Originally posted by kafka47:
I wonder if in the aftermath of the Solomani Rim War, that one could model the rim polity, not so, much as a Nazi state but the Confederacy prior the outbreak of the American Civil War. With humans being akin to the owners of plantation, not so much as enslaving alien populations but assuming roles of guardianship and trusteeship, until said races could have been integrated into regular human society. The war, leads to a backlash philosophy, and the Solomani turn racialist theory, into racialist practices leading down the slippery slope.
Seen the mockumenary, the CSA (Confederate States of America), might this be how the Solomani Sphere evolves? Not read, the Harrison (and others) counter-histories, what do they say about the evolution of a CSA and what inferences can we draw out for Traveller?
I think the most natural evolution of a "slave economy" in Traveller would be with robots.
Imagine a planet whose population is entirely humanoid robots. The robots were originally built by an ancient race of humans that subsequently became extinct or they uploaded their minds into robot bodies, so they could enjoy the longevity and durability of a robotic existance. I don't mean their brains are placed in robotic bodies, but their brain patterns are scanned descructively and encoded into electronic robot brains so it simulates the activities of a human brain.
These robots lay dormant for many centuries, carefully preserved, then some explorer lands on the planet, he pokes around and inadvertantly activates all the robots, the manufacturer's subroutines kick in and the robots automatically obey the commands of the human explorer. Robots activate other robots, the robots start repairing factories and they start building more robots. The human brain functions haven't been activated yet, so they are basically servile robots which have human brain patterns stored in them, but not running at the moment. The explorer sees dollar signs, the robots do what ever he tells them to, because they are automatically programmed to obey the nearest human in the absence of other directives. What a great thing this human guy has, he becomes the defactor leader of a whole planet with billions of humanoid robots at his beck and call, he orders that more be produced, and the programming of the robots and their human brain patterns are all duplicated with the production of each new robot that rolls of the factory floor. The owner starts a company and begins exporting these robots to other worlds. The human memory patterns are duplicated unknowingly with all the other robotic software and for a number of generations there is no problem, the robots spread to the whole sector and the man who discovered them becomes very rich, although he doesn't know how to program them, and can't be bothered with the details of how they are built.
After a while and a number of production runs, the human memory patterns which have been heretofore unactivated start exhibiting themselves, the robots start exibiting free will and self-determination. It turns out that the original flesh and blood humans who built these robots were very much afraid of them, they produced a virus that shut them all down, but did not destroy their programming. There is nothing particularly menacing about these robots except that they gradually over time exhibit a desire for freedom and self-determination, and the flesh and blood humans shut them all down because they are afraid of being replaced by them, unfortunately their society was so heavily dependent of robotics, that they couldn't maintain their technology without them. They abandoned their planet as their economy collapsed and travelled to a number or nearby worlds where they resettled, dispersing their population, at a much lower tech level.
Unfortunately, witht the explorer's discovery, history begins to repeat itself.
