Colony requirements
- Thread starter vegascat
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Book maker if the Tl does not sustain electronics.
Paper maker.
Spinning can be done by everyone during evening fireside chats. Drop spindles can be made out of a stick and old AOL disk.
Moneyer or minter some one to make the currency. Could be as simple as R.A.h. banker solution.
Caster if not included under metalsmith or black smith
Book maker if the Tl does not sustain electronics.
Paper maker.
Spinning can be done by everyone during evening fireside chats. Drop spindles can be made out of a stick and old AOL disk.
Moneyer or minter some one to make the currency. Could be as simple as R.A.h. banker solution.
Caster if not included under metalsmith or black smith
Yeah, well there is that...
It was "Yanks in Space" for good marketing reasons. There are plenty of other ways of running things. Unfortunately, they require players to get their heads around different ways of thinking. Worse, some of these "other ways" are (rightly or wrongly) associated with "official enemies" of the US. Treating "official enemies" seriously or with respect tends to set off patriotic allergies. These are bad for business.
A good example of how Official Ideology can influence players appeared in this thread, where someone claimed that evolution favours selfish behaviour over altruism. This is wrong in terms of evolution, but is correct as far as capitalism is concerned.
In any case, all that is required for my schema to apply is for a society to have sufficient centralised direction to systematically exploit the resources available to it.
It was phrased in capitalist terms because of the factor above, plus familiarity.
A major factor in why I think that space colonisation won't primarily be a matter of self-sufficient farming colonies is that I suspect that suitable worlds aren't likely to be all that common, or all that "suitable". So, "Earth Primes" probably aren't that common, in my view. But part of that opinion is based on the Antropic Principle of life being likely to emerge where ever life is possible. And that is an assumption, and undoubtedly wrong in at least some cases.
More to the point, even suitable worlds will need to be thoroughly investigated, that is, be the sites of outposts for extended periods. These outposts would probably look more like an Antarctic research station than early Utah.
I also have my suspicions about Zubrin-style plans for expeditions to Mars, not withstanding political posturing along these lines. Pork-barrelling has a long history.
Generally, my approach is that colonisation needs to make economic sense or it is unlikely to happen. Ideology can overrule economic sense, but usually by making silly ideas seem sensible, and only until they collide with reality. Scientific investigation can result in quite large outposts being established, and maintained for extended periods, but there is a vague upper limit to these.
So, if I was designing a TU from scratch, "colonies" would _initially_ be research outposts. Some would evolve into economic resource extraction facilities (mostly mines). A few would develop service industries to support other activities (farms and industry), and develop trading and coordination centres (commerce and government). But this would depend on previously existing development.
Of course, if there were enough far-flung outposts, some of these more developed colonies might emerge to support the other outposts, and become, in effect, trading centres. These are probably the ones that are most likely to become independent centres of power.
Would such colonies be rivals of the "home" government? Hardly. It would take a very long time before these outposts developed significant populations. What's even ten million people compared to the billions on the homeworld?
Of course, things might be different if the homeworld is balkanised.
Then you are playing 2300AD, and good luck to you.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
Then why is the world moving away from centrally controlled economies, and toward capitalism? Religious sectarians may be more effective as specific tasks, but overall, they suffer from a fundamental weakness. Inability to change in response to changes in their environment.
It is a binary choice. Either you make all your own decisions, or you let someone else do it. That other person suffers from, what appears to be, an incurable flaw. He ain't you.
He don't know what it is you want, what makes you happy, what your hopes and dreams are. You might know it, but then again, you might not. You can tell him, and hopefully convey all the relavant data to this decision making authority, but that is going to take time and energy, and besides, it is all redundant. If anyone knows this, its you. So why not let you make your own decisions?
Because you might make the 'wrong' ones, as determined by some authority? Because you might behave selfishly? Tell me how that is wrong in and of itself? (And while you are at it, you have to explain to me how me being not selfish does NOT help you out. How preaching altruism is not in itself selfish.)
If you are wrong, you will find out before long, and first, before you can get permission from some authority. The problem of central planning, (which no matter how you wrap it up, is what socialism, communism and all their variants, is all about) is the information problem. No small group of people can effective decide in a timely enough fashion to govern the economic activities of a larger population. The larger the population, the worse the problem. They simply do not have the time nor resources to collect all the data required to make effective decisions.
And as they fail to provide the adequet control, it is a trend that such organization garner more and more political power, more "legal authority" simply to get the job done. And you end up, because the system itself does not work, you end up with Stalins, Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Saddams.
