Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
That's because we haven't hit the limits of laws of physics, yet.
And, even that is circumscribed by our then current industrial base.
And, even that is circumscribed by our then current industrial base.
OTU is 3000 years in the future
- Thread starter ady
- Start date
Probably. It just must be remembered that plasma is matter; (the PGMP is "High Energy" because of the temperature, not because it is composed of a bolt of "energy"). That means your plasma bolt must have a material that is superheated into completely ionized gas to form the bolt. You will need some source for that.
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My take, which may not line up with others' ideas:
TERRA 3K Hence
I imagine that no nation states of the early 21st Century would survive into the far future. The Holy See will still be around, of course, but it isn't a state. Vatican City might still exist as a micro-state, but future political divisions of the Italian peninsula could be wildly different from the present-day
The civilization of China may still exist, but a civilization and a state are not the same thing.
No US, no EU, no Russian Federation, no PRC, none of it survives three millennia. Our present-day geopolitics are ancient history.
Global macro-culture with Anglic as the lingua franca seems likely. That isn't to say regional and minority cultures might not survive.
Beijing, whatever it is called if it still exists, may look a lot like Mexico City or Paris, after three thousand years of globalization, cultural diffusion, migration, and cross-national intermarriage.
TERRAN ORIGIN CULTURES ON OTHER WORLDS
I suspect many cultures long extinct on Terra have survived and evolved in extrasolar colonies. We see this in published materials. But they aren't preserved as flies in amber, generally. Some may consciously draw on Terra's past for projects of cultural unity or renewal, but the results will never be a simple copy of the distant past.
The Principality of Caledon in Reaver's Deep may deliberately preserve various ancient 'Scottish' things, but I doubt it looks anything much like Scotland today.
New cultures rise over time. The Sword Worlds are a good example. Nordic, Vilani, and other elements combining to create a new culture or cluster of cultures. And very different from present-day Denmark or Sweden.
The sea-nomad guys from one of the modules are another good example. They aren't simply 20th Century Turks.
And it's not as if the Vilani or other races haven't undergone cultural changes. I'm concentrating on Terrans/Solomani because we all have a basis for discussion in real history and anthropology.
SOLOMANI CULTURE
I think the emergence of a Solomani culture began in the pre-ISW period, with globalizing trends and cheap transport and telecomms. Over time, this culture has developed on Terra, splintered in a diaspora, and been reimagined and instrumentalized by the Solomani Movement.
Core features include the nuclear family, humanism (sometimes secular, but quite often coupled with religious beliefs), a sense of manifest destiny, militarism, and meritocracy.
WORLD RELIGIONS
I will tread lightly here, given forum rules. I expect most major world religions of today will still exist someplace in the time of the Third Imperium, but with changes in the organization and practice of some and with new religious movements, syncretism, alien philosophies, and so on all part of the picture.
I don't go as far as Herbert does in Dune because the timescale is shorter.
I have provided some notes on a future (fictional) religion elsewhere.
TERRA 3K Hence
I imagine that no nation states of the early 21st Century would survive into the far future. The Holy See will still be around, of course, but it isn't a state. Vatican City might still exist as a micro-state, but future political divisions of the Italian peninsula could be wildly different from the present-day
The civilization of China may still exist, but a civilization and a state are not the same thing.
No US, no EU, no Russian Federation, no PRC, none of it survives three millennia. Our present-day geopolitics are ancient history.
Global macro-culture with Anglic as the lingua franca seems likely. That isn't to say regional and minority cultures might not survive.
Beijing, whatever it is called if it still exists, may look a lot like Mexico City or Paris, after three thousand years of globalization, cultural diffusion, migration, and cross-national intermarriage.
TERRAN ORIGIN CULTURES ON OTHER WORLDS
I suspect many cultures long extinct on Terra have survived and evolved in extrasolar colonies. We see this in published materials. But they aren't preserved as flies in amber, generally. Some may consciously draw on Terra's past for projects of cultural unity or renewal, but the results will never be a simple copy of the distant past.
The Principality of Caledon in Reaver's Deep may deliberately preserve various ancient 'Scottish' things, but I doubt it looks anything much like Scotland today.
New cultures rise over time. The Sword Worlds are a good example. Nordic, Vilani, and other elements combining to create a new culture or cluster of cultures. And very different from present-day Denmark or Sweden.
