Solarpunk Traveller: The World of Mora

 

TL;DR. In a long, rambling post I try to describe what the world Mora, the “hub” of the Spinward Marches, would be like in solarpunk Traveller. I focus more on the nature of life in a large, technologically advanced solar system and less on the stuff adventurers care about.

Although this is in reference to a table top role playing game, my actual goal is to think about what a successful, solarpunk society would look like. I propose that Mora is a heterogeneous group of communities holding many different beliefs and goals, but it uses four key values to make a world in which everyone benefits. These values are; personal freedom, radical transparency, a diversity of communities, and a limit on the inheritance of wealth.

No one has a definitive answer to what a post-scarcity "solarpunk" world would look like, but I'm going to give it a shot.

This is post #6 in my Solarpunk Traveller series. The others can be found here (  #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5). That said, I have tried to write this post to stand alone. (You do need to know that Traveller is an old science fiction TTRPG set in a universe of thousands of different worlds and it makes some assumptions about future technology, which I will try to explain as I go.)

Background.

What I mean by solarpunk. In the Traveller setting, there is no conflict between polluting and non-polluting energy sources. The game has always assumed that vast amounts of very inexpensive energy is available from fusion power. So instead, in this context, I am using solarpunk to mean that the people of Mora use appropriate technology (here we mean, easy to maintain, low cost, environmentally friendly, and appropriate to the community), they understand that they are integrated into the web of life on their world, they reject unjust social hierarchies and respect the worth and dignity of all people, they understand that they live in communities and that there are obligations of mutual aid, and for the most part they believe that problems can be fairly / justly solved—often with the appropriate technology.

What is Mora, the world and system. For this post I’m only considering the material in the original Spinward Marches as cannon and everything that’s been added over the years, I’m taking or leaving as I feel fit. That said, I went with the physical description of the Mora system on the Traveller map and I set the systems population to around 50 billion.

Mora is (I think) the most heavily populated system in the Marches. It is TL 15 (which is the highest possible in the main human empire) and has well over one billion people living off-world in the various communities scattered around the solar system. And, it has been settled for over 1,000 years and people living there have generally had a pretty good for most of that time. The world itself is 90% covered in water, has a dense and tainted atmosphere and a gravity of a little over 1 G. Most people live in large archologies.

Living on Mora. Mora is not a happy world full of people who all share the same beliefs and spend their time loving their neighbors and having drum circles while singing Kumbaya, far from it. But it is a peaceful world.

And a vibrant world. There are endless things happening, people trying new ways to live, new arts and entertainments. There are countless communities pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and inventing wonderful new technologies.

There are rich people and poor people. But no one is ever hungry except by choice. No one is destitute except by choice. And there is hardly ever a need for violence.

Most people are generally happy and content with their lives. But they are almost always in disagreement with others around them. But that’s okay because being around people you disagree with is not bad, as long as everyone feels safe to express themselves and everyone has the basics needed for a fulfilling life. And they do because of the Core Values of life on Mora.

The Core Values.

Mora society is based on four core values, personal freedom, radical transparency, diversity of communities, and the inheritance cap.

Personal Freedom. The people of Mora believe that humans should be able to live their lives as they feel is best, with certain restrictions. The most commonly cited restriction is, “first do no harm”. But there is a lot of disagreement over what constitute “harm”. Certainly almost everyone accepts that killing and maiming and removing peoples only source of income is considered harm. It gets fuzzier when the conversation turns to changing the physical nature of the environment or pulling people away from one world view and towards another. But conflicts are resolved using informed, democratic approaches whenever possible. And the “informed” part in linked to the next value.

Radical Transparency. The people of Mora believe in, and expect, radical transparency (it has a Wiki page). There are public resources that allow anyone to know who – exactly – controls any given resource. There are cyborg sales representatives who can see a person’s estimated total net worth just by looking at them. There are AI agents which can alert you when a member of some community comes near you, or enters your shop, or passes your air raft in heavy traffic. You can easily know the earnings of a store or the pollution created by a factory. All that information and more is available to anyone who cares.

But most people don’t care. It is only when lifestyles are coming in conflict and there is the potential to cause harm that people will start worrying about the implication of this or that ownership. The richest person on Mora might sit next to the poorest at a ball game and each not realize it. (Unlikely, because the richest will usually buy better seats, but it does happen. Not every event worth attending has monetized their seats.)

Diversity of Communities. Rather than working towards one giant monoculture of a community with everyone believing and living the same lifestyles. The people of Mora recognize that their planet’s strength comes from the wild diversity of different communities. People are free to belong formally (or informally) to a wide number of communities at the same time. This might include their Immediate Family, their Extended Family, one or more World View communities like a religion, and one or more for profit or non-profit corporations associated with their work. Most people also identify with a number of social communities based on their interests and activities, including sports teams, fan clubs, and interest groups.

The Inheritance Cap. Wealth represents an individual’s control of certain assets. If a person owns a home, they control the use of that home under normal circumstances. Conditions may occur where their ownership is superseded by another group, for example if the home is on fire, the local fire fighters have authority over the house, but only as it relates to the fire. But all wealth is an agreement in the broader community of who has control of the given asset.