Hayek laid all this out decades ago. I know it is improper in many political circles to read Hayek, but that does not change the truth in his analysis.
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
Hayak, von Mises, and others going back to good ol' John Locke.
Have you seen any of the Public Broadcasting "reality shows" from Britain and the US? One was a family who were going to try to live as a 19th century family for 3-6 months. Another was an American "frontier family" experiment. There is a medieval village experiment, too.
None of these things are anywhere near as easy as it sounds. They have to re-learn things that white-bread modern culture has made unnecessary.
Have you seen any of the Public Broadcasting "reality shows" from Britain and the US? One was a family who were going to try to live as a 19th century family for 3-6 months. Another was an American "frontier family" experiment. There is a medieval village experiment, too.
None of these things are anywhere near as easy as it sounds. They have to re-learn things that white-bread modern culture has made unnecessary.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
And Adam Smith. I would also add Thomas Sowell to the list, mostly because one of his books, (while very dry) was what made me understand commodity markets and insurance companies a lot better than I had.
Amen there! I have not seen them but have visited and used to be part of historical recreation groups in my younger days. It is tough to recreate. It was hard work living in the past. I much prefer the future.
But there are many potential futures. Someone once said that the best form of government was a benign dictatorship. The trouble was the worst form of government was a non-benign dictatorship. The trouble was you never know what you are going to get until its too late.
And of course, even a benign dictator still has to deal with the information problem inherent in the system. Which is the real reason you see democracies as the most successful political structures, in terms of GDP and technical achievement. More brains are being utilized than in dictatorships. Making decisions are what brains do.
Amen there! I have not seen them but have visited and used to be part of historical recreation groups in my younger days. It is tough to recreate. It was hard work living in the past. I much prefer the future.
But there are many potential futures. Someone once said that the best form of government was a benign dictatorship. The trouble was the worst form of government was a non-benign dictatorship. The trouble was you never know what you are going to get until its too late.
And of course, even a benign dictator still has to deal with the information problem inherent in the system. Which is the real reason you see democracies as the most successful political structures, in terms of GDP and technical achievement. More brains are being utilized than in dictatorships. Making decisions are what brains do.
Don't get me started straybow on frontier family survivor all star pbs version. PBS set up all the families to fail.
One they were not allow weapons to hunt large game due it being on a national park. The whiney rich family father snuck within yards (bow range) of a deer and ask if getting that close would qualify as hunting.
Two WHy in the world did the general store owner wait till very late to tell the farmers that they needed fences.
IT was a combination of survivor with enough real world facts to make it a jr high source. For those not in usa. Elementary 1-6 or 1-5, Jr high middle 7-9 or 6-8 , high school 10-12 or 9-12 grades depending on your location.
Then why is the world moving away from centrally controlled economies, and toward capitalism?
</font>[/QUOTE]Well, I'm not sure that any country with a government is moving towards capitalism. China, for example, talks about capitalism but they look like socialists to me.
However, I said three things and I'm not sure which one is making you angry.
1)Capitalism isn't the ultimate truth of the universe,
2)or even the universally most effective mode of human behavior.
3)Religious sectarians and other freaks are often shockingly effective, even at technical tasks.
Please note that I didn't say religious sectarianism was the ultimate truth of the universe. I just said that outside observers can be shocked by it.
I think it's probably (1) or (2) that's making you mad.
I also think we may have different definitions of capitalism.
I was originally referring to a comment -- I think from Alanb -- that talked about space colonies necessarily being motivated by and defined by financial profitability.
Is that from Hayek, too? If so, it would be interesting to read the specific book that talks about it. I've read some Rothbard and Mises -- I don't know if I've read Hayek. Certainly I haven't read him lately.
If I were to show you a man who makes all his decisions except one, the decision of what to have for dinner, which he leaves up to his wife, would that be a relevant counterexample, or would that be nitpicking and missing the point?
I don't think religious sectarianism is necessarily centrally planned. Very often it appears to lack a plan of any kind -- centralized, decentralized, etc.
Also, one should note that different observers will often disagree about what constitutes religious sectarianism. Some will say that (e.g.) anarcho-capitalists are a cult, others might even accuse the capitalists who run (e.g.) lewrockwell.com of being a religious sect that worships Mises.
Anyhow, I'm not interested in arguing for religious sectarianism. I don't encourage it when non-sectarian alternatives are available.
My dog in this fight is to argue for the effectiveness of organic farming. I'm very interested in food and ecology. I'm not very interested in capitalism or sectarianism.
