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Write this one down sometime. Blah blah blah.I am not a writer. That is, while I write, I do not write well enough to consider myself a writer. If I thought I could do it well enough, I would probably try, but I don't think that. Perhaps someday I will make the effort to become skilled at writing and story telling.
In my mind, stories are about their characters. I often come up with interesting ideas that would make story backdrops. Backdrops must not be confused with stories. While the backdrop is often a vehicle for communicating a few of the ideas of a good story, it in reality plays a minor role. Backdrops often play a more prominent role in SF than in other story telling, and that is often a weakness rather than a strength. Still, they have their place in good SF. Most likely I'll never use the backdrops I come up with, but from now on I've decided to start writing them down, just in case.
Imagine a future time approximately nine hundred years from now, after the four hundred year long second dark age, the second renaissance, and the second enlightment. While the majority of the libraries were destroyed during the collapse preceding the second dark age (mostly flooded or burned), the discovery two hundred years after the second renaissance of a buried library ark and the subsequent fifty years to solve of the great puzzle to gain entrance, brought our age's science knowledge to a civilization on already igniting with creative geniuses to rival our Newton, Liebnitz, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. Avoiding some of the eddys our science had become stuck in (though with a few of their own), they over the centuries surpass our understanding of the universe. They also live by a different morality, and therein lies the root of this speculation.
Constrained by their morality, they are unwilling to experiment on conscious beings, and so while our descendents exceed us in physics, chemistry, cosmology, they lag in biology. The sorts of experiments commonplace today are forbidden in their time as too cruel. However, the success of quantum computing has brought simulation capability to levels we can only dream of. Soon our descendents are unravelling the secrets of animal biology first with genetic simulations, then cellular simulations, and then multi-cellular simulations. With each century the simulatable complexity advances. The simulation of organs and even simple organisms seems within reach. Therein lies the dilemma. Is a simulated consciousness still a consciousness? Our descendants won't experiment with the genetic modifications that help to decipher what genes do what because the beings so created might suffer. The debate is then whether the simulated beings simulated suffering is worthy of their consideration.
Eventually our descendents avoid genetic modification, even in simulation. Instead they simply observe the simulations in such detail to understand the workings of the beings. It slows them down, but still they progress. Another century of technological progress brings the possibility of simulation of communities of organisms. Now a new debate rages. Simulated communities of organisms begin to develop predation and aggression. Is violence in the simulated community to be tolerated? Does the suffering of one simulated being in the tenacles, claws, or teeth of another simulated being constitute a moral issue for our descendents? They have progressed to the point of mankind's ancient gods. They are not omniscient (indeed their experiments are performed to learn about their own world by simulating tiny microcosms of it), but they do create a universe, albeit simulated, to study. They could intervene in the simulation (though the effort required to do so is staggering — much more than the simulation itself, due to the necessity of maintaining internal consistency). Are they obligated to do so?
A space probe finds an habitable planet about a nearby star, and Earth mobilizes to send colonists. The number of colonists is limited, which creates a genetic bottleneck. To mitigate the problem the initial colonists are chosen and bred for a wide range of genetic traits, but what is to become of this diversity once they depart Earth?
It is also not clear that the limited number of colonists will be able to maintain anything but modest levels of technology once they depart. Modern technology requires specialization, and their numbers won't support it. There is a good chance that the colonists will quickly descend to much more primitive technology after a few generations. Genetic testing and breeding may not be viable after even a couple of generations. The designers hope the colonists will remain in radio contact with Earth, but that is not certain. Also Earth might send follow-up missions, but interstellar travel is so costly and risky, that it seems wise to wait and guage how well the first mission works before sending others. If the colonists are successful their numbers would completely overwhelm any subsequent arrivals, if any, making them valuable primarily for technology not easily communicated by radio and for their DNA uniqueness, but not their numbers. Also consider that if another probe discovers a new location, Earth might direct a subsequent mission there before a follow-up to the first destination. For all these reasons, it might be centuries or millenia before an Earth follow-up arrives. (Note: consider analogy to Polynesian island colonizations, and their cultural inclinations to mate with new arrivals.)
