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.

Solarpunk Traveller #1

 

I have a hard time considering running a Traveller game within the default setting because it is just so unrealistic. As I’ve already mentioned (in my four earlier Traveller posts, #1, #2, #3, and #4), the game is based on backwards-looking science and tries to recreate something like the British Empire in space. It’s fine if you are into that sort of thing, but I want something with more science fiction, less historical.

What do I want? What I am really trying to accomplish with these posts is to motivate someone to write a descent Traveller setting that I can then convince my Monday night gaming group to play, without me having to write it myself. If you are thinking of writing a forward-looking version of Traveller, please feel free to take any or all of what follows and incorporate it into your work. I want to play this game, not write it.

What is solarpunk? Like all fiction genera, solarpunk is ill-defined and means different things to different people, but it tends to cluster around a few core elements. I consider them to be:

Refusing pessimism: Solarpunk is not about accepting that all human existence must be miserable and dark. Instead, people can create societies that are functional and fair. Further, we can create technology that works for the benefit of people.

Sustainable technology: Solarpunk says that humans can create technologies that allow people to have a good life within these functional and fair societies. A lot of solarpunk focuses on renewable energy, but here we are talking about Traveller which assumes cheap and clean fusion power is easily available, so this is less of an issue.

Social equity: In order to have these fair and functional societies, we need to recognize the role of social equity. In my mind, this includes recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we also have to recognize that wealth accumulation is a function of the rules of a society, and these are written by the collective will of the people.

The second issue with social equity is that we must recognize the fallacy of biological determinism (which I have posted about here). This becomes an even bigger issue when we realize that at relatively low Traveller Technology Levels people will be able to modifier the genetics of their progeny. So, for example, in my game Rubble and Ruin their are bad people who have intentionally created races of big, low-intelligence humans. Solarpunk Traveller is going to have to address this application of technology.

Do-it-yourself: Lastly is the idea that the ability to create and modify technology does not have to be controlled by oligarchs. Much of the idea that modern technology cannot be modified or repaired is created by corporate entities trying to force people to buy a new device rather than repair an old one.

This becomes critically important when you think about interstellar trade in a Traveller-like universe. In a Traveller universe, there are nearly infinite markets. You do not need to intentionally make a bad product to drive sales. In fact, if you want to sell something off-world, you need to have a reputation for being reliable and repairable.

I argue that DIY in the Traveller universe is the presence of transparency and technological standards. Transparency means that you have to say what things really are. No withholding important information. What is the thing made out of? What are the operating conditions under which it is intended to work? How is it designed and how does it work? And standards imply that others can build things that work with what you have built. If you make an electronic devise, I need to be able to know exactly what power supply it needs. We already do this on Earth. There is just a handful of electronic plugs and voltages that are supplied, and you need to make sure your electronic equipment conforms to those standards.

But more than that in Traveller. All your information technology needs to interoperate. Imagine not being ably to repair a starship because the navigation computer was made on Mora, and they use a different jump drive interface and the computer and the drive cannot function together. Now consider this for every two pieces of equipment that are supposed to work together. Imagine missiles fired from a starship that accidentally swing back and attack the firing ship because the targeting system uses the wrong measuring scale.

The most important thing that the Empire does is to keep the technology from one world able to operate on another. Any reader with a technology development background is likely say, “Of course, that is a massive and wildly important task”, while other readers are likely shaking their head and saying, “How trivial and boring.” In a sense, they are both correct. But most real conflict in a Third Imperium type world will come from conflicts over standards rather than over resources.

===== Getting Started =====

The Ground Rules. What am I keeping from the Third Imperium and what am I letting go?

The Map? Let’s start with the map. It is a silly, 2D hex-based map. I love it. When 2300 came out, everyone I knew loved the realistic 3D star map. Someone had already done the work of finding routes away from Earth that matched the space travel technology postulated by the game. It was great. But at the end of the day, for me, it neither enhanced play or immersion. I accept that some people will want a nice, modern 3D map, but I’m willing to not worry about it.