I was extremely inspired and enthusiastic about ideas sparked by a single line of Larsen's writing. He mentioned that power drills break down and it's hard to fabricate replacement parts. In the post quoted below, he questions whether it's possible to maintain high tech-level equipment at a lower TL.
It's interesting to examine Larsen's points in detail. He initially seems excessively confident, but upon careful examination he has a very specific constraint -- he's addressing the case where relatively unskilled folks who had desk jobs in a TL 8+ society try to start over with TL 4 and no special survival training.
I could post points about wilderness survival, organic farming, renewable power, and industrial engineering until my fingers fall off, but I doubt that will interest Larsen. In fact, the main thrust of my argument will probably be of interest only to organic farmers and home power engineers, so I'll post my full argument to the real-world forums that would have some chance of being interested in it.
However, the oversimplified rough draft of my ideas might conceivably be useful to Traveller gamers who only want to simulate colony building, not do the real-life activities which resemble it. So I'll post some eleven points.
1. The basic variance in definitions
I agree that a bunch of unemployed office workers from a TL 8 society cannot possibly survive without support.
However, if you trained them in wilderness survival and released them on a planet with abundant game, they could simply revert to hunting. And if you trained them in enough engineering, they could survive at TL 8 or so. It's possible that they *couldn't* survive at TL 4 -- they would have to go above it or below it.
2. The cost of labor
I'll indicate some specific real-world technologies to show that food can be very, very cheap and labor can be spared on an organic farm.
The short version is: high tech organic farming can be done in less than an hour per day. Skilled engineers could easily grow enough food for themselves as a daily chore and still have their main efforts left over for engineering.
3. The irrelevance of location
Location is *not* very important, and I'll explain why it isn't.
Suppose the initial landing party lands in a place with good geothermal properties, plentiful water, and seismic stability. Their first action is to drill some big tunnels -- at least one vertical tunnel to drive a geothermal power unit, plus a couple horizontal ones to house equipment and personnel.
They install their geothermal turbines and generators. Boom. More than enough electricity. No dependence on fuel, sunlight, etc. No need to build a quonset hut to house the generators -- just drill out as much space as you need. If anything, the biggest problem will be carting away all the broken rock so that there's enough room to maneuver.
Soon they're using electricity, water, and possibly atmospheric air to store their excess electricity in hydrogen form.
So location is not very important. They don't need a whole lot of raw materials. Obviously good geothermal properties are preferable to mediocre ones, and drilling has to be very cheap -- but drilling is getting cheap even in the real world. Wired Magazine recently wrote that drilling has gotten so cheap that an underground real estate boom is expected. Note geothermal drilling requires higher-quality drills that can withstand higher temperatures than normal drills.
4. The irrelevance of many (but not all) surveys
The water has to be high quality because you don't want to need to purify it much before using it for nutrition and industrial processes.
5. The possibility of extremely small populations
I think it was on the same website that I read that food production in many primitive societies was *not* labor intensive. That's a problem for an archaeologist or anthropologist, though, and I'm interested in the industrial engineering aspect.
However, a highly diverse range of raw materials should not be needed initially.
However, given the amazing food production of organic farming, I would not surprised if it were possible to have a lot of mineral extractors in the colony, each of whom had a personal organic garden and fish-tank for food purposes.
Note that the tunnel habitation concept is ideal for food production. Electric lights can be accelerated to produce vegetable food much faster than natural sunlight. Tunnels provide very cheap, very capacious living space so that every human can have very large fish-tanks filled with a diverse range of aquatic food species, including both flora and fauna, and possibly some exotic items like spirulina.
Note that I would expect every citizen to maintain some volume of soil, if only a personal compost supply. Citizens will need to be willing to live in close proximity to a small-scale compost factory, and that may require highly motivated, highly conscientious citizens. Managing compost is not as intellectually abstract as gauge theory, but it does require a willingness to keep rats out of the compost boxes.
Note that tunnel-digging needs to be very, very cheap and water needs to be very, very available -- because compost and soil management require lots of water!
6. The easy solution to the problem of shelter
Put some industrial engineers and organic farmers into a nice, capacious tunnel complex with a year's worth of food, and within a year they would have high-quality soil for themselves, plus possibly some non-toxic, low-quality soil which could be safely dumped outside.
But they don't need bricks or large quantities of lumber.
These would probably hippie tree-huggers, so they would favor reforestation anyway...
7. The easy solution to roads, drainage, and sewage
Roads do not need to be built. In fact, tunnels exist primarily to be lived in and not to serve as transportation.
