Implausibility of technological research and lack of progress

[Iracundus]

Who? The Zhodani? They are not unique. Solomani seem to be the outlier because Solomani seem to not have had any major negative interactions involving the Ancients in some way that may have led to long lasting cultural aversion to instability and change. The Zhodani and Vilani also seem to have taken a deliberate utilitarian view and come to the conclusion that they could provide the maximum happiness or at least contentment to the largest number of people over the longest period of time by creating stable societies, with any change carefully managed by the ruling classes first.

 

[Condottiere]

Well, I wouldn't be too sure about that.

 

[Arkathan]

Zhodani I would say used essentially the same rationale as the Vilani, thinking that uncontrolled or too rapid technological change would cause social upheaval and unhappiness. The Zhodani Consulate has lasted longer than the Ziru Sirka because their psionic psychological skills on top of their stratified society seems more effective than the Vilani method, which has only the stratification but no psionics.

The Solomani attitude towards technology seems to be the outlier. Whereas it seems virtually all other Humaniti takes a cautious approach to technology, only the Solomani seem to go full speed ahead on technology to see where it goes first and pick up the pieces later.

The Ancients took slave stock from Sol, and then left them alone. The slave stock, on the other hand, saw the effects of super tech first hand, early, and remembered what the Solomani never knew.

 

[steelbrok]

Whilst I agree with the logic of the Solomani attitude to technology being an outlier amongst Humaniti, the raises two questions:

1. Why is the Solomani Confederation at a generally lower TL than the 3I?
2. Why should the various non-Human aliens be technologically constrained?

 

[Iracundus]

Whilst I agree with the logic of the Solomani attitude to technology being an outlier amongst Humaniti, the raises two questions:

1. Why is the Solomani Confederation at a generally lower TL than the 3I?
2. Why should the various non-Human aliens be technologically constrained?

1. I would say it is because the Confederation is a smaller state and more loosely held together (in some ways) with individual worlds having wildly different branches of the Party and doing their own thing. Some worlds I would expect to rapidly increase in Tech such as Thetis, as they are Eschatonic Accelerationists, basically pursuing the Technological Singularity. However they may be limited ultimately by resources as AFAIK Thetis and Laputa are the only 2 worlds where the Accelerationists are in control. Even then there seems to be divergence in beliefs as Laputa is lower Tech than Thetis and seems to be heading down a religious pathway of tech worship, though not quite to level of 40K Mechanicus yet.

2. In general I would say the aliens are just as tradition bound as most of Humaniti, and this may ultimately hinder breaking through an apparent tech ceiling at TL 16/17 or so. It could be that breaking through that ceiling requires a research/innovation friendly society and a large enough society united enough to provide the necessary resources to make the breakthrough. For example, Aslan are divided among their clans and they are tradition bound. The radical clans have all been mostly exiled or gone off on their own as well.

I would say that there seems to be a tech ceiling around Jump 7 or Jump 8 and Hop 1 levels, so somewhere in a nebulous fashion around TL 16/17. Similarly I would say there is a ceiling around Jump 1. Societies seem to linger around the ceiling until a fortuitous or concerted effort is made to break through.

 

[Condottiere]

Going by Traveller, the thing that kickstarted interstellar travel was a fundamental understanding and manipulation of the gravitational force, which allowed the creation of fusion bottles, anti gravitational motivation, and probably a way to slip into a higher dimension.

Technological level sixteen may need a similar breakthrough in understanding the laws of physics.

 

[Stingray_tm]

I suspect the Vilani suppressed a lot of disruptive technology, and inventors had an abnormally high mortality rate.

This is explicitly stated in the Pirates of Drinax campaign to have happened quite regularly in the past.

 

[Condottiere]

If you think about it, we're still waiting for a car engine that runs on water.

 

[Arkathan]

If you think about it, we're still waiting for a car engine that runs on water.

And fusion power plants are still thirty years away, and have been for sixty years.

 

[kaladorn]

Maybe the jump beyond TL15 inherently is so huge that by the very nature of that jump it takes so much time? Like for example you need to solve a complex comutational problem to solve a hypothesis, but this problem is so staggeringly complex that even with TL15 computers you have to wait 200 years to get the result? But you simply can not progress, until you have made this calculation?
I mean, I think even today we already know computational problems that on a normal modern PC would take longer than the heat death of the universe. So maybe this can be applied on a larger scale here? (Non canonically).

