Limited Infinite Worlds Campaign

[TheScribe]

Well, to be honest, there is still untapped oil here on our Earth but it is more expensive than other, easier alternatives--so the economics will really make a big deal here.

I actually think that agriculture and such may be the big industry there. Or a lot of manufacturing could be done on the other earth where you could pollute that Earth and not our own.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Xenarthral

I imagine that framework contained in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 would apply to alternate Earths as well. Pretty much everybody else (and Doctor Van Zandt himself - at least that's the impression I got from Infinite Worlds)
would insist on it.

This covers things like
being free for exploration and use by all states (article 1)
exploration and use must be carried out for the benefit of all countries (article 1)
cannot be annexed by any state (article 2)
exploration and use must be in accordance with international law (article 3)
states must disclose infoemation about their activities (articles 10-12)
etc.

http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/5181.htm

So long as its just words on paper and hardly anyone lives there, the outer space treaty works fine, however another Earth is not outer space, and if you apply the Outer Space treaty to it, you set a dangerous precidentm because sooner or later, your going to encounter another world with a nation on it, and if you consider its territory to be the common property of Mankind, then you are justifying an invasion to exploit its resources for "all mankind", and that is not a good basis for international relations and could start a war. The best thing to do is to treat it as another place on Earth.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Rowan

What about diseases? Won't the native populations (especially in the americas, not sure about europe and other places) die off in droves when the first native comes into contact with someone that happens to be a carrier for a disease, or just happens to have a bad cold or something?

Most modern Americans have been innoculated, and as such are not actively contageous. Most of the problems between the Early European colonists and the Indians came from the fact that most Europeans practised animal husbandry and the Indians did not. Nowadays, most modern Americans don't have contact with animals, and those animals are innoculated so they don't have diseases that they can spread to humans. The problem would be much less pronounced upon first contact between Modern Americans and alternate natives, and the problems will be anticipated. Innoculations will be ready to give to any natives encountered.

The natives on the American Continent in Earth 2 look like native Americans, the other alternate contains stone age caucasians, as well as Neanderthals. I'm thinking of making the second stone age alternate into the World of Banded Night from Worlds out of time, just for variety's sake. That way on either side of homeline we have two stone age alternates, there is the realistic Ice Age Alternate, and the not so realistic World of Banded Night, where dinosaurs and humans, neanderthals, and protohumans share the same world. The second world is not the past, and it may be the future, but no one is sure, there is a rocky ring around the planet instead of a Moon. The Dinosaurs, humans, Neanderthals, and protohumans were apparently aquired by an ancient race called the "lost ones". The Lost Ones were an ancient technological elder race of some sort which had the capability of parachronic travel just like this Homeline is now aquiring. The World of Banded Night seems to be based loosely on that olde television series Land of the Lost which had dinosaurs, protohumans and two races of lizardmen called sleestack. The green ones were the savages, and the brown ones civilized. Chaka was a protohuman. Also there were various artifacts called "Pylons" each one had different properties, some controlled the weather, but others were doorways to other worlds. I'm thinking of giving the "Lost Ones" similar artifacts to that TV show. If there are doors to other worlds in the World of Banded Night, you just have to get past the dinosaurs, then you have a reason for colonists to go their. With the Ice Age alternate their is natural resources, in "Banded Night" the animals are alot more dangerous, but the artifacts might make the danger worth the trip. Colonizing Banded night is a bit more trouble. The atmosphere tends to shorten the shelf life of electronic gear, and stronger fences need to be build to keep out dangerous animals, and no one even knows where the oil fields would be located here.

Another factor is there is no GPS, or weather satellites, people don't know when a hurricane is coming or a snow storm. Banded night is poorly mapped and their is no satellite pictures of the place. The Ice Age Alternate has coastlines rougly the same as homeline, and one can navigate by known stars. Banded Night has unknown constellations and planets in its sky, the coastline are unmapped and its easy to get lost. The best kind of reconnassance is by airplane.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

It'd be easier at first to tap the readily accessible sweet crude in North America than to go to the Persian Gulf.
You't tap the bubbly in the Tennessee valley, in Texas, Oklahoma, the Gulf of Mexico, etc., at first, build pipelines with feeders directly to American processors.
After a few years you'd build the processors on the other side, and only ship back the refined product, eliminating a source of pollution on our earth.

