Month: December 2011

Trope-a-Day (R): Alternative Calendar

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Alternative Calendar: Several.  There’s the regular Harmonious Calendar, which is based on Eliera’s – as the homeworld and the throneworld – cycles, but also serves as the de jure calendar for the purposes of the financial year, official record-keeping, and suchlike.  In turn, it’s based on weavetime, which is a universal time standard which simply expands the regular pulse (about 0.75s) into kilopulses, megapulses, gigapulses, etc., for scientific purposes, and also ease of making frame corrections.  That standard has also spawned the difference between the absolute pulse (for values of absolute defined by a consensus of stargate timebase beacons), a.k.a. “empire time“, the local pulse, a.k.a. “wall-clock time“, and “journey time“, which is mission-elapsed time aboard lighthugger starships and thus dissonates quite remarkably from empire time.  And, returning to more simple things, just about every planet, moon, drift, and city-ship has its own local calendar that matches up rather better with what its orbital cycles are actually doing.

“What time is it?” and “What day is it?” can be interesting questions to answer, sometimes.

Trope-a-Day: Sealed Evil in a Can

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Sealed Evil in a Can: Probably more than a few of them, buried in ancient ruins and archives.  A few are physical artifacts, but most are information – recipes either for software or for assemblers.  And rather inconveniently, they’re mixed in with not-much-really in a can, incomprehension in a can, and enough wealth in a can that there’s always someone willing to try for a big score by cooking up said recipes, and hoping they don’t make something smarter and eviler than they are.

Hope is rarely sufficient.

Trope-a-Day (R): Gone Horribly Right

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Gone Horribly Right: An unfortunately large number of experiments with recursively self-improving seed AI are probably the most significant examples, here, for which see that half of the entry under AI Is A Crapshoot.  And for the consequences – well, there are quite the wide variety there, but for a good sampling of the more amusing ones – i.e., the ones that don’t simply get everyone killed immediately – why not pop over to the transhumanist wiki and read your way through the Friendly AI Critical Failure Table:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/Friendly_AI_Critical_Failure_Table

This sort of thing happens on an infrequent yet semi-regular basis.

(The one that happens frequently enough to deserve its own special entry in “civilization-ending stupidities”, though, is when some evangelist-hegemonist religion gets hold of an AI seed and decides to improve its success rate by programming the machine with the Literal Word of God.  Even leaving aside the violations of free will implicit in conversion-by-basilisk-hack, the high probability of a “NOW there is a God!” moment as the growing seed AI tries to reconcile the Literal Word it’s been programmed to believe with the actual universe, and so forth, the end-state in which everyone gets condemned to its lovingly detailed virtual Hell for failure to perfectly comply with the deity’s moral rules in deed and thought every single moment of every day would be a hysterically funny piece of schadenfreude were it not one of the most horrific things ever to happen anywhere.

And yet there’s always some new sucker lined up to set this one off, because clearly they have the real Literal Word of God, so it can’t end in a disaster when they try it…)

Trope-a-Day: Living Forever Is Awesome

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Living Forever Is Awesome: This is, essentially, the default position of the immortalists, which include all of the natural immortals.  There are so many places to go, people to see, things to learn, things to do, it’s impossible to become truly bored… and, oh, yes, do see also Eternal Love, okay?  Plus, of course, that whole infinite time horizon that promises no matter how grandiose the dream, you can almost certainly live to see it through, and take time out to have some fun along the way into the bargain.  Immortality: does not suck.

Drabble: There’s Always A Winter Festival

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(Here, have a vaguely Christmas drabble.)

On ancient Eliera, they roast meat in the snow and light fires for the return of the second sun.

At the peak of Kythera’s deep winter, they dine in the Deep Vaults while robots above set the atmosphere on fire.

In drift-habitats across the Worlds, the Periday’s wild revels attend the long, slow fall back towards the sun.

And for the infomorphs dwelling in the computronium moons of Corícal, each v-year they reshuffle process priorities, giving first claim on new cycle-capacity to those who freed up resources when needed.