And the community decides how this control passes between generation. On Mora there is an agreed upon system for defining a family and for determining the median family income. No single individual can receive from any other individual more than two centuries worth of the current median yearly family income. So if the average Mora family makes 50,000 Credits per year, no one can gain from anyone else more than 200 times that number. This allows an individual to inherit enough wealth that they never have to work a day in their life—if they don’t want to. Yet not so much that there are lineages of people with inordinate control over the lives of others.

Note about calculating a person’s wealth. On Mora something like the market capitalization of a corporation would be considered meaningless. If Guy Wealthy owns 50% of a corporation which has 1,000,000 shares valued at $100 each, on modern Earth we would say they are worth 500,000 (his number of shares) times $100 (their current value) or $50,000,000. On Mora they would say he controls 50% of the company's shares, and the last time one share sold, it went for $100. There are more than enough computers on Mora to sort through all the ownership details should it come up, there is no need to reduce one person's total wealth to a single number. Should such a number be needed, there are many mathematical models that are used to estimate it. And given radical transparency, everyone can know anyone else’s number, if they care.

Life on Mora

People of Mora

The people of Mora have been able to safely modify their own genetics for at least 800 years. And given their love of personal freedom, they have been doing so for centuries. Although everyone is unique in their own special way, the people of Mora can be roughly classified into four biological types.

Main. These are the “wild type” humans. They are not particularly well suited for life on Mora, but they can get by okay. They must were a filter mask when they are outside, but are otherwise comfortable. These folks usually live in large archologies and seldom have to go outside for any length of time.

Off world. Over a billion people live off the main world in Mora. There are giant orbital cities and artificial moons. There is (of course) a massive Imperial Navy base and an Imperial Scout base high above the planet’s surface. Needed mineral resources are harvested from the Oort cloud while metal are refined and reduced in giant artificial space stations.

Adapted. These people have genetically modified respiratory systems so they can go about outside very comfortably without a filter mask. They usually also live in the archologies, but some have settled in small towns on the occasional land mass, or on large floating islands that drift across the planet’s surface.

Aquatic. About 500 years ago the first people modified their biology so they can live in the shallow waters that cover much of the planet. They must surface every few hours to re-oxygenate but otherwise they can live anywhere down to about 50 meters under water. Many of them are very happy to spend most of their lives underwater with life styles including everything from agriculture of aquatic plants to heavy industry. Most have air-filled homes floating just underwater and pop in and out of the water like modern terrestrial humans going outside. A little over 20% of the population live like this.

Deep Sea. In the last few centuries people have started moving into the deep oceans. Some are Aquatics with technological equipment to help them in the “deep dark” but recently people have begun adapting themselves to live down there with ever less technological support.

Population

Total: 50,000,000,000

    Off world: 1,000,000,000

    Main: 20,000,000,000

    Adapted: 14,000,000,000

    Aquatic: 10,000,000,000

    Deep sea: 5,000,000,000

Note regarding biological modifications. All the genetic modifications deployed on Mora follow careful safety standards. If an Aquatic, for example, mates with a Main, the child will develop into only one of the two genetic types. Once the child reaches maturity, it can be very difficult to alter their body to a new type so care is taken to allow the child to chose which lifestyle they want.

Native Life

Long ago the Ancients seeded Mora with a very terrestrial form of life. The equatorial seas are thriving with corals and fish and crustaceans and everything else required for coral reefs. The shallows are a garden-like paradise populated with human cities integrated into this web of life.

Whale-like filter feeders live off the microscopic critters growing in the deep water while human settlements slowly expand across the sea floor.

But the 10% of the surface that is above water is almost entirely a manicured garden. Archologies sit on rock outcrops while anywhere with soil is cultivated, but mostly for aesthetics. The population receives most of the reduced carbon in their diet from shallow sea agriculture.

Social Life

People on Mora spend their life in community. Well, in a lot of communities. On Mora communities have a legal existence that allows for the collective action of individuals. Governments, families, political movements, religions, and ethnicities are all legal communities, just as as for profit and non-profit corporations.

World View communities. This is the collective term for religions, philosophies, political movements, and even different approaches to science and technology. There are thousands of World View communities on Mora. Many are off-world religions or even ethnicity. For example, in three polar archologies there is an active Sword World community composed of the decedents of Imperial prisoners of war who didn’t want to return to their world of origin after the conflict.

A note on ethnicity. On modern Earth, ethnic groups are people who share genetic or cultural backgrounds. Since by TL15 it is trivial to change one's genetic makeup, ethnic groups exist only as groups sharing traditional cultural backgrounds. There is no biological component to a person’s affinity to an ethnic group. Certain World View communities still think a genetic component in an ethnic backgrounds are important, but most people and communities do not.

Social communities. Governments are all viewed as local communities, as are families. Family structure is often determined by ones world view community. A reclusive religion might only recognize certain family structures and marriages to other members of the religion. Personal freedom allows anyone who wants to leave the freedom to do so. They might loose access to certain community held resources and they might lose any inheritance from their extended family, but there will be a place for them somewhere. And it will support a comfortable life.

Note on families as communities. By TL 15 human reproduction is a conscious act. There is no need for the existence of unplanned pregnancies. Therefore, much of the social conventions formerly used to control reproduction are meaningless. On Mora, many communities exist, by design, for only a fixed amount of time. Families are one such community. Many common families are incorporated for a time to see the creation and raising of some number of children. Other families are created to legally join two or more people together for mutual support. There are no bounds on the size or nature of these families. Two people might join together "until death do us part", but so can three or six. Whatever. As long as the paperwork is filed correctly, it is no one's business. 