When you live underground, you have a *lot* of volume to work with. So you can have a lot of people with personal vegetable gardens, fish-tanks, compost boxes, etc. living with lots of room within walking distance.
Drainage and sewage, of course, are the first problem solved by compost! There might be additional problems with condensation on the walls.
Air circulation might be a nontrivial problem.
Also, garbage collection would be non-trivial. Source separation would be vitally necessary.
8. The methane/biofuel solution to internal combustion problems
However, I can't help but mention that methane and biofuels are an excellent renewable resource -- not that the geothermal/hydrogen system would depend on them.
Probably each individual would hand-carry their compost buckets to the neighborhood anaerobic digester -- and that would produce methane and higher-quality compost.
There are cow farms that can produce electricity from cow dung as well as milk from the cows! Is that not miraculous? Of course cows would not be suitable livestock for this settlement, but pigs might be adaptable enough.
I want to stress that organic farms have very low labor costs, so that there won't be an issue of recruiting full-time sugar-cane harvesters to produce raw materials. Everything is a raw material to an organic farmer -- so just don't waste anything, and you'll have all the raw materials that you need.
9. The effortless ease of copper wire
They arrive and dig tunnels first. Then they set up prebuilt equipment (turbines, fish tanks, compost factories). Then they make sure they're using their water optimally (e.g. bottling the oxygen and hydrogen instead of flaring them).
Once that is figured out, they can stop eating MREs. Assume that working out the kinks of production takes them a year. They have dug a lot of tunnels and they've probably done some prospecting. They have huge amounts of electricity to power their equipment. They could even produce so much food that the MREs get eaten by prospectors and the city folks eat fresh food.
If they find minerals far away, they have hydrogen/electricity/methane to power some ATVs to go get ore samples. If they find a high quality vein of useful ore -- e.g. copper -- they can drill a tunnel directly to it. (Personal oxygen bottles might be useful if you have to make a long underground trip in a poorly ventilated ATV...)
11. The effortless ease of electrical engineering
But presumably there are a fair number of engineers who want to live in a self-sufficient colony. They don't need much training to function as organic farmers, given modern equipment to start them off.
Now, even an electrical engineer who can write C++ and design microchips can't build a generator without extra training. Many electrical engineers haven't touched a soldering iron since undergraduate coursework.
But I think it is possible to enumerate a list of reasonable infrastructure requirements and to go with tools that are designed to be maintainable.
One reason why I am motivated to research organic farming is that self-sufficiency is good engineering. A few days before I read Larsen's comments on the need for O-rings to fix broken power drills, I was looking at my IE 572 notes and trying to remember why I had taken an industrial engineering course. I'm not an engineer myself. But Larsen's comments inspired me to pull together a lot of thoughts on the anthropology of technology.
So Larsen, thank you. If you have any good sources on how to analyze and enumerate technological dependencies, I would be interested. To me it looks like an anthropology problem as well as an industrial engineering problem. Actually, it's like the engineering program I wanted to take which wasn't available at my school -- Systems Engineering -- a highly interdisciplinary field.
Space combat and firefights are slightly inspiring. Industrial engineering and ecology is *very* inspiring to me. I always said that the most fun part of Traveller was that it forced me to learn hexadecimal notation. This Larsen-inspired industrial engineering rant is the same kind of phenomenon -- sci-fi which inspires me to look more closely at real-world technology.
It's interesting to examine Larsen's points in detail. He initially seems excessively confident, but upon careful examination he has a very specific constraint -- he's addressing the case where relatively unskilled folks who had desk jobs in a TL 8+ society try to start over with TL 4 and no special survival training.
I could post points about wilderness survival, organic farming, renewable power, and industrial engineering until my fingers fall off, but I doubt that will interest Larsen. In fact, the main thrust of my argument will probably be of interest only to organic farmers and home power engineers, so I'll post my full argument to the real-world forums that would have some chance of being interested in it.
However, the oversimplified rough draft of my ideas might conceivably be useful to Traveller gamers who only want to simulate colony building, not do the real-life activities which resemble it. So I'll post some eleven points.
1. The basic variance in definitions
The question is not adequately defined. As Buckminster Fuller told us, technology consists of both artifacts and information -- and we can break that down further into many, many details of social structures, personal skills, tool maintenance, etc. (Incidentally, Marc Miller's linear model of tech levels is nowhere near detailed enough to satisfy my engineering-whetted appetite for detail. But you all knew that already. I'll save the linear optimization comments for another forum.)
