On 2/7/2018 2:33 PM, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote: > My guess is the Long Night is the reason for humans in the ships and > the lack of Transhumans > > If there's a lot of historic evidence of what happens when you leave > _everything_ in the hands of machines and no sophont supervision when, > then there's a cultural push to have a living hand there to back > things up. > I'd also guess that the work rebuilding from the Long Night influenced > how things are done. > Jump lag is also probably a factor - if you're selling goods, you're > not always going to go with a 6 week old price. Yet, there has been nothing written to imply that the 2I was even close to that level of technological integration. > I can also see people having concerns about having a whole lot of tech > implanted in them when there's probably several horror stories about > certain colonies where there were mega-deaths when the Long Night > interrupted a supply chain that the implanted tech depended on. Or, > if you go the transhuman-immortality route, the people who had a > parent who lived to be 250+ years old, but watched 8 generations of > children age and die might consider that immortality to be a curse... > and the youngest generations watched them psychologically melt down > from it. > Which would leave a cultural bias against such things. At one time there was a cultural bias against eating certain meats, but we've moved past that. My point is that we're talking about an incredibly long time span and the lure of the potential that technology offers is mighty seductive. And not every culture is going to agree, so you should have some planets where they have people sitting around the cracker barrel saying, "I remember when that upstart Sylean kid, Cleon what's his name, started turning his trading empire into a political empire. Then again, I also remember when the Terrans kicked ass on the Vilani!" -- Kurt Feltenberger xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com “Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me