Likewise, new adults frequently enter into formal relations of a fixed duration. Four years is very common. At the end, if it is working out, they might renew it and add addendums for children--or they might not. No harm, no foul.

Corporate efforts. Lastly corporations, whether for profit or not, are considered communities. Everyone working for a corporation knows exactly how much money the group is making and how much each employee earns. This puts a damper on abusive business practices and allows individuals to earn money according to their value to the endeavor.

Of course when the corporation is formed, there are rules that are laid out on the distribution of funds and some people may get a disproportionate amount of the earnings, but at least everyone knows what they have signed up for, and those who don’t like it are free to leave, knowing full well that they will have a comfortable life while they look for a new position.

If you’ve read this far, hopefully you have seen something that makes you think about the nature of a post-scarcity, solarpunk world. This one is just a fiction for telling stories in a game, but I expect there are people who might find it useful. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and I truly do welcome comments and questions.

Adult Recombinant Technology is becoming Real

 

TL;DR: Our biopunk future is becoming real faster than I expected. Techniques which use genetically engineered viruses to insert custom proteins to correct a medical condition are now in clinical trials in China. And I want people to move away from a cyberpunk vision of cutting the body and adding things and move towards a vision of changing the nature of a person's body.

Way back in 2009 I proposed a monograph to the TTRPG publisher Chaosium. This was the start of Rubble and Ruin, my first (and currently only) table top RPG. The original was published by Chaosium (but is now out of print) although I am self publishing an improved edition on Drivethrurpg. Rubble and Ruin is a near future science fiction / post apocalyptic game that tries to recreate the vibe of “cannon fantasy” but in a reasonably hard sci-fi setting. 

And one of the things that has been in this setting from the beginning is what I call ART or Adult Recombinant Technology.

What is ART. I make no claim to be the first to think of this, it was obvious to any molecular biologist who thought about the subject at least as far back as twenty years ago; We should be able to alter the expressed genome in adult humans by building targeted viruses that insert the required new genetics only into those cells that need the change. It is just a matter of figuring out what exactly causes the problem of interest, what exact genetic changes are needed, and how to build a “vector” (fancy word of custom virus) to deliver it only where needed.

I have always felt that we will start with medically important problems and then branch out into “desired not required” biological changes. I expect cosmetic changes will be the first “non medical” uses of this technology. Changing your physical shape or skin color seem likely places humanity will start.

ART is becoming Real. I expected that we would start seeing the first medical applications of ART in the 2030s. I was wrong! I read this morning that there are several clinical trials started in China that are what I would call ART. Here is the link to the story I read.

And that makes me think of the differences between biopunk and cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk and Body Images. Most people who think about cyberpunk and sci-fi cybernetics (not what Norbert was talking about), think about cutting off body parts and replacing them with enhanced mechanical equivalents. For many people, the "rule of cool" beats basic neural science. 

The main “body image” from the 1980s until today seems to be that “humans have an immutable body” and we can cut it up and add changes across function systems. For example, “we can cut of a hand and add a mechanical hand with a gun in it”. We can remove an eye and add a different eye, maybe one that can see infra red.

For me, cybernetics have two problems, biological rejection and neuronal control. The first is a material science problem and I can imagine someone finding a material that can be connected to the interior of a human body, that is strong and flexible enough to meet specific needs, and is invisible to the immune system. I can imagine that. It is the seconds problem, how will the body control it, that has always fascinated me.

In my games I have always had ideas like, “maybe we can add a lens that hides above the eye and that can be pulled down and allows IR vision”. This is the idea of enhancing existing biological systems by adding a new item that improves its function. But, importantly, this item does not need a lot of direct neurological control.

Aside. Way back in the 1980s I had two different ideas that I used in my Aftermath! games. You could build new neural connections in the correct parts of the peripheral nervous system, or you could interface things to small parts of muscles and train the cyborg to control the machine separate from the body original body part.

A new Body Image. What I want people to do when they think of ART is to think about how we can modify complete, currently functional, biological systems, like your body. For example, I have long imagined that there is a reasonably simple genetic switch that can change human skeletal muscle strength. If such a thing exists, then we should be able to make a form of ART which when injected into an adult human, it will increase their physical strength. Of course, to greatly increase a person’s strength you will need to also improve many other subsystems—bones, ligaments, etc. But one little shot gives someone an athletic edge... a +2 STR for most TTRPGs ... I could see it happening. And apparently, happening soon.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments of questions—let’s be honest, I’m a nerd screaming into the digital void, I love any sort feedback.

Solarpunk Traveller #5

 

The Big Picture

TL;DR. In this post, I try to pull together what an actual solarpunk Traveller adventure would actually look like. At a high level and focusing on games that would appeal to the average “traditional” Traveller player. What I did not do, is focus on “cozy sci fi” which is something I think Traveller could do—and maybe I’ll talk about that later.

 

This is post #5, the first four are  #1, #2, #3, and #4.

 

Welcome to Solarpunk Traveller. In this setting, the Imperials are the “Good Guys”. They regulate interstellar commerce allowing the free, but profitable flow of knowledge within Imperial Space. They prevent the willful enslavement of others. They regulate the standards used to create technology and they protect the borders from those who wish to destroy what humanity has made.