I agree that a bunch of unemployed office workers from a TL 8 society cannot possibly survive without support.
However, if you trained them in wilderness survival and released them on a planet with abundant game, they could simply revert to hunting. And if you trained them in enough engineering, they could survive at TL 8 or so. It's possible that they *couldn't* survive at TL 4 -- they would have to go above it or below it.
2. The cost of labor
Disclaimer: maybe at TL 4. Definitely not using TL 8+.
I'll indicate some specific real-world technologies to show that food can be very, very cheap and labor can be spared on an organic farm.
The short version is: high tech organic farming can be done in less than an hour per day. Skilled engineers could easily grow enough food for themselves as a daily chore and still have their main efforts left over for engineering.
3. The irrelevance of location
As mentioned above, engineers can feed themselves given sufficient initial investment.
Location is *not* very important, and I'll explain why it isn't.
Suppose the initial landing party lands in a place with good geothermal properties, plentiful water, and seismic stability. Their first action is to drill some big tunnels -- at least one vertical tunnel to drive a geothermal power unit, plus a couple horizontal ones to house equipment and personnel.
They install their geothermal turbines and generators. Boom. More than enough electricity. No dependence on fuel, sunlight, etc. No need to build a quonset hut to house the generators -- just drill out as much space as you need. If anything, the biggest problem will be carting away all the broken rock so that there's enough room to maneuver.
Soon they're using electricity, water, and possibly atmospheric air to store their excess electricity in hydrogen form.
So location is not very important. They don't need a whole lot of raw materials. Obviously good geothermal properties are preferable to mediocre ones, and drilling has to be very cheap -- but drilling is getting cheap even in the real world. Wired Magazine recently wrote that drilling has gotten so cheap that an underground real estate boom is expected. Note geothermal drilling requires higher-quality drills that can withstand higher temperatures than normal drills.
4. The irrelevance of many (but not all) surveys
You don't need many surveys. I presume that the first farm equipment will be brought in with the humans -- including the geothermal turbines. You need hot rocks, high-quality water, and drilling equipment.
The water has to be high quality because you don't want to need to purify it much before using it for nutrition and industrial processes.
5. The possibility of extremely small populations
I recently read of an organic farm that lists its employees as "one farmer, one hired hand, and fifty billion earthworms."
I think it was on the same website that I read that food production in many primitive societies was *not* labor intensive. That's a problem for an archaeologist or anthropologist, though, and I'm interested in the industrial engineering aspect.
However, a highly diverse range of raw materials should not be needed initially.
However, given the amazing food production of organic farming, I would not surprised if it were possible to have a lot of mineral extractors in the colony, each of whom had a personal organic garden and fish-tank for food purposes.
Note that the tunnel habitation concept is ideal for food production. Electric lights can be accelerated to produce vegetable food much faster than natural sunlight. Tunnels provide very cheap, very capacious living space so that every human can have very large fish-tanks filled with a diverse range of aquatic food species, including both flora and fauna, and possibly some exotic items like spirulina.
Note that I would expect every citizen to maintain some volume of soil, if only a personal compost supply. Citizens will need to be willing to live in close proximity to a small-scale compost factory, and that may require highly motivated, highly conscientious citizens. Managing compost is not as intellectually abstract as gauge theory, but it does require a willingness to keep rats out of the compost boxes.
Note that tunnel-digging needs to be very, very cheap and water needs to be very, very available -- because compost and soil management require lots of water!
6. The easy solution to the problem of shelter
Oh, boy, a year's worth of food -- can you imagine how much nutritious compost you could get out of that? The earthworms would be eating like kings!
Put some industrial engineers and organic farmers into a nice, capacious tunnel complex with a year's worth of food, and within a year they would have high-quality soil for themselves, plus possibly some non-toxic, low-quality soil which could be safely dumped outside.
But they don't need bricks or large quantities of lumber.
These would probably hippie tree-huggers, so they would favor reforestation anyway...
7. The easy solution to roads, drainage, and sewage
As mentioned above, every hand probably produces food for an hour every day and has more than enough that way.
Roads do not need to be built. In fact, tunnels exist primarily to be lived in and not to serve as transportation.
When you live underground, you have a *lot* of volume to work with. So you can have a lot of people with personal vegetable gardens, fish-tanks, compost boxes, etc. living with lots of room within walking distance.
Drainage and sewage, of course, are the first problem solved by compost! There might be additional problems with condensation on the walls.
Air circulation might be a nontrivial problem.