Think of it this way:

All progress happens within a context. That context includes:
- social permissivity for research
- sufficient wealth to support research
- sufficient resources for the particular type of research
- sufficient environmental factors to enable research (ie not mass starvation, civil war, die off from plague, massive fires and floods from global warming, a huge catastrophe if our magnetic poles flip over a short time geologically, massive killoff from climate change affecting crops and animal food sources, massive overpopulation, etc)
- no external manipulative factors preventing advancement (your sun being eaten by a singularity, a dose of the star trigger, your moon de-orbiting into the main world, a massive supernova sleeting your planet with hard radiation, runaway nanite plague and the 'vampire' scenario, a hiver project to slow down advancement, rich guys who like being at the top of the power pyramid that don't want progress to happen, etc.)
- societal stability to allow ongoing research (when you have a violent period and burn all your books/tapes/cities, that sets you back nearly to the start)

Those are some of the possible context issues. You need to have a LOT of things to progress:
- healthy competition
- a dynamic way to combine capital and invention so that investors will invest in progress
- enough sustainability to not have progress end up being the wrecker of planets and governments
- a culture of inquiry and education (if your populace loses the ability to recognize valid science vs. invalid, or to believe strange arbitrary theories over expertise, etc.... then you can have a culture that will struggle to advance)
- a massive world conflict could easily lead to "Mad Max" or "The Road" or even climate failure could cause that
- not all locations have good resource, atmo, etc. to spend much attention on advancement
- resources on a planet are depletable and if that happens before you have a very capable import mechanism, you can know what you want to research but you might not have the resources and that might be a problem

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There's also some proof in the modern world that some problems are much harder than we though. Let's assume the major ones (energy that is cheap and vastly plentiful, ability to live beyond earth is manageable, some form of practicable FTL exist, for example) are very hard to develop and may need precursor technologies that themselves are grotesquely hard and require many odd materials, advanced physics knowledge, etc. I mean, we've known about the concept of the Alcubbierie (sp?) drive (ST Warp Drive using moving bubbles of space time) but we haven't the faintest notion to how we would engineer a drive to do that..... and I don't see any sign of even a roadmap to get to any viable technical reality.

Assume that's true in Traveller and you could get VERY slow advancement beyond a certain point.

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If you want to talk about reality, look to history. Many 'advanced' civilizations that had discovered many things failed. And after they did, in their region or even globally, long periods of falling back or at least stagnating happened. In some cases, the empires involved had most of their knowledge lost and so it was never built on directly.

Here's a thought from most historians: You can't judge things very well in the present and you need a century or so to get enough distance to be able to criticise, analyse and recognize what was true, what wasn't, and what can be pointed out once the emotions about the subject have faded to an old wound. I don't think we can depend on any particular believers of the Singularity or of rapid futurism that are current. They might be right, but we can't ascertain that for a century or more.

Look at things we though in the 1950s:
- Living on Mars by 1980s
- Commuting to work in flying cars by the 1970s
- Using nuclear explosions for Terran projects like reservoirs (ah, yeah, thanks maybe not...)

At the same time, they totally did not see many of the issues today.

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A personal view:

I've been a coder working in networking and other areas of the Internet since the mid 1980s to early 1990s (school first, then working). I got onto the net when the first Web Browser (NCSA Mosaic) came out and there wasn't content. The only places you could find any content were universities and it wasn't pretty. I had email, but other than other nerd friends so for the most part, nobody to send anything to. Even computing three or four computers took quite a bit of work. And most interfaces were text. I recall the early UIs and some of them were pretty lousy and stability was not a thing on PCs.

In those days, all my nerd pals and I figured the opening up and democratization of the Internet was going to make data available to the world (happened, then we figured out paywalls), we'd allow communication with different peoples around the world (done), we figured it would democratize the world (nope), we felt it would make education cheap and available for all (not completely by any means), and we thought it would be a place of scientific discourse, a place to advance and improve culture and our socities (and this was one of the biggest failures... silos, the anonymity used for abusive behaviours, the focus on monetization) and we thought it would give a voice to the most vulnerable and giving everyone would improve things (naive, and a failure - the marginalized still are, the fascists are using the tech for recruiting, everyone having a voice doesn't actually improve discourse as not all voices are of equal value or validity it turns out).

