My guess is the Long Night is the reason for humans in the ships and the lack of Transhumans If there's a lot of historic evidence of what happens when you leave _everything_ in the hands of machines and no sophont supervision when, then there's a cultural push to have a living hand there to back things up. I'd also guess that the work rebuilding from the Long Night influenced how things are done. Jump lag is also probably a factor - if you're selling goods, you're not always going to go with a 6 week old price. I can also see people having concerns about having a whole lot of tech implanted in them when there's probably several horror stories about certain colonies where there were mega-deaths when the Long Night interrupted a supply chain that the implanted tech depended on. Or, if you go the transhuman-immortality route, the people who had a parent who lived to be 250+ years old, but watched 8 generations of children age and die might consider that immortality to be a curse... and the youngest generations watched them psychologically melt down from it. Which would leave a cultural bias against such things. That does, of course, hang on no matter replication/transmutation tech coming in to play. IMTU, a lot of that kind of thing is like Fusion power is now : any day now we'll make break even. On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 12:57 PM, Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, that's exactly the "elephant in the room" for Traveller -- with > millennia of technological progress, effectively infinite resources, and a > wide variety of planetary cultures, why hasn't anyone (or more likely almost > everyone) gone transhuman? As Stross asks in his essay, why is capitalism > still a thing? The meta-answer is "to keep things comprehensible to > present-day players", and that's an excellent reason. But it does make > consistent world-building very difficult. > > One of the things I admire about Iain Banks is his ability to craft a > relatively believable post-scarcity, hyper-technology world in which he > still finds plot-relevant roles for human characters. Although as you read > the novels, you gradually become aware that the "humans" are so heavily > modified (and likely molded by the AIs that actually run things) that they > really aren't entirely human in subtle but important ways. > > On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 9:44 AM, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote: >> >> Yes, sticking strictly Traveller and using technology available at TL15 >> there's no need for orbits of any kind and equipment can be cheap and smart >> enough to remove humans from the loop altogether. You can build automated >> survey starships filled with those automated femtosats (which would end up >> being probes that land and operate on and near the surface of the worlds) >> which can self-deploy to a star system, survey every planet to ~ 1cm >> accuracy and get an accurate count of trees and good approximations of >> number of grass blades on each world. Animal and insect population counts >> would be conducted, DNA sampled and catalogued, and so on. Languages would >> be sampled and decoded, minerals mapped, governments and social structures >> identified. >> >> Likewise, trading would be most efficiently done in such a way. Cargo >> found and paid for with automatically determined best possible credit terms, >> cargo loaded by robot, starship serviced by robot, and starship designs >> automatically refined over time as optimal solutions to particular loads and >> routes are determined. >> >> At TL15, the way it is defined in Traveller, I can't imagine the need for >> a human being in space or on another world except, perhaps, for tourism >> reasons. Computers are almost self aware on the high end and in terms of >> specific tasks (such as designing an optimum free trader for any given set >> of routes) far better than humans are likely to be. >> >> >> -------- Original Message -------- >> On February 7, 2018 6:34 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz xxxxxx@gmail.com >> wrote: >> >> >> >> Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KickSat >> I can picture the IISS having a "Spreader-sat" the size of a 2 liter >> coke bottle that is in a fairly fast ball of twine orbit, and has >> oodles of chipsats in launchers all over the outside of it. Drop one >> in orbit, and it uses the launchers to pop one off every few minutes >> to cover the planet. The chipsats would use mesh radio to relay from >> one to another until the message got to the ship. >> I can see the desire to add a player complication, or 'realism', but >> after 3000 years of space operations, I'd think that what Early 21st >> Century Terra calls "realism" and what 1100's Sylea calls "realism" >> are two very different things. >> >> >> ----- >> The Traveller Mailing List >> Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml >> Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com >> To unsubscribe from this list please go to >> http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=PltOdItWBSgOP4y0Q6abkGbDI1eus0lz > > > > > -- > "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake > > ----- > The Traveller Mailing List > Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml > Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com > To unsubscribe from this list please go to > http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=vSy3NFQJMSbZKrzPfC3XucFBsUCMtKrI
