New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

Unfortunately, the Peter Principle should apply to the replacements as well. I doubt that the total number of competent people in the new group will be greater than that of the old group. They might even be less, because many of them wouldn't have gotten training that they needed.

Of course, the lack of training has a chance of being beneficial because they might not have had all the creativity trained out of them. A small chance, but nonetheless, a chance.

Still, the fight when the old elites get back would be epic.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

Unfortunately, the Peter Principle should apply to the replacements as well. I doubt that the total number of competent people in the new group will be greater than that of the old group. They might even be less, because many of them wouldn't have gotten training that they needed.

Of course, the lack of training has a chance of being beneficial because they might not have had all the creativity trained out of them. A small chance, but nonetheless, a chance.

Even if the new elites weren't any better than the old elites, they have the advantage of continued interaction and competition in a dynamic world.

The "Galt's Gulch" idiots just jumped in a hole and pulled it in after them, for 20 years. That's two decades of isolation from the (admittedly sometimes cacophonous) constant exchange of ideas, two decades of absence from a world full of scientific research and development, 20 years of ignorance about technological innovation.

I mean, a famous example of what happens occurred with mainframe computer manufacturers, in the 1980s. Their entire paradigm focused on how to get more teraflops (and then petaflops), faster, out of bigger, badder machines.

The problem is, by the late 1980s, the synchronization problems had been addressed and massively parallel computing made it possible to do more work, faster, with cheaper chips that didn't need nearly as much in the way of exotic materials, and that proved far more flexible and scalable.

At that point, the entire computer world went through a sea-change as the paradigm shifted and a bunch of the old mainframe manufacturers saw their entire business model get rendered obsolete.

Very few people have mainframes now, except for the the financial industry where floating-point calculations are no bueno. (When calculating interest on earnings, there is no such thing as a "good enough" result; there is one right answer, and every other answer is, by definition, wrong.)

Another one is Elon Musk's stainless-steel spacecraft. If that actually works, then many carbon-fiber engineers are gonna need some re-training.

If people were to drop out for 20 years, by the time they returned their skill-sets would be woefully inadequate. The only way they'd have any chance in hell of staying on top is if they arranged for the world to collapse.

That almost certainly means they weren't actually the "best and the brightest." They were the second-raters who watched their status quo getting disrupted, and decided that if they couldn't be in charge, then the world needed to end.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

PCs could either members of the old elites fighting to recover lost power and influence or members of the new elites fighting to retain what they've got. Either way, you've conflict and drama.

Not really. A bunch of outnumbered relics from the past with obsolete skills and no remaining resources are not going to put up much of a fight. A Galt idea I've had is for the wealthy elite to Elon Musk themselves away into space colonies because they no longer need the common rabble now that they have robots that can perform all the work with minimal organic supervision.

[AlexanderHowl]

Just as an aside, most stainless steels are actually a poor choice for reusable rockets because of the corrosion caused by saltwater exposure (certain stainless steels are resistant to saltwater corrosion, but they are still not good choices). Maraging steel or HY-130 would likely be better choices for spacecraft.

[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

The "Galt's Gulch" idiots just jumped in a hole and pulled it in after them, for 20 years. That's two decades of isolation from the (admittedly sometimes cacophonous) constant exchange of ideas, two decades of absence from a world full of scientific research and development, 20 years of ignorance about technological innovation.

This I agree with. My problem is that I don't see the new people as being any better than the old people *when* they disappeared.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Just as an aside, most stainless steels are actually a poor choice for reusable rockets because of the corrosion caused by saltwater exposure (certain stainless steels are resistant to saltwater corrosion, but they are still not good choices). Maraging steel or HY-130 would likely be better choices for spacecraft.

Tim Dodd did a nice examination of the steel the SpaceX engineers chose to use, and why they picked it, two years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LogE40_wR9k

Plus, as we've seen, they have no intention of any splashdowns in any ocean, anyway. It'll probably take off from an oil rig on steroids, and then land on one, also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYZbqlu3RQ

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

This I agree with. My problem is that I don't see the new people as being any better than the old people *when* they disappeared.

On average, they probably wouldn't be.
Guys such as Musk or Bezos come along no more than a half-dozen times, at most, in a generation.

I mean, Google is 20 years old, now; and Apple and Microsoft are 45 years old, now.

[Willy]

As long as the actual speed of innovation goes on or even speeds up, it´s completly right, that people who are out of touch with recent events, would have skills that are nearly obsolete. But remember, the advance of TL´s was seldom so fast, than in recent history, and I know a time were wellknown scientists were proclaiming the end of scientific advance. The reason was that every new discover was even more expensive than the discovery before.

[TGLS]

Whoever thought that time-travel was a good idea will have always have been an idiot. Without all the tensor math, it's kind of hard to explain, but I'll try. When you move in three dimensions, your movement in space (and delta-movement, and delta-delta-movement, etc.) causes slight changes in your movement through time (and its deltas). This rarely matters unless you hop on a starship and fly up to near-lightspeed. Now let's say you're some joker who wants to kill Franz Ferdinand or save Joe Kennedy. You've got two options:
1) Hop in a starship and maneuver such that time runs backwards. This is usually a bad idea because you'll end up as a toddler in the middle of nowhere.
2) You treat all of spacetime like regular space and treat the fifth dimension like time (this is called hypertime).

That second option might sound like a good idea, but it really, really isn't. If you make a small enough hop, you'll still be able to interact with your initial timeline (reality is surprisingly forgiving). If not, you end up in a bizarre timeline where Ferdinand was shot outside a deli and people eat lobster. That's not the worst part; it's the deltas in hypertime you need to be concerned about. You see, unlike time, everybody (for a normal value of everybody) doesn't move in hypertime, so they get to enjoy coherent (and lobster-free) lives. If you end up with a delta in hypertime, you get maybe four options:
1) Slide along in hypertime and just roll with the changing timelines and all their quirks.
2) Time-travel constantly to try in somewhat coherent places, until you accidentally erase yourself in a paradox.
3) Spacetime travel to a location-time where you'll stop moving in hypertime. These are often very peculiar places, like universes the size of Rhode Island populated entirely by nuclear powered eels and the catgirls who prey upon them.
4) Treat spacetime+hypertime like regular space and treat a higher order dimension like time, so you can stop moving in hypertime. You get maybe 3 minutes before you slide into a completely weird location.

You might wonder why anyone would bother with time travel then. Hey, it's a living, and lobsters are tasty if you try them.

[DaltonS]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Still, the fight when the old elites get back would be epic.

Unless the old elites managed to lock down their resources outside the "gulch" before they took their time jump (and I can't imagine how they would do this), the new elites could simply declare those resources had been abandoned and claim them for their own use. The old elites might rant and rave about it but they could largely be ignored (unless they couldn't be for which the response would be rather abrupt). Not so much an epic battle as a footnote in history. ("Footnotes" can contain surprises though that may cause trouble down the line.)

Dalton “Who are these old farts anyway?” Spence