Depending on the gates, you could send over whole hog the processing plants and land from our earth to save on building times.


Dartmouth College is an Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire, it's a top notch University.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~physics/re...ed.matter.html
Hanover is on the Connecticut River, which with enough work can be made to be navigable, though much work would need to be done to allow big ships to use it, this would lead to the Atlantic Ocean at Block Island Sound, just at the end of Long Island Sound.
In addition, a 40 mile navigable canal can be built from Hanover, at the Connecticut River, to the Merrimak River. The Merrimak River can be made navigable down to Boston and Massachusetts Bay which in in the Atlantic.


There's a UMass Dartmouth, it's a decent enough college and part of the UMass University system, however, it does not have a graduate physics program and is unlikely to be what is being referenced.
Dartmouth Mass is close to the coast and has ready access to the Atlantic Ocean through Rhode Island and/or Nantucket Sounds.

Thanks for that bit of info. Now we have an idea about a development program for the colonists. I kind of want the transferrence costs from Homeline to this alternate to be such that it doesn't really make sense to transport raw materials, such as crude oil to Homeline, but it does make sense for some people to move their and use such natural resources locally. You see people make the move and set up their homes once and living on the local natural resources once they are there, but it is noneconomic to transport oil from this altenate to homeline. Uranium, Gold, Platnium yes, crude oil no. You need some high value material to justify the cost of transferrence. Crude Oil's value is in its cheapness. If a significant number of Earth Population were to transfer to these altenates, they would use the alternate's natural resources and less of homelines, thus the price of crude oil on homeline would drop if enough people moved to the Ice Age alternate.

Also Banded Night provides the means to reach alternates even further out that current Homeline technology can reach due to the working artifact gates of the "lost ones" that dot that alternate planet's surface. Homeline's Parachronic projectors can so far reach only these two worlds. Banded Nights artifacts can reach alot more, but their are dinosaurs of course.

[Ed the Coastie]

Years and years ago (back in my bachelor days, when I a lot more gaming time than I do now), I was playing in a modern-day Horror campaign and we were running through the Flight 13 adventure.

When we escaped from "Austin", though, we found ourselves in an alternate North America in which an Elder Race had scattered Pylons (from Land of the Lost) and Grailstones (from Riverworld) randomly across the countryside. (At least it appeared random to us...) They then had apparently populated the landscape with cloned recreations of Neanderthals, Titanthropes, prehistoric animals, and a handful of dinosaurs.

We never actually escaped from there...the campaign ended before we could finish it. But it was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I might try to run my version of it someday. If I ever find the time... *G*

[Xenarthral]

Originally Posted by Tom Kalbfus

So long as its just words on paper and hardly anyone lives there, the outer space treaty works fine, however another Earth is not outer space, and if you apply the Outer Space treaty to it, you set a dangerous precidentm because sooner or later, your going to encounter another world with a nation on it, and if you consider its territory to be the common property of Mankind, then you are justifying an invasion to exploit its resources for "all mankind", and that is not a good basis for international relations and could start a war. The best thing to do is to treat it as another place on Earth.

But you don't treat it as another place on Earth, you treat it as a piece of uninhabited and unclaimed land, available to whoever comes there first. Somehow I don't think that the terra nullius doctrine (the backwards natives aren't using it properly so we have a right to take their land and exploit the resources) you're suggesting is an improvement over the "cannot be annexed by any state" (article 1) of the Outer Space Treaty, especially when it comes to avoiding international (or parachronic) conflicts.
The treaty does not "justify an invasion to exploit another world's resources for 'all mankind'" it is, in part, set up to prevent a 19th century-style "scramble for the solar system (and any other worlds available)".
The situation is pretty much the same as the discovery of another Earth-like planet (within reach), with natives at stone age level. With the added benefit that you don't have to work out whether they natives are sentient (or which ones are) or whether they count as humans under international and national law.
The legal problems (and the politics) of parachronic activities are much the same as those of outer space activities, possibly with an increased chance of encountering natives.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Xenarthral

But you don't treat it as another place on Earth, you treat it as a piece of uninhabited and unclaimed land, available to whoever comes there first. Somehow I don't think that the terra nullius doctrine (the backwards natives aren't using it properly so we have a right to take their land and exploit the resources) you're suggesting is an improvement over the "cannot be annexed by any state" (article 1) of the Outer Space Treaty, especially when it comes to avoiding international (or parachronic) conflicts.
The treaty does not "justify an invasion to exploit another world's resources for 'all mankind'" it is, in part, set up to prevent a 19th century-style "scramble for the solar system (and any other worlds available)".
The situation is pretty much the same as the discovery of another Earth-like planet (within reach), with natives at stone age level. With the added benefit that you don't have to work out whether they natives are sentient (or which ones are) or whether they count as humans under international and national law.
The legal problems (and the politics) of parachronic activities are much the same as those of outer space activities, possibly with an increased chance of encountering natives.