Have you been naughty, or nice(1)?

Trope-a-Day (R): All Planets Are Earthlike

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All Planets Are Earthlike: So very averted.  Actually, I think somewhat-terraformed Mars-like worlds are in a slight statistical majority among the Empire’s inhabited planets, but there’s plenty of other non-gas-giant like inhabited worlds as well, and that’s certainly not counting all the non-technically-inhabited ones.  (And even the relatively Earth-like — well, contextually, Eliera-like — ones have required some pantropic adaptations of their inhabitants for them to be truly comfortable there.)

National Branding

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Have there been any existing cases or situations (dear lazyweb), of branding or trademark issues where the names of nations or cities are concerned? (Apart from all the obvious ones we ignore, that is.)

I was thinking of this recently with regard to all those cities, and planets, of course, in SF, called New Something.. If J Random Interstellar Colony, set up by some private group, decides to call itself New America, does this current America have any recourse? Especially if it’s an ideologically unfortunate colony, or it had plans to use – or is using – the name itself?

And while it wasn’t a problem when they named New York (or indeed New Amsterdam) after those original cities, or indeed with our forty-odd Springfields, or a source of tension between Kansas City and Kansas City – or to pick a more separated example, Portland and Portland, if someone were today – or in a few hundred years time on another planet – to open a second New York and start touting for financial and commercial business, might the first one have a perfectly reasonable argument that this does constitute “passing off” in the legal sense?

I’m fairly certain there are lots of places in the Eldraeverse with a ™ in their name for this sort of reason, but I’m curious to know if it has any analogs in actuality.

Trope-a-Day: Eternal Love

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Eternal Love: Played straight – with the proviso that being an entire society of natural immortals, they understand exactly how hard it is to make a relationship work over the longest term, and so invest in cultural features designed to help with that, including marrying late, long and intimate engagements, a degree of cohabitation, short-term contract relationships as “trial runs”, etc., etc., before you even think about putting your seal on an indefinite-term relationship, and also includes a good deal of rather pointed cultural commentary on the obligation to work to make it work in the absence of Magic Relationship Fairies, and so forth, afterwards.

Trope-a-Day: Little Green Man in a Can

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Little Green Man in a Can: Rarely done for the sake of secrecy and wonderment, but quite common among those species which are uncomfortable (or, well, dead) in the modal atmosphere and gravity of the Associated Worlds, and which aren’t comfortable for whatever reason with the notion of pantropic adaptation, or having themselves instantiated into a body better suiting local environmental conditions.

Trope-a-Day (R): The Alliance

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The Alliance: The Conclave of Galactic Polities.  Which sounds like it runs the Galaxy, actually in theory runs the relatively small chunk of the Galaxy called the Associated Worlds, and in actual practice does so slightly less well than the United Nations runs Earth.  But it is spectacularly less pretentious about it, which helps, as does the fact that at least four of the five star nations powerful enough to get a seat on the Presidium agree on – if nothing else – that while they like its authority kept solid enough to make communications, trade, IP law, borders, and the conventions of civilized warfare work, they also like it kept tenuous enough so as not to significantly interfere with their arguably sacred sovereign right to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they feel like doing it, as long as it doesn’t totally screw up the interstellar status quo.

Trope-a-Day (R): Alien Invasion

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Alien Invasion: Happens a lot less often than you might think.  Seriously, planetary invasion across interstellar distances is Really Damn Hard (the number of units in the field you need to control and occupy a planet populated by billions alone is pretty astronomical, even if they are all self-replicating war machines).  There’s no point in doing it for the resources, since if you have even a quarter of the tech you need to mount said invasion, your space infrastructure means you’re already swimming in resources.  It’s mostly the preserve of Scary Dogmatists and the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms, and no-one takes those people seriously, particularly because their backward socioforms tend to hinder them from being serious players.