The mission planners therefore craft a cultural strategy they hope is robust enough to maintain their carefully selected initial genetic diversity through the first twenty or more generations. They don't want a situation where early on in the colony the emergence of a powerful breeder (e.g. Temüjin or Niall of the Nine Hostages) skews the gene pool.
The designers' cultural solution is a unique Monarchy algorithm. It is considered somewhat probable that Democracy might be replaced by monarchy in a small society rapidly evolving in a hostile environment, and so Democracy is something the designers expect the colonists to evolve on their own (perhaps foreshadowed by prophecies created by the designers). Monarchy's obsession with bloodlines is also something they hope to exploit, with a new twist.
Genealogy is also built into the naming culture. A child has three names: his mother's matriarchal name, his father's patriarchal name, and a given name. Thus naming encapsulates information about the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. The given name is chosen to make this triple unique in the hall of records. (Often, but not always, the given name is chosen from one of the given names of the grandparents, as in ancient Greece, which gives slightly more information.)
It is the Monarchy algorithm however that requires the colonists to track their lineages more carefully. A new Monarch is chosen in a competition from the eight individuals between the ages of 30 and 40 with the best lineage scores. (Monarchs serve for twenty years or until death.) (Are other high power positions chosen this way too?) Many colonists then choose mates designed to maximize the lineage score of their progeny to maximize their chances of obtaining power. The lineage score penalizes interbreeding and rewards those who mate with individuals descended from colonists different from ones parents' ancestors. An individual's lineage score is computed from a vector of 64 numbers between 0 and 1 that sum to 1. The ideal is to have each element of the vector be 1/64. A child's vector is the average of her parent's vectors. The scoring is a sum of the squares of the differences from 1/64. The lower the score the better (the best score is 0).
If there were 64 original colonists, then you could think of each of their vectors being 0 in all positions except for a single 1. Subsequent generation vectors would then represent the contribution from each colonist to the individual. In practice there are more than 64 initial colonists and 64 is chosen to limit the tracking required (remember it is possible the colonists may have to revert to pen and paper). And the initial colonist vectors are not so simple, since that would lead to deadlock as everyone would have identical scores at first. Instead the initial colonists have vectors assigned by the designers based on genetic testing.
The fun of this story backdrop is to explore the consequences on society of such a cultural diversity incentive: the ways in which members of the society would try to take advantage of it, how would they cheat, and how they would attempt to circumvent it, and when they would overthrow it? How well does the system integrate with human nature and how much is there a tendency to revert to patriarchy? The system encourages arranged marriages (if marriage exists at all), as in most human cultures, and how does that conflict with love? What happens when outlaws are exiled from the community and then breed outside? What happens when an individual decides to burn the record keeping hall in frustration? What happens when a second set of colonists from Earth arrives (now outnumbered 1000 to 1)? Another fun line to explore are the effects the stellarnaut breeding pool on Earth has on Earth culture.
Write this one down sometime. Blah blah blah.
Themes are different than backdrops, but I'm going to list some ideas here too, rather than start a separate file.
Technology can sometimes be freedom enhancing, but I think the
general trend is the opposite. For example, when technology
advances to the level of Oryx and Crake, anyone who would be a
suicide bomber today could be a world destroyer instead. That
is one crude lesson Atwood was trying to warn about. However,
more likely than Atwood's scenario is that governments will
recognize the problem, and clamp down on individual freedoms to
prevent such things. Technology is also freedom destroying in a
way because it causes a gross loss of privacy: One will not be
able to escape one's past, which is a sort of loss of freedom in
a way. (Of course it also encourages responsibility as a
result, but for those that fail, they will always carry the
burden.) Finally, the rate of technological advance is probably
proportional to population (linearly at least?). But increasing
population is equivalent to a loss of freedom (the tragedy of
the commons
forces us to give up individual choices for the
sake of the population as a whole).
Copyright © 2006 Earl A. Killian. All Rights Reserved.
| Earl Killian <earl@killian.com> |
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Last modified: Sat Dec 16 19:30:10 PST 2006