Tech Aside: Technology doesn’t just work. It requires coordination. A common modern example might be cars and fuel. There are big cars and little cars. There cars made by this country and that country, but they all are built to use a standardized fuel—or at least one of a small set of standardized fuels. Likewise, in Solarpunk Traveller, starships are built around standards. If the players capture an enemy ship with a really cool triple laser turret, they can sell their old single pulse laser and swap in the new one. It doesn’t matter which Imperial world made the ship or the salvaged turret, only that they conform to Imperial standards. From there it is just engineering to swap the two. Traveller has always had a “Do-it-yourself” or solarpunk view of technology.

The corollary being that a megacorp can’t ship through interstellar space turrets that only work on the starships they built. This creates sustainable technology which can be adapted to meet the differing needs of people across the Empire.

 Individual planets and star systems are autonomous political units. Most exist to look after the welfare of their citizens. Some follow highly restrictive beliefs while others are welcoming and friendly. Some are prosperous with new people continuously immigrating, bringing with them highly qualified personnel with rare and valuable knowledge, while others are slowly dying under the weight of their own stupidity. The Empire allows this, with one restriction, people are free to use their own wealth to leave, if they wish.

Social Equity Aside: Traveller has always been like this. People can come and go from planets—there are a few that the Empire has isolated. The Traveller’s Aid Society has labeled these as Red Zones and a few TAS advises folks to not visit (Amber zones), but generally the population is free to travel as they wish between worlds. Traveller has always had this element of social equity. Sure, there are unjust worlds, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Most of the Empire is full of star systems with spaceports full of people coming and going, travelling between worlds for business or pleasure. Few of these people carry weapons, because they are not needed. In general, Traveller has always rejected pessimism. Only on the edges are things ill-defined or dangerous.

In Traveller, the Empire has always been made of communities focusing on particular needs. Planets or star systems have governments focusing on the needs of the people living there. The Traveller’s Aid Society is a community of affluent people who work to make their travels easier—and also help non-members at the same time. Corporations are communities of people working to build and sell goods and services. The Scouts are a community of people interested in (and support by the Empire to) exploring the edges of Imperial Space.

So, what kind of adventures can we have in such a world?

The adventure Tarsus just works out of the literal box as a solarpunk adventure. A citizen has a problem with her inheritance, and a group of her friends help her sort out the trade relations with different communities. Depending on the players, violence may or may not be very important in resolving the problems. Here are some ideas.

Diplomatic Spies. Maybe the players are a team sent from Milagro (a minor world in District 268)  to see if they can’t open relations with Lydia (a small, xenophobic world just inside the empire in Glistin). This could be a highly roleplaying, diplomatic game which would not be most players’ preference, except that the nearby world of Grote is offering the player characters good money to also learn the secret to Lydian tea which is highly regarded in many noble homes.

Trouble Shooters. The players could be a team of trouble shooters for the Imperial Bureau of Standards who are sent from world to world on missions to investigate corporate wrong-doings. Not the legal kind, that is the parties NPC sidekicks who are all lawyers and accountants. No, the parties job is to sneak (or fight) their way into restricted spaces and extract evidence of illegal activity. This remote outpost might be a “chop shop” converting stolen Zhodani technology to work within imperial standards. That planet might be using radioactive paint on the faces of their stylish watches. All sorts of “spy adventures” are possible.

Human Rights Protectorate. The Traveller’s Aid Society spends most of its time worrying about its member’s comfort, but they are a huge organization with a lot of money, and an invested interest in keeping the empire strong. So, they might have a secret organization of their own trouble shooters who investigate allegations of slavery, forced labor, and other illegal activities. These teams might be sent to all sorts of nasty places to investigate all sorts of unpleasant groups. And it would be easy to imaging more typical players jumping in  such games.

This week we are investigating a claim that this remote oligarchy is genetically manipulating their citizens to create low-intelligence laborers who are unable to ever leave the system. Next week it is a corporation that kidnaps poor children and raises them as mindless killers.

Of course, the group can be all these things. The player characters could simply be a trusted team with a starship that is hired for different missions. The key to making it solarpunk (IMHO) is focusing on the basics. Refusing pessimism. The players are out to effect positive change in the world. Sustainable, “do-it-yourself” technology. The players are not shipping around a few boxes of mindless junk from one world to the next, trying to make a payment on their personal debt. They control assets (particularly a starship) that is given to them by their community with the understanding that they will use it for good. And social equity, they are doing good in their world. They are not chasing this month’s mortgage payment. They are chasing people who are taking advantage of others. They are chasing those who violate the community standards that define the empire. And hopefully they are having interesting adventures as they do it!

 

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

 

Solarpunk Traveller #4: Technology and Corporations

TL;DR. Human technology does not require corporate ownership of intellectual property and capitalist investment to thrive. Technological advancement requires people with different skill sets to work together towards a common goal. Yes, this can be funded by the wealthy for the soul purpose of increasing their wealth, but it is not required. In fact, in an open setting, capitals protection of intellectual property could be very restricted, and technology would do just fine. And, the core Traveller mechanics already model this structure. In other words, Traveller technology is already solarpunk.

This is part four of a (very slowly) developing thread about what a solarpunk Traveller game would look like. The others are found here. Solarpunk Traveller #1, #2, and #3.