Which isn’t to say that the prospect of one of those terrifying postsophont powers wafting in a half-kilo of replicant neurovirus and pwning all your brains doesn’t keep strategic defense planners up late at night, but so far, those guys haven’t shown any particular urge to earn an entry in the Top Ten Galactic Atrocities List.

Night Thoughts

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The good thing about being self-employed is that when you can’t sleep, and have finished your book, and played every game you own, and fiddled with all of your apps, and come to the End of the Internet, you have the option of getting up and do something useful.

(Or you can sit around and write speculation about how to cook in microgravity, which is what I’m actually doing, but at least the other option exists.)

Trope-a-Day: Scary Dogmatic Aliens

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Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Mostly averted, inasmuch as despite all the wide intellectual, cultural and biological differences between species, most of them aren’t blessed with an overwhelming urge to bring it forcibly to the rest of the universe.  Well, no more so than, say, 21st-century humans, anyway.

Played straighter by, say, the skrandar (of the Aliens as Nazis type, had the Nazis been into building berserker probes, inasmuch as they wanted all sophont life other than them destroyed); the Leviathan Consciousness (of the Aliens as Communists type, had the communists been motivated by the desire to save energy by eliminating redundant thought processes), and, in a twisted and non-expansionist sense, the Equality Concord, although what the Equalitarians have done to themselves scares the crap out of everyone; the Theomachy of Galia (of the Aliens as Religious Fundamentalists type, except they’re not so much Scary Dogmatic Aliens as Laughable Dogmatic Aliens, being a standing joke to all more sensibly organized polities – and when I say more sensibly organized polities, I’m including the space fascists and the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms); and the Trikhad Conquest (of the Aliens as Conquistadores type, as the leading member of said notional League – although again, generally closer to Laughable Dogmatic Aliens, given how well interstellar colonialism usually works).

Most of the Great Powers with definite ideologies tend to be seen this way, too, just because power is scary; including the Voniensa Republic (who are certainly smug enough and unashamed about their desire for ideological promulgation, even if about as good at doublethinking this as the modern Terran West) and the Empire (who are at least as smug, but at least in the public sector are for the most part publically self-aware about the paradox inherent in “conquering for freedom”).

Trope-a-Day (R): Alien Sky

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Alien Sky: Well, yes.  Particularly of note: Eliera’s weird not-a-horizon on account of being just flat enough; the cool accretion-disk effects of Mírlan, which has a pulsar in the same system; Revallá, which is a gas-giant moon and has that in the sky; Galáré’s planetary ring; the double planet system of Isshára-Léstára; and the giant boiling red suns of pretty much any planet in an MV-star’s system.

Also the junklight in virtually all long-inhabited planetary systems; the light reflecting from hundreds or thousands of years’ worth of satellites, habitats, and orbital platforms.

Trope-a-Day (R): Alien Arts Are Appreciated

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Alien Arts Are Appreciated: There is an entire industry involved in selling the ultratech equivalents of opera glasses necessary to perceive the really alien arts, and teaching courses in their proper appreciation.  Which may, under some circumstances, involve having new perceptual routines, background information, and indeed, gnostic overlays containing entire worldviews, grafted into your mind-state.

But, in general, as everyone is sharing one universe with the same physical, ethical, and economic laws, there’s usually enough overlap that everyone can find something to appreciate in most other species’ cultures.

First example that comes to mind: Imperial watchvid connoisseurs would appreciate Firefly, even if a lot of them would secretly prefer a trigraphic remake.

Trope-a-Day: Lightning Gun

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Lightning Gun: Electrolasers.  Commonly used to stun (which is not as harmless as it might sounds, because, y’know, high voltage doesn’t just stun) and to screw up electrically based machinery.  Work on actual physical principles, involving laser-ionizing a path through the atmosphere for the electricity to be dumped down, and as such are vulnerable to problems resulting from said actual physics, like vacuum, uncooperative atmospheres, and excessive humidity.  And firing them while standing in water or in a metal-lined room is not the smartest idea you’ll ever have, although it might be the last one.