The short answer is that there will be people who fear cultural contamination and will stay home, and other people who will venture forth and risk contact with other cultures. This setting assumes that people will venture forth discover new worlds and exploit them for their benefit, and the former stay-at-homes have no power to stop them. One can make the moral argument that we should not invade other countries, but what is a country exactly. A stoneage world has a population of about 5 million hunter/gatherers, these people will remain mostly ignorant if you settle one corner of their world, they are so spread out that they rarely encounter each other and are only aware of neighboring tribes, their whole world is their tribe and the valley they hunt in.

There are benefits of modern humans moving into their world as well as risks. Stone age people led a hard life after all, they had lots of children mainly because alot of them died before reaching adulthood. Many women died while giving birth to their children and their was no medical care. If someone gets injured, either he dies or gets better. Modern medicine can save people who might otherwise die. Do we rob them of some of their hunting grounds or of their primitive way of life? Yes, but in exchange for what? Some of the primitives of the World of Banded Night look exactly like white caucasian modern humans if you gave then a shave and dressed them in modern clothes. Racial differences and animocities would be minimal in those cases, as for Neanderthals, they present something of a problem, but problems are what roleplaying is all about. People should decide individually about what best they should do. I don't really want a Role Playing setting with lots of rules that tell PCs what they can't do legally, I'd rather leave it up to their own judgement, and their are no easy and obvious solutions that come to mind other than not going and not playing the game. If this setting doesn't suit you then don't play it, otherwise do.. If the IW had a rule that you can't interfere with other cultures and can only sneak around, then what is the justification for funding these forays into other worlds? Just to satisfy some scientist's curiousity? I'm assuming that it costs billions of dollars to built each parachronic projector, they can send conveyors back and forth relatively inexpensively, but the initial expense of contructing each projector runs in the billions. Just like hydroelectric dams, they are expensive to build, but accrue benefits once built.

The people who built the parachronic projectors will want to use them to justify their initial investments, that is just human nature and it is the way our society operates. There is no "John Luc Picard" trying to ram the "Prime Directive" down our throats. If there are civilizations out their, we will want to trade with them, if their aren't we may just move ourselves onto those worlds and live on them ourselves, their are no hard and fast rules to apply.

The reason the Outer Space Treaty works is because no one can afford to go into outer space to challenge it, once that changes the Outer Space Treaty will be challanged. The Outer Space Treaty was not designed to deal with large numbers of people living in space, it is completely unworkable. The only reason were not exploiting Mars is because right now, its too expensive to get there. I'd rather not talk about what should be, but rather what would be. Should is a rather political question, and we can argue about it until we are all blue in the face, but the should question will never be resolved because none of us here has the means to resolve it. I can say 'apples' and you can say 'oranges' but without resolution the question will never be resolved. Its alot easier to answer what would happen if parachronic travel were possible. We should examine our societies as they are, and not as we would like them to be. I for one don't think our society would be controlled by a 'Jean Luc Picard' who would then say, "Prime Directive" and we would all obey.

The 'Jean Luc Picards' of this world would stay at home and not interfere, or they would stand outside the headquarters with signs in protest of exploitative policy, but the simplest and most effective way not to exploit or interfere is not to go. And so we might as well not build the projectors in the first place, but if we do, you must expect that there will be some pressure to do something with it thats either of benefit to the society that built it or to benifit the shareholders who funded it. That is realism, that is the question this thread is all about. What should or should not happen is a political question, and it is a political question about a hypothetical situation that we don't now face, it is realistic that some people in this fictional world would say we shouldn't go, but it is also realistic that there will be some other people in this world who would say we should, and it would be those people who would build the projectors.