Also, garbage collection would be non-trivial. Source separation would be vitally necessary.
8. The methane/biofuel solution to internal combustion problems
I feel a little guilty for using your point as a spring-board, because you're talking about TL 4 and I'm talking about modern-day organic farming.
However, I can't help but mention that methane and biofuels are an excellent renewable resource -- not that the geothermal/hydrogen system would depend on them.
Probably each individual would hand-carry their compost buckets to the neighborhood anaerobic digester -- and that would produce methane and higher-quality compost.
There are cow farms that can produce electricity from cow dung as well as milk from the cows! Is that not miraculous? Of course cows would not be suitable livestock for this settlement, but pigs might be adaptable enough.
I want to stress that organic farms have very low labor costs, so that there won't be an issue of recruiting full-time sugar-cane harvesters to produce raw materials. Everything is a raw material to an organic farmer -- so just don't waste anything, and you'll have all the raw materials that you need.
9. The effortless ease of copper wire
Copper wire will require work. But that doesn't have to be laborious. If the main population is engineers, producing copper wire will be a solved problem. They won't have to tackle it right away. (Which is a good thing, because they didn't bother to set up shop near a known copper deposit.)
They arrive and dig tunnels first. Then they set up prebuilt equipment (turbines, fish tanks, compost factories). Then they make sure they're using their water optimally (e.g. bottling the oxygen and hydrogen instead of flaring them).
Once that is figured out, they can stop eating MREs. Assume that working out the kinks of production takes them a year. They have dug a lot of tunnels and they've probably done some prospecting. They have huge amounts of electricity to power their equipment. They could even produce so much food that the MREs get eaten by prospectors and the city folks eat fresh food.
If they find minerals far away, they have hydrogen/electricity/methane to power some ATVs to go get ore samples. If they find a high quality vein of useful ore -- e.g. copper -- they can drill a tunnel directly to it. (Personal oxygen bottles might be useful if you have to make a long underground trip in a poorly ventilated ATV...)
11. The effortless ease of electrical engineering
Okay, so once again we're talking about modern engineers, not TL 8 desk jockeys trying to live with TL 4 tools.
But presumably there are a fair number of engineers who want to live in a self-sufficient colony. They don't need much training to function as organic farmers, given modern equipment to start them off.
Now, even an electrical engineer who can write C++ and design microchips can't build a generator without extra training. Many electrical engineers haven't touched a soldering iron since undergraduate coursework.
But I think it is possible to enumerate a list of reasonable infrastructure requirements and to go with tools that are designed to be maintainable.
One reason why I am motivated to research organic farming is that self-sufficiency is good engineering. A few days before I read Larsen's comments on the need for O-rings to fix broken power drills, I was looking at my IE 572 notes and trying to remember why I had taken an industrial engineering course. I'm not an engineer myself. But Larsen's comments inspired me to pull together a lot of thoughts on the anthropology of technology.
So Larsen, thank you. If you have any good sources on how to analyze and enumerate technological dependencies, I would be interested. To me it looks like an anthropology problem as well as an industrial engineering problem. Actually, it's like the engineering program I wanted to take which wasn't available at my school -- Systems Engineering -- a highly interdisciplinary field.
Space combat and firefights are slightly inspiring. Industrial engineering and ecology is *very* inspiring to me. I always said that the most fun part of Traveller was that it forced me to learn hexadecimal notation. This Larsen-inspired industrial engineering rant is the same kind of phenomenon -- sci-fi which inspires me to look more closely at real-world technology.
That's an irresponsible claim made from vague notions about a specific case for which you probably don't have any direct information. A cubicle might have network access to a nationwide logistics monitoring system.
Back when I worked in logistics, I could "see" trucks moving across two countries, down to the dock schedules and load manifests.
That's not very accurate. A bewildering profusion of low-quality consumer goods are forced onto the consumer by inefficient, planet destroying corporations. The bewildering diversity of Coke-vs.-Pepsi products serves to reduce the quality of life while purporting to raise the standard of living. Many expensive artifacts are designed to become obsolete and to be thrown into landfills because doing so raises the bottom line for various corporations.
If you say that society is supporting the consumer's work, you are slanting the issue to favor corporations. You are presenting corporations are benevolent providers of essential goods to weak, helpless, parasitic consumers -- when in fact it is the corporations who are the parasites.
Once again you seem to be presenting the consumer as an ungrateful child and the corporate parasites as benevolent adults.