There is a TV commercial called "Dear Alice". It's somewhat famous amongst the solarpunk community and for many people it defines both the solarpunk aesthetic and solarpunk technology. I'm going to assume you've watched it--here's a link:

In Dear Alice, an unseen grandmother has left a small farm or agricultural business to Alice, along with some advice. We learn that “the land is more than just dirt. If you look after it, it will feed you forever.” Now remember a couple of posts ago I was babbling on about why people would go into space. Many people are travelling to find a new home where they can establish themselves forever. Of course, the settlers don’t expect to life forever, not in Dear Alice and not in the Traveller universe. But they expect people to live forever in the place they are creating.

This solarpunk vision is not anti-technology. The people of the land show use all sorts of sophisticated equipment to provide for themselves and others. They have robotic harvesters and flying wind turbines and cool micro-rain generators.

But they also have upgraded their wooden barns with advanced materials (at least, that’s what it looks like to me) and their robot carries a cloth sack when picking fruit. They use their technology and adapt it to their needs.

This is not an anti-technology vision. Technology is accepted as one of the core elements of human existence. It is what we do. But it is not the only thing we do. We also live in community. Remember, we are told, “a business is only as good as its people”. So treat them well. We have technology, we have a culture of reuse and adaptation, we have a concern for community, but we also have one other thing. We know that Alice is “a smart one” and she will be “okay, come rain or shine”. The last element we have are what Canadians like to call HQP, or Highly Qualified Personnel.

Not everyone can know everything. In fact, in Dear Alice, we know there are people who are struggling, because we see her farm preparing a crate load of food for “donation”. We don’t know who gets it, or why they need it, but we know she is donating some of her produce. All that advanced technology Alice uses requires skilled people to develop, build, and deploy it.

But in an era with modern communication it doesn’t really require vast amounts of money. Some money, but not “half the wealth of the country is controlled by a handful of people” kind of wealth. In the sciences we have “open science”. It is an off shoot of the open source movement in software. Both of these open movements are allowing great technical innovation, without wealthy capitalists backing them.

I would argue the key element here is something called Intellectual Property. The ownership of ideas. Today, we allow people to own ideas for a length of time to allow them to profit off the effort it took them to develop the idea. We can copyright, patent, or trademark our ideas. But an often overlooked aspect of Traveller is that the Empire only controls interstellar trade. In the Traveller universe, the Empire controls the movement of intellectual property.

At almost any technology level people can communicate with others in their star system. But communication between stars happens at the speed of travel, or at the speed of trade. The most important thing the Empire provides are standards and protocols. The Empire regulates how technology interfaces with other technology. This allows the Empire to exist as a single culture even though there is massive heterogeneity within its people and their technology.

Mora can develop a cool new jump drive, but someone on Regina can install it on their ship. Because all the standards are set by the Empire. The Traveller mechanics already allow this, which implies that the Empire is regulating technology standards.

We are already primed for solarpunk Traveller. This setting is not anti-corporations instead it is anti-enshittification. No one can have a monopoly on a technology. Imperial standards allow local components to be added to off-world systems. If someone wants to sell Alice a harvesting robot, they can. But if she can access the right highly qualified personnel, she can modify it to meet her needs. And if her world has enough population and high enough tech level, she can likely find someone who can help her.

Mega corps are not all powerful. The things they make are commodities, not protected intellectual property. Instead, Traveller corporations are fragmented bodies, not dissimilar to (say) the Hudson Bay company before the invention of the telegraph. Traveller interstellar corporations that leverage the unique skills of their HQP and history to create products people want. But if they start enshitting their products to try and extract increased wealth at the expense of utility, people can simply walk away.

On Earth today there are a handful of corporate entities that control the intellectual property behind most of modern technology. In a Traveller setting, such a monopoly can not exist. If you start making your products worse, in order to gain a profit, someone else can make a replacement for the thing (using a different approach) and everyone will start buying that and everyone will start buying that and swap out your tech.

In fact, corporate reputation will likely be one of their most important assets. And the key resource being traded long distances is knowledge. Specifically, technical knowledge. There can be endless adventures focused on identifying and recruiting the HQP who have the technical knowledge needed to create a local solution.

In fact, Traveller technology is already be solarpunk, we don’t need to change the tech rules—just how we view them. Any set of tech rules where you can create a vehicle (or robot) by purchasing different components, at different tech levels, but which will interoperate, can be considered solarpunk.

Now we are in a place where we don’t need to change the rules, just our understanding of what the rules mean. Well, that is enough rambling for now. As always thanks for reading this and please feel free to leave your comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #3

 

Why people wont ship food between worlds (much).

Here are links to the earlier posts. Solarpunk Traveller #1 and #2

I’m writing this in Q2 of 2026 in the time between when the oil has stopped flowing from the Middle East but before the last cargo ship arrives in North America. We have been watching a crisis unfold slowly across the globe as locations which use Middle Eastern oil for energy start to feel the shortage. We don’t really know how that will effect the US and Canada yet, but we will start seeing the effects in about a week.

But it has made me think about shipping food.

A recurrent theme in the Traveller is buying and selling cargoes for your free trader starship. It is a notion modelled on the world of about the time my parents were born. Back then, in the 1920s and 30s, there were large cargo ships that were made for specific companies, that would travel on fixed routes, with fixed cargoes. One might pick up bananas in South America, move them to the US, then reload the ship with cars and move them to Europe, then take cargo from there back to South America. Then there were the free traders. These were smaller ships that would look for cargo in whatever port they happened to be in, take it to where it was going and start looking for more cargo there.

