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08-02-2011, 08:02 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
Spoiler warning: if you are going to play in my campaign Red-Blooded Earth-Men, reading this thread will materially diminish your enjoyment thereof.
If you go ahead anyway, please do not convey spoilers to the other players. If you do, your character will be skinned alive, and I will not give you any cheesecake. SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE SPOILER SPACE In September I am going to start running a new campaign inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series (especially Master Mind of Mars), S.M. Stirling's In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, Jack Vance's Tschai (Planet of Adventure) series, and the movie Stargate. The premise is that four Australian soldiers are mysteriously transported from the battlefields in France in December 1917 to the habitable, indeed inhabited, surface of Mars. In accordance with sci-fi convention from before about 1970, Mars is going to be an older world than Earth, afflicted by desiccation, inhabited by the decadent remnants of a culture that once had a tech level far higher than Earth has. I think I will place the fall of the last (already decadent) régiváros (technological stronghold) to the barbarians at about the time of the rise of civilisation on Earth. I think that about 1917 that was believed to be about 3200 BC. Surviving examples of the highest tech will be five thousand years old, an must be either extremely durable, very carefully preserved, self-repairing, or self-reproducing. In designing the remaining tech of Mars (or Világ as it in known in the Martian language Szólásmód), I want to achieve the sensawunda of Clarkean magic with minimal strain on players' suspension of disbelief, which means designing the relict technology and legacy biotech in terms that would satisfy the players and then concealing my working to present it as magic to the characters, its mode of operation to be slowly puzzled out. In short, I want the tech to be both plausible and wonderful. Parahumanity I imagine that back in the Kora Képesség (Old Days) the Emberek (Martians) used high bio-tech on themselves and their progeny, producing a range of essentially parahuman races. I take it that any feature that was an advantage in the ultra-high-tech conditions and depraved society of the late Kora Képesség will have be achieved at some sort of metabolic or other biological cost, and that therefore many of the parahuman types will have died out, and that many features produced by germ-line genegineering will have been eliminated by five thousand years of harsh selection for lives of poverty at reduced tech. But some types, and some traits, will remain. What do you suggest and recommend? Genegineered crops It is an obvious but often-overlooked application of ground-up genetic engineering that crop plants will be designed as solar-powered bio-tech chemical factories, producing high-tech fuels, fibres, adhesives, food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, explosives, propellants etc. in as advanced a state of processing as can be managed without refrigeration etc. That is, crops will be designed to produce high-tech drugs, making herbalists fantastically expensive, kelvar will be a bast fibre, making "linen" bulletproof, amoxycillin will grow on trees. Crop plants will be genegineered to minimise processing. It also seems obvious that crop planets will be designed to minimise cultivation. Most will be perennials so that each plantation only needs tilling one. They will fix their own nitrogen, etc. and they will bear their produce in a form and in a part of the plant, and present it in a way, that makes it easy and cheap to harvest and ready to distribute. What's more, the harvest of these crop plants need not be a fruit or seed or stalk, or fruit: it need have no metabolic, structural, or reproductive property for the plant. One can imagine, for example, a tree that produces sealed ration packs in light tough pods, with no seeds or function in storing energy for the plant. Bio-tech robots and computers What roles are there for genegineered animals? They need not have been common in the Kora Képesség to have replaced the decaying hard tech. On the other hand, I don't really see genegineered traction engines or vehicles making it. There will be the descendants of pets, of guard "dogs", perhaps of "grazing" animals that collect plant products "automatically" from large fields of low productivity. What else? Pollinators? Pest-control predators? S.M. Stirling's decadent Mars had biotech robots with distinctly more brainpower than was strictly necessary. Too too much of the biotech could speak, and its favourite word was "Food?". I plan to borrow this quirk. Micro-organisms And of course we must not forget cultures and ferments, which will basically perform final processing of materials to produce foods, drugs, cosmetics etc. that would not be safe or stable if grown in a plantation. Extinction In some cases it will have been cheaper and more convenient to intervene in ontogeny during propagation than to design a fully self-reproducing organism. For example, tissue from different strains might have been grafted together to produce the more advanced organisms. If the tools, techniques, or basic strains were lost, high-tech organisms will have gone extinct when the last chimeras died, or sterile chimeras that grow power cells (for example) might be irreplacable, carefully nurtured legacies. Evolutionary degeneration In many cases genegineered organisms, producing or doing something for humans rather than for their own good, might be at a severe metabolic disadvantage compared to weeds and wild animals, unable to propagate themselves without husbandry, even dependent on "owners" to survive. What does not remain useful in changed circumstances may die out, or be out-competed by less-wonderful competitors, or may evolve to its own biological advantage and cease to produce as much, as good, or anything for humans. Those are the general principles that occur to me. Anything to add? Any obvious examples?