The sea-nomad guys from one of the modules are another good example. They aren't simply 20th Century Turks.
And it's not as if the Vilani or other races haven't undergone cultural changes. I'm concentrating on Terrans/Solomani because we all have a basis for discussion in real history and anthropology.
SOLOMANI CULTURE
I think the emergence of a Solomani culture began in the pre-ISW period, with globalizing trends and cheap transport and telecomms. Over time, this culture has developed on Terra, splintered in a diaspora, and been reimagined and instrumentalized by the Solomani Movement.
Core features include the nuclear family, humanism (sometimes secular, but quite often coupled with religious beliefs), a sense of manifest destiny, militarism, and meritocracy.
WORLD RELIGIONS
I will tread lightly here, given forum rules. I expect most major world religions of today will still exist someplace in the time of the Third Imperium, but with changes in the organization and practice of some and with new religious movements, syncretism, alien philosophies, and so on all part of the picture.
I don't go as far as Herbert does in Dune because the timescale is shorter.
I have provided some notes on a future (fictional) religion elsewhere.
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Of course, the Referee can hardly be expected to extrapolate 3K years of cultural change and account for all the aliens and other branches of Humaniti. He has a game to run.
I'd say the OTU setting runs so far into the future and includes so many aliens and variations of Humanity that almost any changes that are plausible within the technology of the world in question and within basic human nature (allowing for alterations of that though genetic editing, evolution on separate worlds since the Ancients moved a population, and so on) could be used in play without straining my suspension of disbelief.
That includes worlds that have cultures not hugely dissimilar from cultures that exist on our world today. It's a ginormous universe and may contain many possible cultural patterns and variations.
The 20th Century is about as distant in time for people in the 'Classic OTU' as the late Bronze Age is to us.
I would change the names of multiple cities and regions on Terra, to suggest the long span of time that has passed.
I'd say the OTU setting runs so far into the future and includes so many aliens and variations of Humanity that almost any changes that are plausible within the technology of the world in question and within basic human nature (allowing for alterations of that though genetic editing, evolution on separate worlds since the Ancients moved a population, and so on) could be used in play without straining my suspension of disbelief.
That includes worlds that have cultures not hugely dissimilar from cultures that exist on our world today. It's a ginormous universe and may contain many possible cultural patterns and variations.
The 20th Century is about as distant in time for people in the 'Classic OTU' as the late Bronze Age is to us.
I would change the names of multiple cities and regions on Terra, to suggest the long span of time that has passed.
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Traveller76
SOC-9
I have used an alternate history website for cultural ideas for online geopolitical games. Also, all those historical or authentic societies may have incomplete records for cultures 500 or 1000 years in the past. See the game of telephone or history myth videos.
Reminds me of the Buck Rogers television series, where Buck was explaining to the museum curator what all the stuff from the past was or did.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Culture.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
The Arizona university Garbage Project went through modern garbage dumps with the idea of calibrating human behavior with actual material found in quantities and order. They were often able to precisely date older levels with newspapers that were still readable, and in other instances do polls with people whose trash they inventoried.
In many cases what they found was counterintuitive to expectation or literally the opposite of what was polled. A sobering reality check to try and avoid canticle of Leibowitz bad pattern matching outcomes.
en.wikipedia.org
In many cases what they found was counterintuitive to expectation or literally the opposite of what was polled. A sobering reality check to try and avoid canticle of Leibowitz bad pattern matching outcomes.
Tucson Garbage Project - Wikipedia
Even if you have a surviving primary source in the original format and can read the language, you might have major problems interpreting it 3k plus years later. Too much missing context.
And the vast amounts of slop and nonsense that fill the 'World Wide Web' in our time may confuse matters even further for future historians, depending on what out of all that rather ephemeral mass of information ends up being preserved. People today have trouble telling what's real and what is BS. Imagine trying to sift through fragmentary logs of a long-dead 'net thousands of years later. With inevitable accumulation of errors, data corruption, and mistaken notes or commentary appended to the files...
Many things about life and events during Rule of Man or the Long Night may be very murky.
A historian or archaeologist could make for a fun Patron encounter.