[Tom Kalbfus]

A conveyor under my definition is simply a communication's device, it is an enclosed space with a communications device which is essentially a very tiny parachronic projector, it projects a message to homeline that basically says, "Take me back" and the projector responds tothis message by cycling the conveyor back to the projection platform on homeline. It can only project back those objects that are in the location corresponding to the platform, it can project back trees, animals, and dirt. You can see this spot on the alternate because there usually is a flat smooth spot where a piece of the terrain was removed by the initial projection. If someone is standing there when a conveyor arrives, then he will be transported to homeline outside the conveyor when the conveyor arrives where he is standing. All that the conveyor does is present a boundary so that parts of people are projected while other parts of people are left behind. The part of the conveyor thats resting on the ground may sink in a little and part of it may be left behind when projected back to homeline. A person standing on the arrival area may find that most of him arrives in homeline, but perhaps the soles of his shoes or even worse the bottoms of his feet weren't transported with him, a conveyor is simply a safety feature that prevents that from happening, and it is a means for a person to signal that he wants to go home and so activate the projector to bring him back.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

When we escaped from "Austin", though, we found ourselves in an alternate North America in which an Elder Race had scattered Pylons (from Land of the Lost)

!
And Lands Out of Time was just released.. hmm...

Synchronicity rears her acausal head ;)

[Tom Kalbfus]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

!
And Lands Out of Time was just released.. hmm...

Synchronicity rears her acausal head ;)

Lands out of time could be a key to other worlds, its denzins obviously come from different worlds, the dinosaurs did not come from the same place that the cavemen did, and the book states that cavemen (cro magnons, neanderthals, and protohumans are the only mammals around) an obvious suggesation the the Lost Ones might have something to do with them being here. Then their are trilobites, trilobites and dinosaurs don't belong in the same world either, these are obvious suggestions that the lost ones may have had parachronic travel in their day, and their ruins are still around, and unlike human technology in this environment, the lost ones' technology was designed to last a long time, there may be pylons or whatever with gates to other worlds. If we follow Land of the Lost's example, then the Pylons are tall mini pyramind with openings that materialize when you put the righ gemstone in the proper hole. Inside there is a control board with holes where you can place the proper gemstones in the right position that signal the pylon to open up a gate to one particular world or another, and unlike the parachronic projectors, you just step through the opening, and the opening remains until one of the gems on the control board is removed, then the gate disappears. I could easily imagine a technology like that operating on the World of Banded Night. Each of the two worlds offers something different to the people on Earth sponsoring the parachronic missions. The Ice Age Alternate offers more natural resources in know locations that can be exploited by society, there are no civilizations here to give people moral qualm about going there, and plenty of reasons to go. This is like a taste of things to come and a way for society to benefit from parachronic travel. Of course their are obstacles to overcome and a wilderness to explore, but after its filled with people, it becomes just like another Earth. Cities will be contructed, highways and homes built, and after its settled and colonized it will become another version of homeline, with new cities and no history prior to its initial colonization. I think the United States might very well clame the land of North America on the alternates and add more states to the Union with names like New Connecticut, New Massachusetts, and New New York. They'll have the same old boundaries as on Homeline, only with new cities, highways, and homes, and a lower population, greater access to resources, and of course cleaner air initially.

There are more worlds to be had, but they are hard to get to. The only other world currently within reach of parachronic technology is the World of Banded Night, it is a more dangerous world, with carnovourous plants, giants beasts, and more savage natives, their is also one primitive nation on it that practices agriculture, but also on it are the ruins of the lost ones, which may lead on to yet other worlds. The only other way to reach other worlds is to build another billion dollar parachronic projector on the Ice Age Alternate so you can move to the next world, or build one on the World of Banded night with its atmosphere unfriendly to modern technology, but fortunately the World of Banded Night already has its gates to other worlds, its technology is more advanced than Homelines, at it can reach many more other worlds than two. The trick it getting to the pylons, and learning how to operating them in a predictable fashion so you can travel to other worlds and get back. And of course there are plenty of obstables along the way to getting to the pylons. Parachronic projectors by the way cannot reach anywhere within a 500 mile radius of where each gate pylon operates, so travellers have a significant overland journey to make avoiding dinosaurs and the like to get their and back on the way to other worlds. Eventually a road can be carved out in this wilderness, but it will take some time and some danger to carve it, and also equipment keeps breaking down here.