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 08-02-2011 at 09:54 PM. |
08-02-2011, 10:16 PM | #2 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
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08-02-2011, 11:04 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
Now just a minute: The Hungarians are immigrants from Mars? All right, I'll grant that John von Neumann was an intellect vast and cool. . . .
Bill Stoddard |
08-02-2011, 11:39 PM | #4 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
Leo Szilard thought so. Enrico Fermi asked "If the universe is teeming with intelligent life, where are they?" Szilard answered "They are among us, and they call themselves 'Hungarians'".
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
08-02-2011, 11:18 PM | #5 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
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What kind of parahumans will exist is going to depend on what kind of society Mars had when they were created. Theocratic, aristocratic, consumer capitalist, technocratic, caste-based? That will determine the raw material. Unless the genetic lineages were mutually sterile, mongrelization will have erased the differences and reverted them to wild type. * An amphibious race created to maintain the canals, and now living in and along them, sailing up and down them, and probably carrying on most of whatever trade the planet has. * An entertainer or courtesan race talented at manipulating others, possibly with levels of Smooth Operator or Charisma. * A guardian race, now living tribal lives based on mutual loyalty and clannishness, possibly as sanguinivores. * The original race, driven out into remote wild areas and now adapted to live as nomads under the harshest conditions. Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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08-05-2011, 01:53 PM | #6 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Jacksonville, AR
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
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Travis Foster |
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08-05-2011, 09:30 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
Reasoning by analogy from Earth. The very low-tech societies lived in bands of hunter-gatherers in the arctic, in harsh deserts, on remote islands, and so on, when (a) less harsh environments were able to support civilized peoples and (b) civilized peoples had the military capacity to push tribal peoples away. Add the assumption that the civilized people can manage genetic modification, and you get the modified races living in the more benign environments, while remnants of the Old Race hang on in the deserts and at the end of the polar glaciers.
Bill Stoddard |
08-03-2011, 09:30 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
Standing surface water would not be salty due to salf-fixing micro-organisms.
Cover the dead sea bottoms with ochre moss/lichen to help prevent erosion and dust-storms while keeping up the oxygen production (much of Earth's oxygen comes from plankton). The moss is ochre rather than green to best use the dim sunlight. Trust me on this. The Ancients made it that way. :)
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Fred Brackin |
08-03-2011, 08:09 PM | #9 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
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Absent superscience, this puts fairly hard limits on what your bioplants can do in a given time. That's not to say they can't work, but they won't be fast for anything that requries a lot of energy to process or make. So if a plant makes fuel, then it's going to make modest amounts over a period of time, unless you've got huge areas of ground covered in plants to make the fuel for a few vehicles and machines (which might actually form a useful basis for the power politics of a region). One could imagine fights over control over a square mile of dark-green-leaved fuel plants, but with attacker and defender carefully avoiding damaging the plantation itself... Food is no big problem, cosmetics, clothing fibers probably not, they shouldn't take huge amounts of energy, and if the plants make them to last, that's a viable approach. OTOH, fuel is a bitch, if it's being converted from solar power, there's just no way around the fact that such a plant will need long periods of sunlight to make fairly modest amounts of fuel or propellant. There is only 'x' amount of energy to be harvested from a square meter of sunlight, and the plant can't convert it all. Alien farming: one might see vast fields of plants, with leaves of a green so dark that it could be mistaken for light black, surrounded by fields of polished metal mirrors that gather additional sunlight and focus it onto the fields of plants, to raise the incident energy level. The mirrors need not be sophisticated, they could be simple polished copper or brass or the like, though they'd have to be regularly adjusted for maximum effect. Quote:
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08-03-2011, 11:02 PM | #10 | ||||||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Reinventing Barsoom: 2 — Parahumans and legacy genetic engineering
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[i]They might not have been that specialized. If one used genegineering to make a miniature 'elephant', maybe with multiple trunks capped with manipulative hands, on all sides of its body, and gave it a mind that was able to learn from experience but programmed for doglike devotion, you might have a very versatile and effective field worker, and one that might be able to make it in the wild if need be, too. It could be a traction machine, a field hand, or a guard dog, all in the same animal.[/QUOTE] Possibly, but I'm always suspicious of Swiss Army knives. As the Space Shuttle and the F-35 show, multi-function equipment usually turns out to be less economical than a set of specialised tools. Unless you capital is underemployed and usually idle, that is.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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