A
Anonymous
Guest
Rick said:
and arguably inspired by Dune and bugger all to do with trans humans and traveller, kindly desist from discussing it in this thread, thank you...
and arguably inspired by Dune and bugger all to do with trans humans and traveller, kindly desist from discussing it in this thread, thank you...
alex_greene
Guest
If you can make the book seventy flavours of awesome, go for it.heron61 said:
Maybe if you create something small and focused on the topic first, maybe Jeff Zeitlin could put up your article in FreeTrav. As long as you have writing examples you can show, anything is possible - even going self-pub and pitching your book through DriveThru.
There's certainly going to be no competition from me - my interest in transhumanism kind of stopped at Stapledon and K Eric Drexler, Alvin Toffler and Fritjof Capra, James Schmitz and Alfred Bester.
When I think of transhumans these days, I think of the whole "energy beings" thing, which was what Theosophists used to think that we were all destined to become some day - think of that episode of Next Gen where Dr Crusher fell in love with a man who turned into a ball of yellow light, in that half-forgotten Season 3 episode that came just before "The Best Of Both Worlds," which presented a whole different slant on transhumanism - The Borg.
I've done research, and it seems that Theosophists had this idea that we are all some sort of transcendent beings inside, and that some of us would somehow reincarnate in some Rapture-like mass wave of transmogrification into balls of energy and light. Transhumanism came from these early 20th Century dreams, where the Far Future was Gernsbackian and triumphalist and so very, very bright.
What disturbed me was that the Theosophists had a crystal clear idea of who the some were - and what particular parts of the population were destined never to Ascend.
And at that point in my research, the focus shifted to Wagner and Nietzsche, and to 1930s Germany and Buchenwald and Auschwitz; and at that point where I was looking at pictures and footage of ovens and railway tracks and cattle cars and showers without water, my interest in transhumanism kind of stalled dead in its tracks.
Lord High Munchkin
Mongoose
Oh, it's way older than that....
There's the "Great Disappointment" of the early 19th C... and that (arguably) leads on to the whole 'positive thinking" movement of today for a start. There's a massive eschatological back history.
One could also argue an origin in 11th C Chinese populist "end times" peasant rebellions, but that might be pushing it (the Triads wouldn't disagree though). It's a murky subject.
There's the "Great Disappointment" of the early 19th C... and that (arguably) leads on to the whole 'positive thinking" movement of today for a start. There's a massive eschatological back history.
One could also argue an origin in 11th C Chinese populist "end times" peasant rebellions, but that might be pushing it (the Triads wouldn't disagree though). It's a murky subject.
To a degree, I've already done that, in the article "Traveller for the 21st Century" that I wrote for Freelance Traveller: http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/tech/traveller21c.html It doesn't go into the upper levels of transhumanism, but it touches on many of the issues.alex_greene said:
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Any mention of Google Glass is just dating your stuff. Try to avoid comparing 57th century household items with today's flash in the pan gizmos.
sideranautae
Mongoose
Tom Kalbfus said:
Make it a 9th level spell as the psionic power is not sci-fi but fantasy in Traveller.
I'd rather focus on sci-fi items like artificial eyes that can see in IR band, etc.
alex_greene
Guest
Unless you are counting the trope of the Kwisatz Haderach as a branch of the overall "transhumanist" trope.hiro said:
alex_greene
Guest
Unless you are counting the trope of the Kwisatz Haderach as a branch of the overall "transhumanist" trope.hiro said:
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
sideranautae said:
Well so is FTL travel, it all depends on how you dress it up, you can dress it up as a gizmo, or you can just accept it as a fantasy element and why not link it to a psionic power if the setting already has psionics? This is similar to the game Dragonstar, which was basically D&D in space, but unlike Spelljammer it was in a technological setting where magic coexisted with it, and since there was already magic, their was no need to invent an FTL drive. A teleport spell already existed, all that was needed was a way to amplify it.
sideranautae
Mongoose
Tom Kalbfus said:
Um .... no. In Trav there is no FLT travel.
I'm talking about in TRAVELLER rules. NOT your possible house rules.
sideranautae
Mongoose
I think that given the diverse environments where humans live in the Trav universe that mods for that would predominate. Respiratory augments to breath in tainted atmosphere, very thin, etc. Major stuff for combat troops.
FTL = Faster Than Light, and it definitely exists in Traveller - jump drive counts, it would violate the heck out of relativity, and unless we are vastly wrong about physics, it's exactly as impossible as psionics. Wormholes that can be used for FTL travel might be possible, but jump drives are not.sideranautae said:
sideranautae
Mongoose
heron61 said:
Nope
Reynard
Emperor Mongoose
The Jump drive does something quite similar to theorized wormhole travel. Neither are Faster Than Light. They distort time-space without actually covering the time or distance of real space.
Warp drives as describe actually travel in real space by paradoxically warping space to cover distance in far less time.
Warp drives as describe actually travel in real space by paradoxically warping space to cover distance in far less time.
GypsyComet
Emperor Mongoose
sideranautae said:
That really depends on what sort of setting you use as the base for the transhumanist stuff.
A setting that doesn't lean toward Transhumanism until long after some sort of FTL (or equivalent, which Jump *is*) has been discovered will have different points of focus than a setting that plumbs Transhumanism *in order to* explore the stars. Dune is merely the best known of these, with the Navigators, but there have been stories that employ more mechanical approaches to the problem, or which imply them.
Not all Transhuman settings need to involve FTL, or even space travel, of course, but the combination is expected given that this is a Traveller discussion.
GypsyComet
Emperor Mongoose
sideranautae said:
"The lawyers experimented vainly with various ways of redefining murder, reevaluating it, and in the end even respelling it in the hope that no one would notice." -h2g2, Douglas Adams
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
The way wormholes work is you create the wormhole with both ends together, and then you put one end of the wormhole on board a starship and the starship accelerates at slower that light speeds towards the destination, if it reaches a high enough velocity, it can use einsteinian relativity to shorten the travel time. While the starship is still enroute with the wormhole end towards the detination, you can expand the wormhole at the Earth end and step through it arriving at the destination in the future when the starship has already arrived. You don't have to wait the number of years, decades, or even centuries for the ship carrying the wormhole to get there, If the ship pushes close enough to the speed of light, in a couple of years waiting on Earth, you could even step through the wormhole and end up in the Andromeda Galaxy 2,538,000 years in the future, and when your done, you can step back through the wormhole and end up right back in the present. If you don't mind being in the future when you explore distant stars and returning to the present when your done, wormholes work just fine So tell me how this would affect the Traveller setting if these kind of wormholes were used instead of the Jump Drive?heron61 said:
Reynard
Emperor Mongoose
Or it pinches real time/space to reduce or remove the intervening distance. One game system I play has space warps (essentially wormholes) you enter and exit instantaneously similar to Stargate. The definition for things are legion. Dune Navigators instantaneously pinch space.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Most science fiction FTL devices make shortcuts through space, the main difference is the Jump Drive opens up near the destination, wormholes do not, you have to move the destination end towards the desired location after you create them. this means travel in space also involves some time travel.Reynard said:
sideranautae
Mongoose
GypsyComet said:
Where do you think that the OTU would lie in that sense?