These free traders also usually had a few cabins and would take passengers with them. Allowing people to move about before the creation of regular air lines. Here is a neat book about travelling on these ships. That whole world died with the Second World War. By the 1970s, when Traveller was written, food transport was already beginning to be standardized. Containers dominated shipping. Cargo ship seldom picked up cargoes and instead things were moved in standard containers with corporate ships transferring containers as needed between ports and trains taking them inland. Free traders were already rare at that time.

By 2026 this containerized network covers the global and represents the overwhelming majority of all international movement of goods.

Including food. We grow fruits in one country, ship them halfway around the world to process them and then ship the processed food again for packaging. Shipping is so cheap that it is the price of labour that drives where certain work is done, moving the goods is almost free. At least as long as the oil is flowing.

But in Traveller, movement is expensive and time consuming (one week per jump) and energy is basically free. Traveller assumes that there are relatively low-tech ways to convert hydrogen gas into electricity—it’s the power plant for all those relatively inexpensive starships.

Google tells me that accelerating a 100 ton starship at 1G for 1 day would take on the order of 8 x 10^12 calories (already converted to kcal for my fellow math nerds) which is enough energy to feed half of Earth’s current population for one day. In other words, a 7 ton, 16 Mcr power plant could feed all the people on Earth today. Let’s assume 50% efficiency and go with two of them. The amount of money spent on food in the USA would pay for these two power plants in about six minutes.

So what is food? Food is mostly just reduced carbon. Plants take in carbon dioxide, which is literally just oxidized carbon and they “reduce” it – if you remember REDOX reactions from high school chemistry, that was what they were talking about – the plants then break water (H2O) and produce O2 gas (oxygen) and various hydrocarbons. We then eat the hydrocarbons – often as sugars and starch or lipids—and use the energy to run our bodies. Now there is some fancy chemistry that needs to be done, our bodies have certain small molecules that we need but can not produce ourselves, essential amino acids and the like, and there are a number of micro nutrients that we also need. But all of this is just a chemistry problem.

You can imagine LEDs being used to grow plants which are then feed to other creatures in carefully constructed networks that creates everything humans need to survive. In Andrew Weir’s 2017 book Artemis , we see a very near future moon colony that recycles wastes to run algae production to create food, using power from a nuclear power plant. And it is so new that people complain about the flavors, and rich people like to pay to have Earth food shipped to the base. But that is about the extent of it.

So any Traveller colony of non-trivial size, say half a million or more people, would have food production facilities that will meet all of their populations needs for a fraction of the cost of one one-hundred ton starship. We can assume there would be multiple systems producing a variety of foods. There is no real need to ship food from one world to another.

In fact, food production is really just a minor consideration for interstellar travel. Sure, there will be short-term bases that are created to do a thing, and they are too small or too temporary to justify setting up an ecology. These places would have regularly scheduled food shipments. Likewise, there will be communities that want specific food items only available on another world. These can be shipped as needed.

But in general, the creation of food is a solved problem long before the first interstellar starship heads off to establish a new colony.

This does bring up an interesting problem of technology. Some places are going to be hostile to life. They will need a “mechanical” or “technological” ecosystem. Food will be created from carbon dioxide which will create the required oxygen gas, which in turn is consumed by the humans to recreate carbon dioxide. Energy will be feed into this system and allowances will be made for certain inefficiencies—maybe they need to add outside water to account for trace amounts of escaped gas or maybe certain micronutrients are not recovered and everyone takes a pill once a month. These worlds need to maintain their technology level if they are to last. Life on such a world is dependent on the technology.

Other worlds may want to be self-sufficient without needing technology. They want self-replicating, living systems, to create what they need. How this is done depends on why people have settled the world. If your religion believes that you should settle this particular uninhabited world and there you and your decedents will live the “One True Life” (tm), then you either need to change the world to fit your needs or you need to change yourself to fit the world. And this opens infinite terraforming and biopunk story opportunities.

This is probably enough for today. As always thank you for reading this and I always welcome comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #2

It took me a while to figure out how to approach this, but I think I have it.

This is Part 2 of a series that starts here.

Why would people go into space? If you want to create a realistic solarpunk interpretation of the Traveller universe, you have to start by answering the question, “Why do people go into space?” This is the main problem holding back modern space exploration. No one can come up with a compelling reason to go. It is hard, technically challenging, and requires a comparatively large amount of resources.

But, it is pretty obvious that eventually people will start travelling through space. One obvious reason to go is to prove (to yourself and others) that you can. That’s how the USA put people on the moon.

A close follow up to that reason is to see what is there. Given that in the Traveller universe the only way to see what is actually going on at another star system is to go there, it seems likely that a lot of initial space exploration will be jumping to new systems just to map them, see if they have any unusual concentrations of resources, or if there is any alien life there.

This brings us to an oddity of the Traveller backstory. Once upon a time, 300,000 years ago, an alien species called the Ancients transported humans to all sorts of other worlds. No one knows why. But, this means that eventually our exploring humans will encounter other exploring humans and everyone’s view of life, the universe, and everything will be upended. Once we know there are other clusters of humans out there, many cultures are going to jump start their exploration just to see what they can find.