What we did not see was:
- tech companies so big, so global they would exceed government's ability to pursue
- the power of global scope corporations to control elections by the vast monies they can deploy
- the rise of the ignorant and angry
- the failure of amity and cooperation in governments
- the rise of Russia again and China becoming the worlds coming world power
- management for corporations that is more 'burns and get out with $$$' rather than 'manage as if going concern'
- the potential threats of A.I., of broadcast our presence to the cosmos, and tech like nanites and genetic engineering
- the impact the ubiquity of the net has had on kids - cyberbullying, anxiety when removed from their phones, huge social pressures, access to lots of inappropriate messaging that are not age appropriate
- massive problems with cracking, ransomware, state-sponsored cyberattacks on infrastructure (and hospitals)

So, I mention that just to say that we looked to the future in the late 80s/early 90s, we were optimistic. We recognized some of the good that could be done, but missed most of the problems. We also missed timelines and many developments we didn't see coming. And some of those have the potential to change how fast advancements occur in the future (national siloing of knowledge, possible near term armed conlficts that could go global, many scientific and commercial enterprises have taken what used to be free or citizen provided knowledge and put them behind paywalls, etc).

Think about my grandfather (gone now) who lived 1898 to 1989. He saw the coming of radio, TV, computers, automobiles, space travel, cures and treatments for many things. That's all to the good. But he saw two world wars (fought in one), nuclear weapons developed and deployed, the cold war, environmental issues rising, etc. Much has changed, but if we look at the situtation on the Russian border now, it looks a lot like before 1939's invasion of Poland.

It's quite easy to think that our fast-advancements are a sign of an amazing future, but it may well be we are more 'Elysium' with the rich living in gated habitats while the world is a poor favella because labour isn't worth much. If that happens, we'll be having a lot less scientific progress at least as long as that exists.

 

[kaladorn]

If you think about it, we're still waiting for a car engine that runs on water.

They promised we'd be living on the moon by the 1980s and by the 1970s we'd be all flying to work in aircars. We still aren't doing either of those things.

 

[GamingGlen]

If you think about it, we're still waiting for a car engine that runs on water.

They promised we'd be living on the moon by the 1980s and by the 1970s we'd be all flying to work in aircars. We still aren't doing either of those things.

For flying cars automated driving has to be greatly improved upon first. Do you want these yahoos on the road today who have a hard time with 2D navigation to start navigating in 3D?

More seriously, at least on the ground multi-ton vehicular killing machines are a bit more restricted.

 

[Iracundus]

Some advancements may not be possible without a radically reshaped understanding of the universe. For example, without understanding nuclear fusion, it was not possible for past people to explain how the sun can possibly keep giving off heat and light for so many years. Their known methods of light emission and combustion (such as burning coal) could not last that long, according to calculations of the sun's size, so it was a bit of a mystery until nuclear fusion was known. Similarly, Jump (or the Alcubierre warp drive) may be a mystery that is impossible under currently known physics and engineering until some radically new discovery makes it possible.

Of course there is also the possibility that a society ends up advancing in some areas and not others, rather than one abstract Tech Level affecting everything. The short story The Road Not Taken has that scenario. In it, the three basic discoveries of ancient civilization were fire, agriculture, and gravitiy manipulation/hyperspace. Humanity somehow missed the last one, but advanced far beyond in all other areas, so aliens invaders are taken aback because they are at the black powder stage of weaponry when they invade.

 

[Condottiere]

1. An engine running on water seems plausible with our current technological base, while fusion may require the technology to catch up.

2. There are vested interests not particularly thrilled with an engine that runs on water.

3. If I recall correctly, Pournelle had the CoDominium control scientific research, specifically into armaments, and corrupted scientific databases.

4. Speaking of which, the other half of the CoDominium was a revitalized Soviet Union.

 

[GamingGlen]

2. There are vested interests not particularly thrilled with an engine that runs on water.

This would also apply to hover/grav vehicles: tires & rubber.

Are we still filling the world with used tires?

 

[Condottiere]

I think there are schemes for recycling them, either in the building industry or rethreading them.

 

[Stingray_tm]

If you think about it, we're still waiting for a car engine that runs on water.

They promised we'd be living on the moon by the 1980s and by the 1970s we'd be all flying to work in aircars. We still aren't doing either of those things.

On the other hand, in the 60s nobody even could imagine us being able to livestream oneself making duckfaces on TikTok while being literally on the other side of the world, geotagging the video via GPS and using filters to look like a fox-furry.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Stingray_tm]

Point taken.

 

[kaladorn]

Well Played, Condottiere. That image is spectacular.

We probably didn't imagine a lot of details and some larger techs, but we expected others that we could imagine that haven't happened as fast as expected or others that may still not be feasible (period).