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Old 02-05-2023, 05:28 AM   #31
Willy
 
Join Date: Dec 2020
Default Re: What is our TL?

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Even non-GMO crop varieties are often not true-breeding, I believe. It's pretty common for the productive seed to be a hybrid.
Of course, their are heirloom seeds thad breed true, nearly all other seeds are hybrids.

Raising your own seed like the farmers and gardeners did for millenia is now next to impossible. At least if you want the same properties and results.
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Old 02-05-2023, 12:02 PM   #32
ravenfish
 
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Default Re: What is our TL?

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Raising your own seed like the farmers and gardeners did for millenia is now next to impossible. At least if you want the same properties and results.
To put it another way, it's still perfectly easy to practice pre-modern farming, but you have to be willing to settle for pre-modern yields, so its obviously not a popular choice.
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Old 02-05-2023, 01:21 PM   #33
Ulzgoroth
 
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The big ones are GMO commodity crops with built-in resistance to particular herbicides and there is increasing consumer, environmental, and grower pushback against such practices.
In the US that's apparently not exactly true outside soybeans. It looks like almost all cultivation has switched to strains that combine the herbicide resistance with Bt-based insect resistance.

There's been popular and scientific speculation that anti-insect modifications would endanger bees. The evidence seems pretty strong that the Bt-based version doesn't, though some other modifications that have been tried might.
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That might not be as corporate evil as it sounds. There are benign uses for GMOs.

The big one is non-transgenic genetic engineering of plants to quickly combine desirable traits from different strains into a single cultivar. It gives you exactly the same effects as years of cross-breeding different cultivars in a fraction of the time with much greater precision. That sort of genetic engineering is harmless and useful.
I'm not anti-GMO and have at worst mixed feelings about evading the labeling standard. That said, it's absolutely a case of gaming the rules to profit by misleading end-users...

(I'm not aware of any real justification for the idea that being transgenic makes an organism more dangerous.)
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Old 02-06-2023, 02:14 PM   #34
Opellulo
 
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Default Re: What is our TL?

Discussions like this come out from time to time and I stand by my point. If you remove social media and PR stunts we are no more technological than the nuclear age:
- IA: It's just machine learning models over data pools, Eliza on steroids
- Self driving cars: a PR stunt evloved to a plain (and dangerous) scam
- Fusion power: it still consumes more than it produces, plus current solutions use deuterium and tritium (not the pure hydrogen based fusion of the Sun) so it would never be viable.
- Quantum computing: it exists... Did you notice any change?

The only "TL 9 tech" we can claim is Crispr Gene editing plus some baby steps in high capacity batteries... That still are not power cells.
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Old 02-06-2023, 03:03 PM   #35
whswhs
 
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Default Re: What is our TL?

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The only "TL 9 tech" we can claim is Crispr Gene editing plus some baby steps in high capacity batteries... That still are not power cells.
It seems to me there are two definitions of TL9. One is "what this sourcebook" (such as a GURPS supplement) "says is characteristic of TL9." The other is "something that's clearly beyond TL8."

For comparison, Robert Heinlein wrote a bunch of boys' books in the 1940s and 1950s, which in GURPS terms is TL7. He had people taking off for the Moon, Mars, Venus, and even the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn in nuclear spacecraft, with little worry about environmental effects; in one novel he had interstellar range teleportation and time distortion fields. But he portrayed computers that had to be programmed by keying in machine code, translating numbers from decimal to binary by looking in books of tables, while his engineers carried slide rules. Yet I think if he saw what actually developed, from programmable calculators to desktop computers (he did live to see a little of those!) to gene sequencing and editing, he woud have recognized them as beyond not only what the earlier era was capable of but also what it even imagined.

So that's what I would look for, and not necessarily anything that went into a specific GURPS supplement.
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Old 02-06-2023, 05:30 PM   #36
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: What is our TL?

We're generally more aware of technological changes that we've personally experienced, but if TL 6 can cover 1880 to 1940, there's no reason TL 8 can't be 1980 to 2040, just putting us in late TL 8.

We're probably never going to be 'TL 9' in GURPS terms, because predicting future tech is very unlikely to be correct. Instead, we'll hit what would be TL '8+1' (though a future edition of GURPS would probably rearrange things so TL 9 reflects what's actually in use and what's currently GURPS TL 9 would become 8+1).
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Old 02-06-2023, 07:01 PM   #37
Ulzgoroth
 
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- IA: It's just machine learning models over data pools, Eliza on steroids
It's very useful and very powerful, within certain domains. But it's not much like what most SF calls AI and some people call AGI to distinguish it from all remotely successful AI exercises.

While chatGPT analogues might start to superficially resemble a GURPS NAI, they aren't actually much like one.
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- Self driving cars: a PR stunt evloved to a plain (and dangerous) scam
...You can ride in one, you know? I'm pretty sure they're real, though likely with significant limits besides the regulatory.
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Originally Posted by Opellulo View Post
- Fusion power: it still consumes more than it produces, plus current solutions use deuterium and tritium (not the pure hydrogen based fusion of the Sun) so it would never be viable.
The first part is true, the last part is silly. Proton-proton fusion isn't remotely a prerequisite for fusion to be useful.
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- Quantum computing: it exists... Did you notice any change?
To what extent does it actually exist? My lazy research suggests that the first thing that might be a serious working model was announced in 2019...and obviously that's a research device, and still probably too small to do most of the interesting problems.

However, if you look in the right places you can see computer security types making adjustments so that our entire information security structure doesn't disintegrate the moment quantum computers actually become available.
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Old 02-06-2023, 08:50 PM   #38
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: What is our TL?

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D

The only "TL 9 tech" we can claim is Crispr Gene editing plus some baby steps in high capacity batteries... That still are not power cells.
No, we're hitting the lower edge of TL9 personal armor. Specifically the Vest w/plates and Helmets in UT.

Cutting edge firearms are also turning out things not found in UT. Sometimes they have superior performance though mostly it's because of conventional propellent used at higher pressures rather than radically new tech.
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Old 02-06-2023, 11:54 PM   #39
Pursuivant
 
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To put it another way, it's still perfectly easy to practice pre-modern farming, but you have to be willing to settle for pre-modern yields, so its obviously not a popular choice.
Not always. Smart "regenerative" agriculture can get decent yields and a carefully tended organic garden filled with heirloom vegetables can give very impressive yields. The main problems are that organic/regenerative agriculture requires different skills and is more labor intensive.

There are also amazing things happening with (mostly) organic aquaponics and hydroponics which allow high-density agriculture in areas where conventional farming isn't practical.
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Old 02-06-2023, 11:57 PM   #40
Pursuivant
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
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No, we're hitting the lower edge of TL9 personal armor. Specifically the Vest w/plates and Helmets in UT.
Except for the areas I pointed out, we're certainly at mature TL8 for arms and armor.

The serious lack of workable battlesuits and energy weapons prevents us from being anyplace close to TL9, however.
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