Next, people will go into space just to harvest resources. But there won’t be that many resources people actually need. At least, not resources that will need to be shipped back to another star system. Elements and minerals that are rare on the surface of Earth, gold, diamonds, are common if you look in the right spot. Since gold forms in the hearts of massive events like supernovae, once you find where it is locally abundant, you can get as much as you need. And you don’t really need that much. We like gold because it is non-fungible—meaning we can use it as a token to control commerce. There will be no element that can serve this role once you have access to all of space. And minerals like diamonds—aside from likely being very abundant in certain locations, they can be fabricated. Even today, diamonds are easily manufactured whenever they are needed.

An oily aside. Petrochemicals won’t exist the way we know them today. To get oil deposits, you need plate tectonics, which requires liquid water and oceans, and living systems lasting for hundreds of millions of years. The living systems reduce carbon from their environment, die, and get buried through tectonic action, before they can oxidize. There will be very few worlds where this will happen, and there will be no reason to ship the oil when they do. We like oil because it can be burned when needed to power cars and the like. But in Traveller, you already have all the power you need with fusion reactors. It is easier to build an electrical distribution system around your reactors than to ship a bunch of flammable liquids over interstellar distances.

It seems likely that there will be some short-distance transfer of raw resources. This planet finds it easier to get the mineral that they need from over there, rather than building factories to make it on their own world. But if the trade starts getting too hard, you just walk away from the problem.

Which brings me to what I think will be the main reason people will head off to other worlds. To get away from people.

People form communities and communities form cultures and cultures are always different from one another. I currently live in Manitoba and this is one of the last corners of Western civilization. There are just under two million of us here, with about half living within a half hour drive from where I am typing. (We have one main city, Winnipeg, and it has about half the province’s population.) In this province, we have dozens of different communities composed of people that want to only (or primarily) associate with their own people. Some of these communities are small enough and have been together long enough that they are starting to become inbred. I see no reason to suspect that this will ever change. The individual groups come and go, but I can easily imagine a far future where groups of people are transporting themselves off to uninhabited worlds and establishing themselves there, with the hope of living in isolation.

A biopunk aside; Genetic Isolation. I suspect that once the tech is available, a lot of these communities will also want to modify their biology to further this isolation. It is likely that it will be relatively easy to modify an organism’s chromosome structure so that members of a community can only produce viable children with other community members. This is a likely way that despotic leaders will try and keep their population under their control. At the same time, it is likely they will also want to modify people’s physical appearance so that you can easily recognize outsiders.

“But hey, this is biopunk not solarpunk. Where is the optimism?”

“Easy. It is in the rest of humanity.”

I live in Manitoba and I am surrounded by self-isolating communities. But I am also surrounded by people who have left them. The problem that the despots face is that as soon as people realize that these communities are based on a false understanding of the world, many of their people leave. I know countless ex-this and ex-thats.

So my vision of a solarpunk Traveller universe is one that is full of worlds that are marked as amber zones because the locals are trying to keep their people from learning the true nature of the universe while it is all glued together by people who have—for the most part—recently left this or that group and have discovered the broader nature of human existence.

Further, this will be so common that there will exist communities who’s main goal is liberating those who are trapped. Underground railroads transporting the repressed. Genetic clinics that reverse religious-based modification. Countless games can be focused on the adventure of people discovering life beyond that they are taught.

And that leads us to the one force that has the greatest impact on human mixing, conflict. But I think that is a topic for another post. Until then, I thank you for your time, and as always I invite any questions or comments below.

Why AI is not going to take your job.

 

TL;DR. Foundation Model AI have effectively reached their current limit and that isn’t good enough to replace most educated workers.

I have heard, both in person and on-line, CEOs of AI-based companies saying that their new technology is going to make most workers redundant. They claim we won’t need most skilled workers in the future. Exactly when? Really soon.

This is just a marketing lie. Everyone who understands the technology knows it is not true, but the goal is to feed the dreams of the super-rich and convince them to invest in AI technology. Anyone who understands the technology knows the claim isn’t true. My goal, with this post, is to help the average reader understand why this so, that is why AI is not going to replace skilled workers.

To get there we will have to talk about things that most people don’t currently know. They are a little bit complex, but not nearly as hard to understand as what the tech bros want you to think they are. But you will face a bunch of text without pretty pictures, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to suffer through, if you want to understand the changes happening around you.

The Basics

First we need to have some understanding of two terms that sound complex, but at their core are reasonably simple. They are Latent Space and a Universal Function Approximator. Most people don’t know these terms, but it will take you about three minutes to understand them well enough to know why skilled labor isn’t going anywhere, so I’m hoping you’ll stick with me.

Latent Space. A latent space is a compressed representation of something. The idea is that we can strip off a lot of details and get to the core of something in a simpler form. For example, imagine you correlated peoples ages and heights. Older people tend to be taller, at least during childhood. But once adult height is reached, we stay pretty much the same over our lives, until we shrink a little when we become elderly. I could develop a mathematical function, using fancy regression, that predicts the average person’s height, given their age. For kids, you could use a linear regression of a line going up with time. We can add some fancy bits to flatten the line at adulthood.

That function is a latent representation of the relationship between age and height. It will be pretty good, but not great, at predicting a persons height, if you give it their age.

I could add additional things to the equation that will make it better. I could add the person’s nutritional background, and maybe some genetic markers, and maybe their parent’s height when they were the same age. All of this would make my function do a better job of predicting a person’s height, but it would still not be perfect. But it would be a latent space for predicting a person’s height. Adding information about Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein will not improve this equation—this become important later.