And the vast amounts of slop and nonsense that fill the 'World Wide Web' in our time may confuse matters even further for future historians, depending on what out of all that rather ephemeral mass of information ends up being preserved. People today have trouble telling what's real and what is BS. Imagine trying to sift through fragmentary logs of a long-dead 'net thousands of years later. With inevitable accumulation of errors, data corruption, and mistaken notes or commentary appended to the files...
Many things about life and events during Rule of Man or the Long Night may be very murky.
A historian or archaeologist could make for a fun Patron encounter.
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Octanes can stand in for midichlorians.
Darth Sidious is the banker.
And either the McCoys or the Hatfields would be the Sith.
Jethro would be the chosen one.
Darth Sidious is the banker.
And either the McCoys or the Hatfields would be the Sith.
Jethro would be the chosen one.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I very much doubt it, we can translate and understand languages over 3,000 years old now. Unless there is some sort of cataclysm then all the stored context data from today and the next 3,000 years will still be available. By then AI will make translation trivial.
Go to priimary sources and look at the politics of authors. Discount the revisionist nonsense.
Why would they be fragments... there is no disaster that occurs to Terra in Traveller's future history
Not on Earth, Earth was never affected in the way Sylea (who invented the whole Long Night paradigm) was.
Very much so.
RE incomplete records:
The means of storage for electronic archives are subject to decay and maintenance issues. Servers don't last forever. At some point, information has to be printed out or stored on other media, and that media can degrade over time. And changes to new systems may require a choice about what to keep and what to dump.
So, unless someone is going to engrave many billions of emails and posts, all the online news stories, wikis, etc. on golden disks stacked many miles high, a lot of that stuff is going to vanish over time. In three thousand years, I expect most of it to be gone.
But your take on the OTU might include very well-preserved and incredibly extensive archives on Terra. It's your universe!
Have you read Necromancer, by Gordon R Dickson?
Bias:
Looking for and understanding bias is one of the first thing one learns in a historiography course. Our biases as much as the source author's.
Revisionism:
I understand you (Mike) mean it in the negative way, referring to scholars who falsify evidence or advance bad faith arguments in order to serve some political or social agenda. And that really happens. It is not good.
But revision is not a dirty word. Revision based on new information, on new ways to analyze or consider sources, new analytical tools, a fresh approach, the input of the sciences, and so on, is absolutely vital to the discipline of history.
Narratives and agenda:
This gets into narrative. Since the advent of postmodernism, grand narratives of history have, been called into question and partially abandoned among scholars. Yet such narratives flourish anyway. I think this is because people use these big stories to make sense of the past and to justify their present beliefs and future plans. I mean 'myths' of Progress, or nationalism, various political ideologies, religious or secular teleology.
I will avoid giving any real-world examples, because this would lead off-topic and violate forum rules.
Instead, let's consider whether state-supported historians of the Rule of Man might have, in many cases, stressed certain facts over others and even distorted the record to present the Ziru Sirka as corrupt, decadent, badly in need of reform. It would be in the interests of the RoM regime to present its foundation in the best light.
Maybe revisionists came along later and argued the First Imperium was actually doing pretty well until the Terran Federation gov't unleased the Plague of Dingir, a terrible war crime. And they might have evidence for that argument.
(GURPS ISW mentions the possibility of a bioengineered plague)
The means of storage for electronic archives are subject to decay and maintenance issues. Servers don't last forever. At some point, information has to be printed out or stored on other media, and that media can degrade over time. And changes to new systems may require a choice about what to keep and what to dump.
So, unless someone is going to engrave many billions of emails and posts, all the online news stories, wikis, etc. on golden disks stacked many miles high, a lot of that stuff is going to vanish over time. In three thousand years, I expect most of it to be gone.
But your take on the OTU might include very well-preserved and incredibly extensive archives on Terra. It's your universe!
Have you read Necromancer, by Gordon R Dickson?
Bias:
Looking for and understanding bias is one of the first thing one learns in a historiography course. Our biases as much as the source author's.
Revisionism:
I understand you (Mike) mean it in the negative way, referring to scholars who falsify evidence or advance bad faith arguments in order to serve some political or social agenda. And that really happens. It is not good.
But revision is not a dirty word. Revision based on new information, on new ways to analyze or consider sources, new analytical tools, a fresh approach, the input of the sciences, and so on, is absolutely vital to the discipline of history.
