. : ooc : . wrote:{ALL-CLEAR} tl;wr is that this is a thread for FT nations to classify their technological strengths according to a system pioneered by an Arizona Novanian intellectual. OOCly Think of it as the One FT Tech Level List to Rule Them All, or a misguided attempt to bring balance to a frontier of roleplay that has traditionally been enmeshed in conflict over details too trivial to name; a White Tower for FT, if you will.
Note that this is probably more for soft-scifi and space epic types than hard-scifiers, but should still be general enough to cater to both. Its purpose is not to judge people for their technology, but classify them, and if you're more a hard sci-fier who eschews all talk of dimensional technology, then in referring to this list you might be able to see, at a glance, who it is you may wish to avoid.
As well, it's a work I make out of complete curiosity. Some of the responses I got back from the first have been surprising in how people picked and chose; our own tech bases, I think, can blind us to other ways of doing things, and seeing everyone's fundamentals laid out plainly might aid in understanding across the board.
Table of Contents:
→ Specialties
→ Strategic Triangle
→ Second Edition
→ POSTING TEMPLATE
This idea was first broached and hammered out on Derscon's IRC Nationstates Chat: irc://irc.loveandnature.co.za/nationstates
Further refinements were suggested by The Sskiss.
Some edits included in the Second Edition courtesy of TRIAD Enterprises's thought-provoking discussions.
Dacre Ambrogino Wieland’s An Inquiry into and Analysis of the Nature of the Science of Nations
Dacre Ambrogino Wieland is President of the Arizona Novanian Federation of Libraries and Archives, with a Ph.D. of Information Science. His other significant works include his Sacred History: Rise of the People for the Temporal Crusade; Monotheism in the Age of Atheism; Double Meanings: The Threat and Promise of Posthumanism; and Coping With Temporal Relativity in Information Science.
Introduction
In ancient times, men strove to pierce the darkness clouding the future with speculative lights, ones which imagined and extrapolated the progress of technology from the present to remote times. As the clockwork of the universe has run, however, this speculation has often fallen by the wayside, casualties to reality. The Terran Jules Verne's work, From the Earth to the Moon, is one of the most famous examples of such, speculating the construction of a giant gun from which space travelers would be shot at high speeds to the surface of the moon. The advent of true space travel soon shew better; liquid-fuel combustion rockets, not bullets, would be the means with which mankind came to Luna.
To those authors of speculative fiction, it became the fashion to focus less on the means of technology than upon its ends; to linger less in describing the details of its workings than to dream of the problems it would solve. Disease would be cured, the walls shrouding the universe from our sight and step would be thrown down, life would be made to go on indefinitely; more darkly, new and terrible weapons would be created to bring entire nations to heel, new methods of control would be devised, and unstoppable plagues would ravage life. Utopias and dystopias revolving around technology and science were painted on the canvases of books and film.
What was considered the ultimate apotheosis of this line of thinking was the idea of the post-scarcity society; that technology would ultimately render the need for resources obsolete, and liberate thinking species from capital, and that conflict might cease because of universal prosperity, precipitating an event posthumanist thought refers to as the singularity.
However, as before, the procession of time has proved otherwise. Across the galaxy, advancing technology has indeed rendered scarcity extinct in certain societies. However, conflict has not ceased; as time has gone on, the exact opposite has happened, and conflict has escalated further and further with technological advancement. Not a day goes by without the declaration by some tyrant or another of the development of a galaxy-ending weapon, declarations which inevitably result in the bloody dismantling of said tyrant and the salting of the earth of his civilization. War has regressed to exchanges of barbaric atrocities which would horrify the Roman Empire; worlds glassed, stars destroyed, and genocide being par for the course. The incursion of the Shivans in the early hundreds A.C.E. gave us a glimpse of a species which existed solely to destroy sapient life. What had gone wrong?
Anthropologists and clerics alike have often glibly answered that the selfish origins of sapient species - in humans, the greed and deceitfulness of the chimpanzee, or in saurids the carnivorous callousness of the lizard - are the cause of our woes. Yet this alone does not satisfy.
The answer to this question is actually as simple as it is unsatisfying: technology has not liberated us from capital; technology is capital.
We fight now, at the "end of time," when science has finally caught up to the margins of the expanding universe, with weapons of unimaginable power. Why? To end the threat of others who hold the same. It is a kind of war which was in the first pioneered by the American and Russian civilizations on Terra in the early 20th century; referred by them as the "Cold War." Ostensibly resources were at the heart of their struggle, but what was emphasized by either power was the contrast of their ideologies; capitalism versus communism. The material fixation of either ideology was eschewed in favor of painting the foe in diabolical colors. We fight too to gain the tools of our foes. The peculiar species of transhumanoid that crops up from time to time referring to itself as the Borg are one such example of this; a collective whose sole purpose is to absorb the biological and technological distinctiveness of all other species, that by this absorption its weapons as well as its defenses may grow stronger.
Technology is capital. We strive to acquire more, and perfect what we have. Yet, the number of powers that has arisen is almost beyond count; no two domineering superpowers explicitly shape our universe. The rise of any one nation to supreme ascendancy is always marked by growing protest by the mass, resulting in its isolation and destruction by the merciless millions of billions without.
So what is the point of pursuing science and technology? Perhaps nothing. But there is still profit to be had in another place: analyzing our science and technology from a broad angle. "Know thyself" - to define and to understand oneself - is one of the oldest adages of philosophy, and its logical extension is that, once one knows itself, it can come to know others, and in knowing others, one comes to know their strengths - and weaknesses.
Forward to the Science of Nations, Second Edition
I am surprised and pleased by the reception of my work in the international community; it has gained some measure of acceptance, and what's more, provoked diverse discussion of its topic matter; overall I am pleased to say that it has been lauded, and the creation of Book III, the Great Analysis, continues apace, as intellectuals across the galaxy submit the profiles of their own nations.
The criticisms are, however, what I wish most to address in this Second Edition. Specifically, an issue brought up by my esteemed colleagues formerly of TRIAD Enterprises, who engaged me in debate over where the Fundamental Forces - gravity, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism - fall in terms of specialties. It was his own opinion that simple Force Manipulation would be a suitable specialization, but I had to somewhat pointedly differ. Such would imply that mastery over gravitonics was mastery over magnetism was mastery over nuclear force; yet, the technology in an artificial gravity generator is incredibly distinct from the technology in a disruptor. So then it fell to me to try and determine whether each force could be considered its own specialty. Surely, the applications of magnetism are vast, however, they are not especially distinct; containment fields for antimatter, the delivery sheath used in plasma weaponry, the central component of the MAC; it is not, in these cases, the magnetic field thats is as important as what it is either containing and or delivering, whereas in gravitonics, the primacy of production, control, and delivery of that elusive particle is central. As well, I have not seen many examples to date of an FTL civilization which has built its entire technology base on mastery of magnetism, whereas this has been observed to be the case in the case of gravitonics; witness The Mindset, for example.
Yet other forces do have distinct and diverse application, but only at particularly high levels. Being able to affect nuclear force is the basis of both disruptor weapons and force fields; but there is still relatively few applications of it that have been broached to me beyond that.
The other matter of much discussion was the Minor Strategic Triangle. While the importance of application of biological science was not contested, its place on the triangle was, as was some of the terminology I used for the other definitions. I was forced to agree with the points raised in that department, and sought out terminology to perfect the minor triangle, and make it as airtight, as it were, as the Greater.
