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Voting closed: April 07, 2013, 10:34:35 am

[Gamerlord]

((Give me a while to figure out a few logical arguments and I should be able to get him to make a copy of his brain and stick it in. It could give us multiple Doctors! How fucking awesome would that be?))

[Xantalos]

Because we don't know what the Doctor is.

[Sean Mirrsen]

((We don't even know if he actually has a brain, in the conventional sense of the word. I think the Doktor is about as far from biologically plausible as Grate on amp battery acid is from physically plausible.))

[Gamerlord]

((Does the Doctor know what the Doctor is? If not, then he just might agree to it in order to find out.))

[Xantalos]

((I'd think he does, considering his comments and his line of work. He's an Eldritch abomination of some sort - the usual innumerable eyes, many teeth, and thin limbs reaching toward you etc.))

[Harry Baldman]

((I'd think he does, considering his comments and his line of work. He's an Eldritch abomination of some sort - the usual innumerable eyes, many teeth, and thin limbs reaching toward you etc.))

((Especially since he apparently used to be a man, and probably only became more than that through his own experimentation.))

[Xantalos]

((I'd think he does, considering his comments and his line of work. He's an Eldritch abomination of some sort - the usual innumerable eyes, many teeth, and thin limbs reaching toward you etc.))

((Especially since he apparently used to be a man, and probably only became more than that through his own experimentation.))

((In other words, Xan's father figure once he finds this out.))

[Harry Baldman]

((The human mind is perfectly capable of comprehending spans of time past a few hundred years. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. WE WOULDN'T BE PLAYING THIS GAME. We haven't EXPERIENCED such spans of time, but we certainly have imagined it. There are by my estimates, A billion^1000000000 stories created by humanity that deal with that exact concept, the concept of billions or trillions of years, and those stories are typically where the ridiculous "YOU CANNOT COMPREHEND" bullshit comes from.

The concept of not being able to conceptualize the concept is a concept invented by humanity (specifically STEPHEN HAWKING).
CONCEPTCEPTION!


Also let it be known STEPHEN HAWKING supports all advancements in knowledge, and thus is against the genetic and tech bans))

((It's easy to imagine individual events happening in a time period across, say, five centuries, but not the entire period itself, because it is about five (in the case of a hundred-year-old person imagining it) to twenty-five (in the case of a twenty-year-old doing the same) times longer than the current lifespan of a human being. You can also imagine a period of a billion years if you abstract it heavily, conflating extremely long-term processes into easy-to-understand periods. You can't actually properly imagine living for five centuries, or a billion years, because the total amount of information you are dealing with increases manifold in such a process. And that's just in regards to your own life. Imagine absorbing the information produced by a whole planet over such a period. Politicians have trouble coming up with policy meant to deal with the next couple of years in a nation's lifespan, think about how difficult it would be to run a whole planet.

Thing is, the human mind simply isn't equipped to deal with centralized galactic government or even centralized planetary government. That's one of the main failings of the current UWM - no human being can run institutions that large in a truly efficient manner, no matter what their intentions may be. Decentralized as the UWM is, it still apparently doesn't work well.

Also, I love quiet worlds, so I'm in favor of lifting research bans entirely. The only way to make dangerous new technologies safer is to research them further, obviously. Though it may be wiser to make the policy itself mutable over time and up to planetary and sub-planetary authorities.))


((Finally, a thought occurred to me - since the Altered cheat, it's not a terribly far-fetched idea that they utilize space magic in their workings. After all, we extracted the fleshwarping amp from amps that had been changed by the proto-Altered. The question remains, though, which came first? Did the Altered discover space magic and indelibly incorporate it in their makeup (it would also explain their aggression and otherwise inexplicable unity - think on Grate's behavior when he rolled low on will), after which humans extracted space magic technology from their bodies (space magic was apparently discovered during the Altered Wars), or did humans discover space magic beforehand and the Altered merely harnessed it? It could explain why we're not allowed to look inside manipulators and amps - doing so runs the risk of the Altered remnants within escaping, and knowing we carry pieces of the damn things around would be unnerving for pretty much all civilians and the non-crazy convicts to say the least.))

[Sean Mirrsen]

((In regards to tech bans, we could do a different process. The bans on development are lifted, but only for worlds under direct ARM control. Any technology that is deemed acceptable for public use is immediately transmitted via FTL channels, or plain ferried off to other planets on ships. That way we don't spontaneously arrive at a planet where our technology might as well have been bamboo-derived, and we still keep the tech advancing, even if it'll take some time to propagate.

Outright enforcing a technological stagnation is a good way to keep things in check, but I think a controlled release of technology is going to be better in the long run. Even if it means some of our own tech ends up being used against us, one way or another.

Genetics should really stay in check though.))

[Xantalos]

((I'd offer Xan as an example of why genetics experiments are a good thing but then I look at him and some of the things he plans to do and I realize why we should be careful.))

[BFEL]

((The human mind is perfectly capable of comprehending spans of time past a few hundred years. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. WE WOULDN'T BE PLAYING THIS GAME. We haven't EXPERIENCED such spans of time, but we certainly have imagined it. There are by my estimates, A billion^1000000000 stories created by humanity that deal with that exact concept, the concept of billions or trillions of years, and those stories are typically where the ridiculous "YOU CANNOT COMPREHEND" bullshit comes from.

The concept of not being able to conceptualize the concept is a concept invented by humanity (specifically STEPHEN HAWKING).
CONCEPTCEPTION!