The Future History? What about the background? I’d like to keep the major events. The Ancients seeded many worlds 300,000 years ago. These scattered worlds have become the home to humans who have spread out across the nearby space. There are other alien races who have also developed space travel, and they are different from humans. That’s all works for me.

The Core Technology? Let’s keep it. Let’s keep the restriction that jump drives take a week to travel, independent of the distance they go. This is a great mechanic and it leads to an interesting situation where travel between human communities is once again long and dangerous. Let’s also keep the important fact that there is no faster way to communicate between worlds than to travel there.

Psionics? I vote no. I was there in the 1970s. Many, many people truly believed that psionics were a real thing and they were just about to become understood. This was a traditional that traced back to the dawn of science fiction. People honestly believed that magic was a real thing that we just didn’t yet understand—but it was coming soon. This hasn’t aged well and I think we can let them go. (As an aside, you find psi powers in all hard sci fi games of that time, Morrow Project, Aftermath, all of them.)

But we are going to need to add a modern understanding of biotechnology. And we will need to modernize the information technology. But those are separate issues.

For now, I think I am going to stop this here. I have a start. The next post will start with what I think a solarpunk Third Emporium will look like—or at least, what issues we need to consider. In till then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments, questions, or concerns in the comments below.

Traveller Blog #4. Xenobiology

 

This is my fourth post on “modernizing” Traveller. The others are, here, here, and here. The importent bit is that in the last one I mentioned one flaw with the biology of the game. Namely, that it did not take into account how easy it will become for humans to modify their own biology.

Traveller uses a mechanic called Technology Levels to track how sophisticated a culture needs to be before they can enact certain technology, and the original authors in 1977 thought things like controlling the aging process would be the hardest, so only the most advanced technology societies (TL 15) could do it. It is not something that is just around the corner. And they set uplifting other mammals as even more difficult. Yet, controlling gene expression and modifying our own biology is something that is coming fast on the heals of the information age, more like TL 9 than 16.

As an aside, I think they wanted anagathics to be hard to balance their life path character creation system, but we don’t need to do that today—there are other, easier, ways to balance characters.

There is another element of the biological sciences that needs to be woven into Traveller, xenobiology. As part of my “miss-spent” youth, I worked for several years in the laboratory of Sidney Fox who happened to be a world-expert on the biochemical origin of life. Which, aside from being an inherently fascinating subject, is also central to the Traveller setting. I can’t blog a review of all the details of this field of study, but I will hit on a few relevant points.

How common is life in the universe? Or, why are we looking for evidence of life on mars? There is a concept of the stellar ecosphere (or Habitable Zone) which is a space, shaped as a hollow shell, around a star wherein water on the surface of a planet can exist in liquid form. Life appears to have started on Earth within a few hundred million years after the planet formed—very quickly in geologic time. But here’s the rub. For the first few hundred million years of its existence the sun was burning hotter and Mars would have been in the habitable zone—in fact, the Earth might have been too hot to sustain life.

Now old-school origin of life folks imagined that life forming was a freak event with an almost zero change of happening. Fox’s work in the 1950s and 60s showed that this was likely untrue. In fact, the formation of life might be almost a given on any rock with the right collection of elements that is the right distance from its star.

So to prove this, we need to look for life on Mars. If life started to form on Mars, and then froze, it would mean that life almost always forms on planets withing the stellar ecosphere and therefore we should expect life to form frequently on other worlds. In Traveller, we assume this is true. So within a couple thousand light years of Earth there are assumed to be hundreds of planets that have their own, independent, life.

The History of Colonization. Further, in the Traveller “future history” there are several important waves of expansion. The most important is the work done by the mysterious ancients. An alien civilization, 300,000 years before the game (which is about 2,000 years in the future) took humans and transported them to many other planets, for reasons unknown. They also uplifted dogs to create the Vargre.

The game has several other major and minor alien species. Just in the Spinward Marches there are the Aslan and Droyne, both major races with their own world of origin, and there are chirpers and a few other scattered in various adventures published over the years.

The Biochemistry Problem. If one looks at all the different mechanisms that have been proposed over the years for the abiotic origin of life, I would lump them into two groups. The first answers the question, “How did we get here” and deals with the formation of life on Earth, and the second considers mechanisms for the development of life on other worlds. These latter approaches (I’m looking at you Graham Cairns-Smith) talk about other types of life, silicon, clay, or even non-Terrestrial carbon-based.

