Trope-a-Day: In Space Everyone Can See Your Face

In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Averted, for all the practical reasons mentioned.  In practice, augmented reality v-tags – actually, the standard public identity tag – tell you who is who, and those who want to can use supplementary v-tags to indicate their current emotional state, etc., and perform other expressive tasks.

(The running lights on spacecraft also mentioned?  There for close orbital operations and for the benefit of the crew when they have to go clamber about on the hull to do maintenance, including such things as delineating the – very hot – radiative striping so you don’t accidentally step on it.  You can turn it off quite happily outside those circumstances, although a lot of captains don’t simply because with the energy budget of your average modern spacecraft1, there’s really no point in making the trivial saving of turning the lights off.  Besides, someone might have a telescope aimed at you, and programming this gorgeous paint job wasn’t cheap, y’know?)


1. i.e., running on fusion, with thus-generous power budget. This was not the historical case back in the fuel-cells-and-solar-panels days.

Trope-a-Day: Digital Avatar/Myself My Avatar

Digital Avatar/Myself My Avatar: Ubiquitous in the Empire and other noetic societies; as mentioned under Body Surf, people fairly regularly swap bodies for work, for visiting hostile environments, or just for the hell of it; or issue them to forked copies or fragments of themselves.  Of course, that may well not count for the purposes of this trope, since it’s a body-swap rather than remote control, but equally, the same bodies can be and are teleoperated remotely by people – especially infomorphs – when the communications lag is not a problem.  Also, of course, avatar instantiations are common in virtualities used for everything from work through commerce to entertainment, and in those cases, equally, one’s mind is not in the virtual body in any sort of meaningful way.

(It’s really quite hard to tell, in general, without checking the public identity tag for the long version of their name-identifier, even though it is a custom for teleoperators of physical bodies to refer to themselves through them as “this extension” rather than “me”.)