Avoiding Intollerance in a Post-BioEngineering Setting

[L.J.Steele]

I'm fairly sure that proposing bio-engineering personality is right out. And possibly a bit beyond our understanding. Now using TL10/11 psych care to minimize the risk of anyone having the equivalent to the Intol disadvantage and treating it if it comes up -- that's doable.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

I'm fairly sure that proposing bio-engineering personality is right out. And possibly a bit beyond our understanding. Now using TL10/11 psych care to minimize the risk of anyone having the equivalent to the Intol disadvantage and treating it if it comes up -- that's doable.

Wait, you claim to be TL10-TL11, and you still haven't started engineering personality modifications? O_ò

[ericthered]

I suspect personality traits are like the human body: you can tweak them with fairly low level gene tampering, but it will be much more difficult to leave the human experience, and you can't discount the effects of training.

You can probably tweak folks to be more strong and agile, but if you don't give them exercise and training, they're not going to perform like star athletes. And rebuilding a human be capable of lifting 2,000 pounds and carrying it around will take a large amount of rebuilding: you'll have to do a lot of research, testing, and so forth. You can't pull from simple existing traits: you have to rework a number of body systems.

I expect mental traits would behave the same way: you can nudge things, prevent diseases, and select for traits, but it won't replace cultural upbringing and its much more difficult to leave the human experience.

I think messing with the "Us and them" instinct runs both into the training caveat and the "re-engineering" caveat. You can probably do a little bending at first, but you're going to hit limits before you want to.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I suspect personality traits are like the human body: you can tweak them with fairly low level gene tampering, but it will be much more difficult to leave the human experience, and you can't discount the effects of training.

You can probably tweak folks to be more strong and agile, but if you don't give them exercise and training, they're not going to perform like star athletes. And rebuilding a human be capable of lifting 2,000 pounds and carrying it around will take a large amount of rebuilding: you'll have to do a lot of research, testing, and so forth. You can't pull from simple existing traits: you have to rework a number of body systems.

I expect mental traits would behave the same way: you can nudge things, prevent diseases, and select for traits, but it won't replace cultural upbringing and its much more difficult to leave the human experience.

I think messing with the "Us and them" instinct runs both into the training caveat and the "re-engineering" caveat. You can probably do a little bending at first, but you're going to hit limits before you want to.

I also suspect that, esp. with mental traits, there's always going to be a high 'unintended consequence' factor. That is, a high risk that what looks like a trivial or minor effect is actually interconnected to something else, maybe apparently unrelated, that's really important, and the effect might not show up for years or decades before it suddenly becomes important.

"Who would have thought that making people 5% less quick to anger would produce narcolepsy in 30% of the subjects post-age 50?"

[L.J.Steele]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Wait, you claim to be TL10-TL11, and you still haven't started engineering personality modifications? O_ò

TL11 breakthrough is very recent. (new ship of refugees from the old world with proto-warp tech. We spent a century in cold sleep taking the slow boat. They saw the destruction of the old world from the belt, struggled to survive, and spent the last century maintaining their TL, boosting it to TL11, then a bunch of them fled to find us)

When we left, it was TL9/10, with TL10 medical in many, but not all areas. The big push was for the colony ships (looming disaster was known), so not as much experimentation with anything that might have unintended effects.

The folks most likely to implement the bio-engineering are my Doc and the PC geneticist/biologist. I'm pretty sure both would look at personality mod to be far too risky in unintended side effects.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

TL11 breakthrough is very recent. (new ship of refugees from the old world with proto-warp tech. We spent a century in cold sleep taking the slow boat. They saw the destruction of the old world from the belt, struggled to survive, and spent the last century maintaining their TL, boosting it to TL11, then a bunch of them fled to find us)

When we left, it was TL9/10, with TL10 medical in many, but not all areas. The big push was for the colony ships (looming disaster was known), so not as much experimentation with anything that might have unintended effects.

The folks most likely to implement the bio-engineering are my Doc and the PC geneticist/biologist. I'm pretty sure both would look at personality mod to be far too risky in unintended side effects.

And yet most behavioural modifications are TL9, a few TL10, and only Selfless and Slave Mentality are TL11. There seems to be more of a TL mismatch than originally seemed.