It might be more accurate to say, "Because the propaganda is so thick, you have given up trying to fight for more simplicity in your life. Deep down, you would like to throw a bomb through the window of the Monsanto Corporation, but you know their security guards would shoot you before you got into range. Because the genuine worth of these products is less than zero, you give up on trying to fight the unwinnable wars."
It might be mind-boggling to most people. There are, however, academics who study it and can quantify it. I've actually solved math problems for some of them.
I suspect that anthropology would be necessary to get complete answers, but one can make a great start with industrial engineering.
I still have some of my notes from the industrial engineering class that I took to help with my logistics job. They explain how to deliver the most efficient solution.
Consumerism is *not* the most efficient solution. It is a pathologically wasteful system that coerces people into buying products they don't want and can't use.
Consumerism does not need to be mind-boggling, if one checks the numbers. For example, Americans use 10 kCal of energy to deliver 1 kCal of food to consumers. More efficient societies use something more like 4 kCal to do the same job -- and those kCal may be serving other uses besides providing food.
Many people looking at the gas station products will decide, then and there, to start acting on the advice Duane Edwards wrote in _Voluntary_Simplicity_.
<from Dupont-Dow website at http://www.dupont-dow.com/Products/Viton/viton.asp>
Viton® fluoroelastomer is the most specified fluoroelastomer, well known for its excellent (400°F/200°C) heat resistance. Viton® offers excellent resistance to aggressive fuels and chemicals...
</Dupont-Dow>
Corporations take simple tools -- such as power drills -- which can be repaired and maintained -- and they seek to replace them with more complex tools which deliver less value to the consumer and need to be replaced more often.
I doubt that a small colony would want or need to produce fluroelastomers for every single power drill. Bakelite would probably work just as well, and it would be well within the capabilities of a crude shop to produce.
Certainly a small colony cannot pursue a wasteful strategy of consumerism. That does not mean that it cannot deliver an efficient, technological life.
I had actually intended to write this post in an ingratiating style, asking you for your analysis of exactly what economic activities are genuinely necessary and how they can be quantified. Instead I will state the consensus widely held by environmentalists -- that the modern web of production is not complex in order to serve the consumers, but to exploit them, and that simplifying the web of production would result in happier consumers, a healthier environment, and better technical progress.
^ Wow, this is gonna get good! Better make some popcorn before the fireworks start!
alanb wrote:
"Alternatively, it might be best for people to start studiously ignoring this thread and the others like it."
Sir,
My thoughts exactly. Whatever points he is trying to make are so far off the topic of the thread in general and my posts in particular as to be ludicrous.
I actually downloaded his 'replies' to my ancient posts thinking they should be carefully read, only to realize he's posting about something utterly different.
It almost seemed as if Sophia the Green was back, but Mr. Walker's spelling and grammar is much better.
Sincerely,
Larsen
"Alternatively, it might be best for people to start studiously ignoring this thread and the others like it."
Sir,
My thoughts exactly. Whatever points he is trying to make are so far off the topic of the thread in general and my posts in particular as to be ludicrous.
I actually downloaded his 'replies' to my ancient posts thinking they should be carefully read, only to realize he's posting about something utterly different.
It almost seemed as if Sophia the Green was back, but Mr. Walker's spelling and grammar is much better.
Sincerely,
Larsen
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Possibly it was a waste of your bandwidth to use this board to think out loud.
A troll is one who :
1) posts impolite messages;
2) is not motivated to advance the discussion;
3) is motivated by a desire to distress the other participants.
I had genuinely been thinking a lot about why Traveller inspired me so much lately. This discussion here crystallized my understanding. The end result was of interest to me as a mathematician and environmentalist, but may not be appropriate to this forum. In the white heat of inspiration, my rhetoric went past the bounds of politeness. I assure you that my desire to advance the sciences and technics of ecology motivated me. I was not motivated by a desire to disrupt this board.
Apologies to Alanb and Larsen and everyone else I've offended for my impoliteness. I have moved the discussion to talk.environment, because I am genuinely interested in this topic and I am discussing it to advance my understanding of it. I'm not trying to elicit emotional reactions, but I did go past the bounds of netiquette in trying to get facts out of folks.
As Jay W. Forrester said, in Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems,:The mental model is fuzzy. It is incomplete. It is imprecisely stated. Furthermore, within one individual, a mental model changes with time and even during the flow of a single conversation. The human mind assembles a few relationships to fit the context of a discussion. As the subject shifts so does the model. When only a single topic is being discussed, each participant in a conversation employs a different mental model to interpret the subject. Fundamental assumptions differ but are never brought into the open. Goals are different and are left unstated. It is little wonder that compromise takes so long. And it is not surprising that consensus leads to laws and programs that fail in their objectives or produce new difficulties greater than those that have been relieved.