Universal Function Approximator. Deep learning using something call Artificial Neural Networks. These are fancy and complex mathematical tools that function as universal function approximators. Remember that function we wanted that would take a person’s age, nutritional background, parent’s heights and genetic markers, and predict a persons height? To find that function in the real world will take a massive amount of information and several hours of collaborative meetings between domain experts and biostatisticians. But we could use artificial neural networks to approximate that function. These tools can find something that is almost as good as if you had the experts do it. But not exactly as good.

Deep learning can approximate a complex latent space, provided it has enough training data relative to the problem. It uses some fancy logic to estimate the function, and the corresponding latent space, and the more data it has, the better the job it does. But it will never be as good as doing the analysis correctly from first principles. Though, it will often be good enough.

The Limits of Training Data

There are lots of fancy terms being kicked around to describe different ways to put together these artificial neural networks and create useful latent spaces. The biggest ones are now called Foundation Models and these are what the Tech Bros are trying to sell you.

Aside. Remember the Tech Bros are not really trying to sell the service to you. They are trying to convince people who have billions of dollars that their technology will replace the workers the billionaires have to pay in order to make more money. They just need you to believe what they are saying so the billionaires will believe them also.

So Foundation Models take massive training data sets and try to find a Latent Space that can predict anything. The “G” in chatGPT stands for Generalized. A GPT is a pretrained (that’s the “P”) generalized tool. You can ask it anything, and it will have an answer. It has be trained to have a latent space to predict anything. It can tell you how many “r”s are in Strawberry. How Frankenstein ends. And how tall a person is at age 3. We’ve trained this latent space to have every answer all at once.

The models aren’t really that good, but they are improving. The people I know use them to answer easy questions in areas they aren’t expert in. What is the code to write a t-test in the programming language R?

But most of us have noticed that the models are no longer improving very much. A few years ago you could believe a CEO when they told you that they were weeks away from having a GPT that did everything. Because every week they seemed to get better. But then they stopped.

 There is one figure that you need to see in order to understand why they stopped improving.

I added the purple line by hand—it is not a regression line, just my guess as to where such a line would go. But I think pretty much everyone can see the pattern.

This image is taken from https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci. What it shows is the relationship of Foundation Models between their performance—how well they work according to a certain set of metrics—and the size of their training data set. Well, actually the log of the size of their training data set. So the left most point which has a performance score a little below 70, was trained on a data set of a certain size. And it was a huge training set. And chatGPT5 up near the top right, with a score of almost double the left most point was trained on a data set 10,000 times larger!

Increasing the training set by 10,000 times only doubled performance. And worse, it appears to be slowing down. Models trained on even larger sets seem to have little or no improvement. We are close to the maximum that the current architecture can produce.

Building larger data centers and training models with even larger data sets is not going to make them particularly better. Only innovation in the AI architecture is going to do that, and the people working on AI are too busy trying to fleece the billionaires to spend any time on that. It is not that we couldn’t build better AI. It is simply not going to be worth it. The people who could build new architectures that generate better models from the same size training sets aren’t working on that problem. It is not an easy problem, and it certainly can’t be solved by a vibe-coding kid.

A Foundation Model’s performance (for a given architecture) depends on the size of its training set. Oh, there is some noise around it. This one is a little better than that one, but in general, they improve with exponentially more training data.

And they are out of training data. They have taken everything that is easily available.

Another Aside. In order to see real innovation in the AI industry, what you need to watch for is new AI architectures that gives improved performance with the same amount of training data. This would be represented as a curve above the one I drew. Such a curve will likely have a new slope and will represent a real improvement, not just marketing hype.

Conclusions

Remember that fancy regression we did at the start of this post? It will never be perfect, but it can be both close and useful. Provided you have enough experts working on it. Our AI approximation will always be a little worse (or a lot worse) than the bespoke model.

Foundation Models are trained from data stolen off the web. But Shakespeare is dead. He’s not writing any more. Same with Mary Shelly. So all the new data you can get is from the on-line content currently living people are creating. (This blog will likely be slurped into some models without my consent.)

But we don’t write our deepest expertise on-line. We write things that we want people who know less than us to understand. This blog is to help intelligent readers with little AI exposure understand the limitations of AI, not my thoughts on using visible AI to interpret omic data sets. Only my coworkers hear those. Eventually we will write new peer reviewed papers that the Tech Bros will steal to add to their models. But only AFTER we are using them. And such papers are always incomplete.

The current approach to AI will always lag.

This post is already getting long, so I’ll stop here, but there is a whole other story on AI performance related to the density of training data. Questions that fall near areas in the latent space that are relatively rich in training information will yield better results than those out and away from training data. Just like our regression example is trained on human age and height and will not work well for either mice or elephants, questions asked to Foundation Models do best when they are asked about things close to their training data.

Models asked about how to write R code for calculating a t-test do relatively well. There are hundreds of web sites that answer that question. If you ask the same question about hierarchical linear models (which have very little representation in the training data) the models do poorly and often give factually incorrect answers. And this isn’t going to change any time soon.

As always, thank you for read this and I always welcome your comments and questions below. Also, I am trying to make this approachable to a broad audience and always appreciate feedback on where I was unclear.