On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Bira <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:25 PM, David Scheidt <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Remember, this is a TL10 culture, which has been TL10 for a long, long >> (a couple thousand years) time. This means that all sorts of >> surveillance is pervasive and accepted. > > I think that's more of a cultural setting detail than something > inherent to the progress of technology. Same goes for mini-facturing. > Both are possible at TL10, but whether they're common and, in the case > of surveillance, accepted, is something that has to be decided for > that specific setting.
I think it's inherent in being TL10. Otherwise, you're TL7 with spaceships and rayguns, and might as well play Traveller. Technology has always changed the way society works; that's one of the reasons I like SciFi. Pretending that technology that's been invented won't be used, and won't get out of the control of the people who invent it, is to ignore all the historical precedent. Look at the attempts to control the printing press, or the automatic loom, or gun powder, or steel making techniques, or the atomic bomb. None of them worked, at least not in the long term. For my two examples, first let's consider mini-facs. If you don't have them, you're entirely dependent on imported tech. Not just for goods, which might be okay, but also for spare parts and maintenance, which is selling yourself into slavery. Or imagine having to tell your ship's passengers that they're all going to die, because stupid regulations prohibit the ability to make the part you need to fix the life support system. As for information on how to build things, restricting that is going to work as well as restricting other sorts of knowledge: Not well at all. Once one copy has been made out of the originators control, there will be more, and then as many as you'd like. Surveillance is getting more and more pervasive today, and it's still expensive to do it. It costs money to store video; make storage cheap enough that you can afford to keep it forever, and computers powerful enough to dredge through it in real time, and you're going to tell me people won't? never happened before in human history; don't see it changing. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