Red Walker explained:
"Apologies to Alanb and Larsen and everyone else I've offended for my impoliteness."
Mr. Walker,
No apologies needed, although the explanation did help.
I was rather confused by your posts. I couldn't quite grasp their link with the thread or with my ancient posts to it. They seemed to be little but a jumble of non sequitors.
I hope you do find a RPG mechanism for the detailed farming techniques you're interested in.
Sincerely,
Larsen
"Apologies to Alanb and Larsen and everyone else I've offended for my impoliteness."
Mr. Walker,
No apologies needed, although the explanation did help.
I was rather confused by your posts. I couldn't quite grasp their link with the thread or with my ancient posts to it. They seemed to be little but a jumble of non sequitors.
I hope you do find a RPG mechanism for the detailed farming techniques you're interested in.
Sincerely,
Larsen
Darn, why do people have to be so stinking civil! 
Red, if you only knew the tongue lashing Larsen is capable of producing; a true master working in his medium! AlanB ain't no light weight either; a couple of his right hooks to your arguement and your ego's going down!
Just kidding guys! Don't be so serious! It's just a game, a great game, but just a game.
Red, if you only knew the tongue lashing Larsen is capable of producing; a true master working in his medium! AlanB ain't no light weight either; a couple of his right hooks to your arguement and your ego's going down!
Just kidding guys! Don't be so serious! It's just a game, a great game, but just a game.
OK, so there's no hard feelings and all that:
Traveller, IMHO, is not a suitable system for modelling detailed engineering and all that. I'm not sure that any roleplaying system is good for that - it's not really what they are designed to do. Something like Aftermath might come closest - but I doubt that it would be particularly accurate.
Traveller has some economic systems scattered around. All of them are broken to one degree or another, but at least they are there, and work well enough for a game that is basically about action/adventure anyway.
The ability to think about different forms of social organisation is its main strength, if you want to use it as a tool for semi-serious thought experiments. Each world is potentially a distinct society, with its own ways of doing things. You can manipulate their degree of interaction (none to lots), and can ask neat "what if" questions.
But you can't expect accurate detailed economic modelling.
It doesn't do that, because it's not meant to do that. And, probably, because it's not possible to do that, given the range of variations possible.
What it does do, admirably, is allow you to play action/adventure science fiction games. That is what it was designed to do. You go beyond that at your own risk.
Traveller, IMHO, is not a suitable system for modelling detailed engineering and all that. I'm not sure that any roleplaying system is good for that - it's not really what they are designed to do. Something like Aftermath might come closest - but I doubt that it would be particularly accurate.
Traveller has some economic systems scattered around. All of them are broken to one degree or another, but at least they are there, and work well enough for a game that is basically about action/adventure anyway.
The ability to think about different forms of social organisation is its main strength, if you want to use it as a tool for semi-serious thought experiments. Each world is potentially a distinct society, with its own ways of doing things. You can manipulate their degree of interaction (none to lots), and can ask neat "what if" questions.
But you can't expect accurate detailed economic modelling.
It doesn't do that, because it's not meant to do that. And, probably, because it's not possible to do that, given the range of variations possible.
What it does do, admirably, is allow you to play action/adventure science fiction games. That is what it was designed to do. You go beyond that at your own risk.
Why thank you. I've never had any particular problem with accepting flattery gracefully.Originally posted by Ran Targas:
AlanB ain't no light weight either; a couple of his right hooks to your arguement and your ego's going down!
I've played a fair amount of RoleMaster, and it is typical of how a detail-oriented system can bog down without being particularly accurate. I enjoy Traveller more than the space-based versions of RoleMaster because Traveller manages to encapsulate a very inspiring atmosphere for me.
Traveller inspires me so much that it inspires me to make my own sims.
However, once I get inspired and start making imaginary worlds, I start leaning on operations research pretty heavily and the whole enterprise starts looking less like entertainment and more like pure mathematics. It would be an abuse of terminology to call my games RPGs.
I've also made mathematical models for real-life engineers, and of course they're so boring that no one would look at them unless they were paid to do so. I certainly hope my economic sims will be fun enough that people will download them, try them, and tell their friends the URL.
For the moment, I'll try to talk less and code more -- but if any of these projects gets to beta, I'll host the freeware at a download site somewhere and post the URL.
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