Also let it be known STEPHEN HAWKING supports all advancements in knowledge, and thus is against the genetic and tech bans))

((It's easy to imagine individual events happening in a time period across, say, five centuries, but not the entire period itself, because it is about five (in the case of a hundred-year-old person imagining it) to twenty-five (in the case of a twenty-year-old doing the same) times longer than the current lifespan of a human being. You can also imagine a period of a billion years if you abstract it heavily, conflating extremely long-term processes into easy-to-understand periods. You can't actually properly imagine living for five centuries, or a billion years, because the total amount of information you are dealing with increases manifold in such a process. And that's just in regards to your own life. Imagine absorbing the information produced by a whole planet over such a period. Politicians have trouble coming up with policy meant to deal with the next couple of years in a nation's lifespan, think about how difficult it would be to run a whole planet.

((By this logic a person also can't properly imagine ONE year. Or a month. Pretty much anything longer then a day or so is out, because the human mind is built to abstract time, to focus on the really good and really bad.

And what exactly is "properly" imagining something? Do I have to know the precise location of every atom in my body and the exact forces that work upon them at all times to "properly" imagine WALKING?

In relation to the governing idea: Do you honestly think a ruler has to know LITERALLY EVERYTHING to have any chance at success? Certainly information helps, but you seem to be suggesting that a government needs to know the exact number and length of toenail clippings produced by its populace to not spontaneously explode ))

[syvarris]

I think the problem is less that a ruler must know the dimensions of every citizen's toenail clippings, and more that a human ruler is incapable of comprehending the evolutionary changes to toenail sizes over thousands of worlds, through centuries.  So if he makes laws deciding when people should clip their toenails, and by how much, it's guaranteed to be too often for some worlds, and too rare for others.

[Harry Baldman]

((By this logic a person also can't properly imagine ONE year. Or a month. Pretty much anything longer then a day or so is out, because the human mind is built to abstract time, to focus on the really good and really bad.

((Quite true. And the longer the period imagined, the more you lose. And if you start going into time periods as far out of individual human experience as five hundred years, it becomes quite difficult to actually perceive how long that is. Time doesn't really have much meaning to us beyond a certain point. So yes, a human being can't fully imagine a year of time, let alone a hundred. Neither can they really imagine a whole planet without working on individual fragments, writing a lot of it down and building upon it for a long period of time. The point is, human imagination, memory and perception are all highly limited, and you seem to be arguing that they are not and human beings can imagine anything they put their mind to.))

And what exactly is "properly" imagining something? Do I have to know the precise location of every atom in my body and the exact forces that work upon them at all times to "properly" imagine WALKING?

((That's a reasonably good point, and I do agree with your point of view on this. What I was going for there is a fairly nebulous concept that even I'm not sure what it really means, so yeah. There really is no proper way to imagine something, as the best you can do is to perceive it similarly to a memory, which are quite varying in their accuracy.))

In relation to the governing idea: Do you honestly think a ruler has to know LITERALLY EVERYTHING to have any chance at success? Certainly information helps, but you seem to be suggesting that a government needs to know the exact number and length of toenail clippings produced by its populace to not spontaneously explode ))

((No, but a ruler can't abstract away an entire planet's worth of resources and people, their traditions, society and other things. The human-populated patch of the universe, as far as I can tell, is highly varied in technological advancement, culture and other things. What I'm trying to explain is that each planet has its own specific issues that it is worried about, its own centuries-old society (if not several), its own persuasions on what society needs to be. You can't trust a single, isolated clique of powerful people to run one whole planet, let alone several, and remain an institution that the people actually want to preside over them, which is the only way a revolution can assume power and not defeat itself.))

I think the problem is less that a ruler must know the dimensions of every citizen's toenail clippings, and more that a human ruler is incapable of comprehending the evolutionary changes to toenail sizes over thousands of worlds, through centuries.  So if he makes laws deciding when people should clip their toenails, and by how much, it's guaranteed to be too often for some worlds, and too rare for others.

((Kinda what he said, yeah.))

[Toaster]

they are not and human beings can imagine anything they put their mind to.))

((Allow me to play devil's advocate for a second...))

Something is looking at you through a haze of stardust and flame. Something with eyes made of emerald and waves of gravity distortions that breathes a haze of shattering physics equations. Huh.

The figure points upwards toward the stars with one of it's many cilia. The milky way spins overhead, the white spattering of stars now glowing an angry dull red, it's shape much distorted. The being speaks to you, it's voice a like the sound of cracking glass.

"SentientspeciesmacrolifecycledivinityisselffulfillingKardashevcouldnotpredicttheyliftthestarsanddrinkthewavesoflight"

"Alliscoalescencestarsplanetsgodsallarenotbornbutflowtogetherproductsofimmensitygravitymasssentiencebuiltwithincognitioncarriesinstinctofspeciessurvivorshipevolutiononmacroscalewhatisgodthinkcondensate"

((It may be just me, but I get the feeling that whatever this is was at one point human.))

[Sean Mirrsen]

((Which is why the first thing that needs to be established is a doctrine. Not a rigid set of rules, but a set of general guidelines for development that properly chosen and sufficiently loyal representatives of the governing body on each given planet will attempt to enforce. While we can't imagine the variations in toenail size and growth rates across the whole populated cosmos, we can sure lay down a general guideline a-la "any size is fine as long as it fits inside your boots".

Of course, it will lead to introducing regulations regarding to shoe sizes later on, but it's a good start. ^_^))