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Old 05-14-2011, 02:10 AM   #21
Sir Tifyable
 
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

Mad superscientists might also enjoy Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired characteristics, so they can create new species by surgically altering animals/people and thereafter they will breed true.
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Old 05-14-2011, 06:34 AM   #22
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

Hum... this thread is giving me a lot of good ideas for my "modern" setting... I loved the contributions so far!
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Old 05-14-2011, 08:07 AM   #23
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Originally Posted by Sir Tifyable View Post
Mad superscientists might also enjoy Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired characteristics, so they can create new species by surgically altering animals/people and thereafter they will breed true.
Actually, I don't think surgeries would affect it that way in lamarckism. As I remember, it would require an actual effort from the being to affect its blood and inheritance. But you could still make interesting things mixing bloods and making the creatures do an effort in the wanted way.

Last edited by BaHalus; 05-14-2011 at 08:43 AM. Reason: The program cut my words out.
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Old 05-14-2011, 08:12 AM   #24
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
The second confuses spontaneous generation and abiogenesis, not to mention missing the fuzziness of any definition of "life".
Oh yeah. I missed the building blocks stuff. He might have taken both definitions in creationists sites or something like that.
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Old 05-14-2011, 12:19 PM   #25
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
Discredited terms from old theories, or convincingly-sounding made up ones are much better.
Aren't those, especially the former, only really appropriate for divergent TLs? If it has Ether for instance it has to be TL5+x (and might not even be superscience at TL5; the Ether was real science), since the Michelson–Morley experiment and Special Relativity basically define TL6 in Physics.

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Old 05-14-2011, 12:38 PM   #26
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

Nietzscheian (or 'anime physics world')- Whatever does not kill you DOES make you stronger, as medicine advanced to allow recovery from horrific things like being a ground 0 of an atomic blast people start becoming tougher and tougher, as they become tougher they can endure more things that ALMOST kill them. Such a world likely has radically retarded medical knowledge for long term treatment, more advanced 'immediate survival' treatments, and many of its members are scarred super-humans.

Some form of controlled near-death injury may be a 'right of passage'.
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Old 05-14-2011, 12:48 PM   #27
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Aren't those, especially the former, only really appropriate for divergent TLs?
No. The truth is "superscience works! awsum!" is one of the possible bases for a divergent technology along with "we're too dumb to invent the wheel", "we started in a place where all the petroleum is used up" and "the alien space bats have decreed that no electrically powered machine shall work". But superscience only becomes the basis for a divergent technology path if it is integrated into society at large. For example in a comic book reality, there are many examples of super science and that could have been true going back many centuries. But if your orgone technology can only be created by the use of Weird Science or Gadgeteering, and society at large is still using vanilla internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors, then there is no divergence. There is also no divergence if orgone tech can be mass produced...but it was only invented last Tuesday so that isn't happening yet. You are still living in the point of divergence.

Oh and the Russians gave us Kirlian fields and psychotronics.
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Old 05-14-2011, 01:04 PM   #28
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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but it was only invented last Tuesday so that isn't happening yet. You are still living in the point of divergence.
I assumed we were talking about campaign TLs and not the TL of isolated gadgets. If we are talking about campaign TL, than I don't think you can use obsolete theories to justify non-divergent TLs. The fact that the experiments went differently in your timeline means that is significantly divergent by definition.
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Oh and the Russians gave us Kirlian fields and psychotronics.
Those (and Orgone) were always pseudoscience. I don't have a problem with "Orgone works" being TL7^. Ether was science, though. "Ether works" is TL5 Physics.
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Old 05-14-2011, 01:16 PM   #29
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Yeah, that's the name of a real current scientific theory which isn't being described accurately.
What he's got here is an odd form of "inheritance of acquired characteristics", to which Lamarck's name it often attached though his actual theory is somewhat different from the caractured form usually presented.
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Old 05-14-2011, 01:24 PM   #30
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Default Re: Them TL^ words [Superscience] . . .

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Originally Posted by Sir Tifyable View Post
Mad superscientists might also enjoy Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired characteristics, so they can create new species by surgically altering animals/people and thereafter they will breed true.
Lamarck didn't actually think this. It would have been easy to disprove experimentally.
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