Narratives and agenda:
This gets into narrative. Since the advent of postmodernism, grand narratives of history have, been called into question and partially abandoned among scholars. Yet such narratives flourish anyway. I think this is because people use these big stories to make sense of the past and to justify their present beliefs and future plans. I mean 'myths' of Progress, or nationalism, various political ideologies, religious or secular teleology.
I will avoid giving any real-world examples, because this would lead off-topic and violate forum rules.
Instead, let's consider whether state-supported historians of the Rule of Man might have, in many cases, stressed certain facts over others and even distorted the record to present the Ziru Sirka as corrupt, decadent, badly in need of reform. It would be in the interests of the RoM regime to present its foundation in the best light.
Maybe revisionists came along later and argued the First Imperium was actually doing pretty well until the Terran Federation gov't unleased the Plague of Dingir, a terrible war crime. And they might have evidence for that argument.
(GURPS ISW mentions the possibility of a bioengineered plague)
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gchuck
SOC-12
My player, is a film 'buff'. As a result, the main PC has a rather larger than 'average' collection of twentieth and twenty-first century flats, or 2D 'movies', digitized and shown regularly at the local theatre in the 'Star-town'. The predominant comment from 'first-time' attendees is; "What does THAT mean?" Or the much more fun; "Why does the 'bad' guy keep calling them 'Meddling kids'?"
IMTU, Ganglic (sp?), I seem to remember reading somewhere, is just the 'evolutionary' child of English, and not that difficult to parse out. Until you get into 'sociological' references.
IMTU, Ganglic (sp?), I seem to remember reading somewhere, is just the 'evolutionary' child of English, and not that difficult to parse out. Until you get into 'sociological' references.
IMTU, it is as difficult ''Galanglic'' speakers to comprehend 20th Century English as it is for a modern English-speaker to read or hear and understand Beowulf in the original language. Probably more so, given that the separation in time is three times as long! Specialists with training in archaic language--sure. But not most people.
Vowel shifts, changes in idiom, changes in orthography and grammar, loan words from non-Terran languages, changes in the meanings of words--take 3k plus years of that and you are looking at something really different from our present-day English.
I think a great deal of Vilani language elements entered the stream of Anglic during the Rule of Man.
The Solomani Party might even be conducting linguistic purges, to purify Anglic!
Old 'flats' as you say, might be dubbed to help people understand them.
But languages may not have changed a whole lot IYTU. What seems most fun and most plausible? Definitely something for the Referee to consider.
As Mike notes, programs may assist in translation. That could be handy if the travellers come across ancient media that contains valuable or important information. And missing the cultural context, a possibility which you note, might cause the PCs to misunderstand even a technically correct literal translation.
The 'Classical' form of Anglic would, I'd guess, be that dialect used on Sylea at the dawn of the Third Imperium, over a thousand years ago. Which is further in the future from our time than Julius Caesar is in our past!
Imperial Year 0 is A.D. 4521!
Vowel shifts, changes in idiom, changes in orthography and grammar, loan words from non-Terran languages, changes in the meanings of words--take 3k plus years of that and you are looking at something really different from our present-day English.
I think a great deal of Vilani language elements entered the stream of Anglic during the Rule of Man.
The Solomani Party might even be conducting linguistic purges, to purify Anglic!
Old 'flats' as you say, might be dubbed to help people understand them.
But languages may not have changed a whole lot IYTU. What seems most fun and most plausible? Definitely something for the Referee to consider.
As Mike notes, programs may assist in translation. That could be handy if the travellers come across ancient media that contains valuable or important information. And missing the cultural context, a possibility which you note, might cause the PCs to misunderstand even a technically correct literal translation.
The 'Classical' form of Anglic would, I'd guess, be that dialect used on Sylea at the dawn of the Third Imperium, over a thousand years ago. Which is further in the future from our time than Julius Caesar is in our past!
Imperial Year 0 is A.D. 4521!
| 4,521 A.D. |
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Artificial intelligence programmes will remaster them into three dee, as well as increase the resolution.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
That could be as much as a cultural question, as well as a technological one.
War tends to be great for technological development and innovation, while consumerism encourages mass production and refinement.
War tends to be great for technological development and innovation, while consumerism encourages mass production and refinement.
