I've often wondered about this as well.

One of the things I think about is, just how many people do you need to sustain any TL?

At TL0 you can probably hold all the knowledge of how to do everything in one person's head (this is a guess. I don’t know enough about it, but I said 1 person to make the point)
By TL2 you can write a bunch of books (The Encyclopaedia Britannica) to hold all the knowledge necessary, and need a society of about 5 million
By TL8 you probably need 5 or 6 billion people to have enough specialists in their fields to be able to research, invent, produce, all the stuff you need
By TL10 you probably need 100 billion? Possibly across multiple star systems, or one binary star system with planets about both stars
By TL12 a subsector?
By TL15? Who knows? A domain? multiple domains?

And that would be to get to those TLs. If you have already done those TL you wouldn’t need as many people. The knowledge is already there you don’t have to find it out. i.e. you know about bacteria @ TL0, you know how stars create energy @ TL0 and how to create a fusion reactor @ TL0, you just can't build a spherical tokamak.

So how many people do you need to sustain a TL? Could you sustain TL8 with just 100 Million people? Not can you sustain it with imports from out system. But how many people do you need to keep sovereign capability for TL8 across everything?

There is a significant difference in researching the TL to produce it an just producing it if you have the knowledge. For example Russia and the atomic bomb and China with stealth tech. Once you have stolen the knowledge it's orders of magnitude easier to make it, and you can make and innovate at a lower technology than was needed to find the knowledge. i.e. you can create a space suit @ TL4 or 3 because you have the knowledge of vacuum and space. Or you can create the paper clip at TL1 you don’t need to wait until TL3 for someone to innovate it.

At higher technologies with replication you probably just need to be able to find mine/provide the raw material and the existing infrastructure will be able to create parts for it's own repair and/or create "other stuff" for what you may need. But can you keep a sovereign capability across all of TL10 with 3,000 people? I'm going to guess not.

So for those systems where you have 500 people @ TL3, believable.
50,000 @ TL5 possible maybe?
For those systems where you have 30 billion people @ TL6, not a chance ... there are going to be 100's millions of people with access to the knowledge that are going to drive TL change extremely quickly probably close to the carrying capacity of the population. So if 30 Billion people can sustain sovereign capability across all of TL12 comfortably then that's probably where they are going to be.

Then add in free trade across systems, and I can't see how you wouldn’t increase TL to the carrying capacity of your population, or higher. You might only have to rely of a minimal set of imports to keep a population base at a high TL than your population could comfortable hold a sovereign capability at.

IMTU the area is coming out the other side of a war of complete attrition. i.e. the other side of Hard Times, or the Long Night, where the TL of the sector has regressed to what I think are reasonable carrying capacities of populations in the systems.

So I agree with you Jim I can’t see how the Imperium could have TL stagnation in the way it has been portrayed across centuries. I can’t see the Nobles not wanting to increase their system's (and thus their) wealth by just technological innovation. You wouldn't need significant investment either, you can generate productivity and wealth just by using the innovations someone else has already thought of, and then put that generated wealth into infrastructure improvements, and then go around again. And you can also leverage higher technologies. Want to build a railway on your TL3 world? higher/buy/lease/borrow a TL13 construction bot to do the labour for you. It will be much cheaper/quicker and to a higher quality than you could do with the capability in system.

Best regards,

Ewan
--
For the fallen in the cause of the free:
 "When I go home I will tell of them and say,
 For our tomorrow, They gave their today."

 My spelling is entirerly due to dyslexia, typos, and poetic license

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxxx@simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Sent: 15 March 2023 17:40
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Subject: Re: [TML] Technological Diffusion in Traveller

I'm doing a lot of writing about Carmel (Deneb/Praetoria 0604) lately, playing with all this stuff.
And I've been looking at the Maker rules on the Traveller Wiki. And stuff from AotI about this kind of thing.
There should be a lot more tech growth.... you're right there.
But.
Something's slowing it down.

The issues as I see them are:

1) Cultural fallout from the Long Night: Once upon a time, we had high tech, but needed parts from elsewhere. Then the ships stopped and everybody died.  We have nursery rhymes now-a-days that trace back to the Black Plague. Some things make a huge imprint on society, where they won't upgrade past what can be made right here.