[Steve Jackson]

Is it certain that there is a third power? Just reading the account, I would be highly suspicious of the well-developed psi and gene-engineering race you already know about. Or a faction thereof.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

The gov't put out a gag order to medical while we tried to figure it out. 2 years later, we have more clues, but no answers yet.

How is "the gov't" structured? Does it attempt to govern the natives? Is the gag order a restriction on itself or on the public?

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

There's a third intelligence, nature unknown, that's bio-engineering about 20% of our newborns, to adapt them to the planet. (Reflective hair to reduce UV issues from this system's star.) So far, the adaptation is dominant in animal testing. (It also seems to have beneficially bio-engineered both native sentient species and some of the animals and plants.)

Are they sure it's a distinct intelligence doing this, and not some natural mechanism, or possibly some leftover technology from previous settlers?

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

Psis vs. non-psi. We've got a dozen or so psis (including my doctor). Psi is recessive, so not enough individuals to maintain a reasonable percentage of psis in the populace without genetic engineering.

I'm not sure this is right.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I'm not sure this is right.

Blond hair is a recessive. This does not prevent entire populations of people with blond hair.

[L.J.Steele]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Blond hair is a recessive. This does not prevent entire populations of people with blond hair.

True, but mostly when you have a decent starting population of blonds so there's not much inbreeding risk. More of an issue when you've got a total population of about 10k (gene banks with more sperm/ova) and of those 10k, about 10 individuals with measurable psi (each with a specialization so we've got one strong Telepath, one strong Anti-psi, one strong Psi-Sniffer, one strong Healer, etc.-- it's expensive to have measurable amounts of more than 2-3 psi powers groups) and maybe twice that with advantages like Luck and Danger Sense that are likely weak psi. So far, for example, we have only two sources for the psi-healing gene set -- my doctor and someone from the gene bank. We've got three known sources for the telepathy gene set, probably another dozen sources for that in the gene bank.

(Old world, most Psis lived in big group mind-cities and weren't able to function in small groups -- the psis we got were the oddballs that didn't fit into that structure.)

Is it certain that there is a third power?

Reasonably so. Short-ish version, we found traces of plants (trees, coral, and some sort of desert flower) that bloom only once every few centuries or so and emit a purple prion. The avian species deliberately collects it when it washes up on the beaches and uses it to line their nests and affect their eggs (that's where we first encountered it). The psi-insects claim they embraced it in their distant past and it made them more intelligent (and likely strengthened their psi) -- there's a distantly-related psi-insect race (nomadic herders) who the psi-insects say were their distant ancestors. We arrived just after a big bloom, so there's lots of prion pollen in the atmosphere.

It gets a bit weirder -- we also found some black crystals in underground layers, laid down every 500-ish years. If it gets into AI-level circuits, it starts trying to rewire them. So far, nobody's been willing to sacrifice an AI (hard to replace right now) to see what happens if we let it run its course. Powers-that-be sent us out to a glacier to take ice cores to find out more about this dust and pollen-- where we found out that the crystals are volcanic, form one of 8characteristic shapes each 500 yrs in a big eruption cycle, and have combined to form repeating patterns in the ice -- the patterns go back over 60k years. (That was either the first or second weirdest thing we found.) We're pretty sure there's something really old deep in the planet -- possibly an automated terraforming system -- haven't figured out how to talk to it yet. We think the prions and the crystals have the same source, but not 100% sure.

How is "the gov't" structured? Does it attempt to govern the natives? Is the gag order a restriction on itself or on the public.

Aspirational representative democracy -- senate and president, with guild-like houses that have monopolies on certain tech they brought with them on the colony ships -- so a House that handles space-tech, a House that handles Medical-tech, a House that handles livestock/domestic animals, another for mining, etc. There's only 10k or so sentient colonists, all adults are 1st generation to the new world, so there's not a lot of room yet for spread between government and governed. Senate and president said "go look into the prion effects on mammals" (world only has a few examples of true mammals). Several generations of mice later, my doctor comes back with the mutagenic effects on mice, which were mirroring what we were starting to see in our newborns. President said -- find out what's causing this and Medical, you can't tell anyone what's going on yet. (Partly because at that point, we didn't know enough to try to prevent it -- we've got an option for that now.)