02-05-2023, 05:28 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Dec 2020
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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. |
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02-05-2023, 12:02 PM | #32 |
Join Date: May 2007
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Re: What is our TL?
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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I predicted GURPS:Dungeon Fantasy several hours before it came out and all I got was this lousy sig. |
02-05-2023, 01:21 PM | #33 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: What is our TL?
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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. Quote:
(I'm not aware of any real justification for the idea that being transgenic makes an organism more dangerous.)
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-06-2023, 02:14 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Rome, Italy
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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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“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?” |
02-06-2023, 03:03 PM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: What is our TL?
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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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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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02-06-2023, 05:30 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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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). |
02-06-2023, 07:01 PM | #37 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: What is our TL?
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While chatGPT analogues might start to superficially resemble a GURPS NAI, they aren't actually much like one. Quote:
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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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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-06-2023, 08:50 PM | #38 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: What is our TL?
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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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Fred Brackin |
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02-06-2023, 11:54 PM | #39 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: What is our TL?
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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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02-06-2023, 11:57 PM | #40 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: What is our TL?
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The serious lack of workable battlesuits and energy weapons prevents us from being anyplace close to TL9, however. |
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