2) People are, for the most part, lazy and often stupid. There's a lot going on, and infrastructure isn't fun to upgrade. Go wonder about a glass of tap water in Flint, Michigan. The technology to fix it is literally present just down the road in the next town, but nobody fixes it.

3) Where's the money? I could spend Mcr5 or so and set up a power plant A in a brick building with a well and a fuel purifier, and make a fair amount of cash every month selling power to the grid. Probably break even in 10 years, pay off my loan in 20 and have decent profit.
 Or I could bring in Mcr5 of tamaguchi, sex toys, Space Viagra, and tribbles and have Mcr23 by the end of the month. Unless the rechargable sex toys use so much power there's a drain on the grid (I'm looking at you eLoveBot 9000) nobody's going to care about not having fusion plants. There's a reason there's 8 gabillion spams for penis enlargers and generic cialis and etc ad nauseum in your email:
enough people buy that crap to make spamming worthwhile. If it's being imported from a world 2 TL up, people are gonna believe in it and cha-ching goes the credit machine.

4) Cleon the First's original plan was to maintain this situation. If there's no disparity, there's no market. No market, no trade No trade,
and no reason for ships. No ships, and it's Long Night. Again.   If
everybody were TL15 with an A-Port, who's buying what?
4a) And every petty world dictator can build Happy Fun Balls. Not conducive to Imperial Stability.

On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 11:56 AM Jim Vassilakos - jim.vassilakos at gmail.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
> Traveller has lots of worlds that use old technology, and this is something that has never made sense to me. Recall, however, the game was first created in the late 1970s and is, culturally, a product of that era, and so, taking the analogy of worlds being like countries, the game envisions rich and poor worlds, high-tech and low-tech worlds, as well as democracies and dictatorships, all existing side by side, little-changed by each others’ proximity, over the course of centuries.
>
> Of course, recent history has rendered this analogy obsolete, as our world has changed considerably since the 1970s. Nations that once seemed backward have dramatically progressed, both in technology as well as the median standard of living, and, in many cases, they’ve even changed their form of government, mostly toward democracy. But Traveller, by its very ruleset, particularly with respect to world/society generation, envisions a universe where technology doesn’t progress at quite the same rate.
>
> Like I said, I’m not a big fan of this idea, but one thing it does achieve is that it makes each planet more unique than they would otherwise be.
>
> One could, I think, argue that the speed of technological diffusion on Earth got a boost due to all the trade going on during the last several decades of globalization. Traveller's Imperium is also a free-trade zone, by and large, but maybe it's too expensive to get high quantities of technological pre-cursors and components from one place to the next. Apple, for example, works with suppliers from something like forty-three different counties. Without the level of trade that we have, we might not have smartphones, or, at least, they'd be a lot more expensive. So the pace of technological diffusion may depend on the cost of moving a displacement ton of goods across the interstellar void.
>
> One could also argue that technological diffusion on Earth was boosted by military concerns. Societies such as Russia, China, and Japan looked west and saw a potential threat. The elites realized they needed to industrialize, or they might lose the next war. So leaders such as Peter the Great, Stalin, Mao, Meiji, and so forth, pushed hard, in some cases sacrificing millions of people in a mad scramble to increase the industrial and technological capacity of their respective countries. However, in the Imperium, individual worlds probably get some sort of security guarantee, so the TL-4 world doesn't need to worry about being militarily invaded by the TL-14 world next door. And if you're an elite on a TL-4 world, and things appear to be going fine from your point of view, why rock the boat?
>
> Nonetheless, I still have trouble with this idea that technological stagnation in the Imperium goes on and on for not mere decades but centuries. If you were a leader in a society that burned fossil fuels, for example, and you knew nuclear fusion existed, and you knew you could get the plans for a fusion reactor, and your society could build it, and then you'd have access to clean, cheap energy, why wouldn't you do it? Certainly, the local fossil fuel industry might not like it, and they'll lobby against it or maybe even sabotage the project, but that reactor would eventually get built. I just don't see how it wouldn't happen.
>
> What do you think?
>
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