition has regarded them as an ideal - not so much ants, which we don't get along with, but certainly bees, symbol of hardworking prosperity. Plato's Republic.<br /><br />I would not be surprised if intelligent species tend to be, like us, clever, social scavengers that can live on a wide variety of foods, and thus have to make a lot of judgment calls. I call it the niche of nichelessness. <br /><br />This doesn't mean they'd look like us, even in a general way, because they could arise out of many ecological circumstances.Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-47201701499533269872010-08-16T14:34:54.416-07:002010-08-16T14:34:54.416-07:00"As an example, sea turtles have a very high ...<i>"As an example, sea turtles have a very high mortality rate as hatchlings but as adults they can live 80 years or so and aren't threatened by many things in the sea. Trees have a tendency to spam out seeds by the ton and the odds of any one seed hatching are slim but the resulting tree could be around for hundreds of years."</i><br /><br />I know that, but the problem is that to have a really R-strategist society, you'd want the R-strategism to actually show to some degree <i>in the behavior of people in the society</i>. If they have high mortality rates before reaching sentience but lose this trait once they actually start being people, then you don't really have anything interestingly different from humans.<br /><br /><br /><i>"The hive mind answer is that the individual is not important and can be replaced. The somewhat biowank answer is that all technical skills are hardcoded into the genetic code and are instinctive. I don't really like either of them."</i><br /><br />Amen.<br /><br /><br /><i>memory transmission stuff</i><br /><br />What you're essentially trying to do here is speed up the rate at which information can be taught to others, so you can learn quantum mechanics in seconds or minutes. That has gotta be difficult to evolve (is that much information density even possible, and can the brain process that much at once?), though if you could pull it off, then yes, that would reduce the difference between individuals.<br /><br />Living in a world where you know and directly "remember" what everyone else in the world is up to would be weird...<br /><br />The question is what do these individuals do to emphasize their not-hive-mind-ness?<br /><br /><br /><i>"it boggles my mind how the genetic code can carry information for a neural net that hasn't even been built yet. Sperm and egg come together and that resulting zygote has all the instincts wired in right there. I can't bloody explain it."</i><br /><br />The same way you can encode a picture or a video game into a series of ones and zeroes.<br /><br />Except DNA describes much more complicated programming and encodes it into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts.Milonoreply@blogger.com