Fox’s work suggests that non-Terrestrial carbon-based life could very likely have recognizable proteins. And if you look at the thoughts on the subject from Freeman Dyson (the Dyson Sphere guy, presented here), it is reasonable to think that these proteins would have a genetic structure controlling their replication—but even if they did use sugar-based genetics, the sugar moiety would likely be completely different. This means that all these worlds are going to have a completely different biochemical basis.

A Little Background. Life on Earth is a complex web of biochemistry that creates ever more complex structures from reduced carbon--remember those redox reactions from high school chemistry--living systems burn reduced carbon to liberate energy to create new structures of reduced carbon. Because no process is 100% efficient, we have to burn more reduced carbon than we end up making. We might eat 100 calories and make 10 calories worth of new material.

Life exists as a thin layer coating a planet in a field of energy flux.

And life exists at different scales. Within cells there are symbiotic subcellular structures that were once independent living systems that have found their existence within your (yes, you the reader’s) own cells. There are small blocks of genetic material that form viruses. And their are giant whales that live by filtering microscopic organisms from the water they swim in. And all of this life is busy building more of themselves. The autotrophs (mostly plants) are capturing energy from the sun and reducing carbon dioxide from the air, while the heterotrophs (animals and fungi) are taking apart other things to build more of themselves.

And these systems are more or less specialized. Humans can eat all sorts of things, but not everything. Only certain plants can grow up here in Manitoba, while those same plants will be out competed if they try to grow further south.

And this brings us to the Biochemistry Problem. When two carbon-based biochemistries meet, one is likely going to completely disassemble the other—wiping it from the world. Or, the two will be completely incompatible. Neither being able to extract anything from the other.

So if we want humans travelling from one of the human worlds created by the ancients and living off native life forms, they either have to be eating Earth-based life, or the humans have to be modified to eat it—with just the occasional, weird, “Oh, you can eat that” alien thing.

This is going to lead to an interesting set of worlds. Those that you cannot go to, because you will be eaten—likely by unseen microorganisms—and those that have Earth-based life transplanted by the ancients but modified long ago to fit the new environment. And those where Terrestrial life co-mingles with the native life, each mostly ignoring the other. And those where humans have changed themselves to adjust to the new biochemistry.

Conclusions. As I move towards a vision of a solarpunk Traveller, I think I have all my main issues laid out. (But I am just writing this as a go, it is a blog after all.)

In my next post I want to start talking about life and exploration in a post-scarcity society. We need to consider things like, “What resources are important?” and “Why go to another world?” There will be different types of worlds with different biologys. But this is probably enough for now. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and (as always) I welcome comments and questions below.

Traveller Blog #3: The Missing Sciences

 

This is my third post regarding the Traveller RPG. It is not a secret that I’m trying to build a case that we need a solarpunk interpretation of the game’s setting. And to get there, I wrote this post as background on the game and this one about how the science in Traveller was “backwards looking”; It is a game that focuses on old, not modern, science.

The two major sciences in my professional lifetime have been Information / Computer Science and Biology. Both are ill-defined, because they are both very much in active development and experiencing rapid growth.

Computation. In a Traveller context, our world has just left Technology Level (TL) 6 and entered TL 7 and in doing so, our world has changed. Every grandmother in the developed countries now has a computer with more computational power than the largest, fastest supercomputer in the world on the year Traveller was first published.

Think about that.

I want to say it was over a decade ago that an iPad had more computational power than the fastest Cray in 1977. And Grandma uses all that computational power to swap recipes with her physical and virtual friends (and pictures of cats).

Traveller considered computers large, complex machines used primarily for navigation and for storing little snippets of information. This will need to be reconsidered.

And our ability to interrogate biological samples has been increasing at a faster rate (here’s a link). What we know about the working of living systems is changing faster than our computers. Now from around the 1980s, when computers became a household appliance, to around 2010—let’s say 30 years—the physical nature of computers changed quickly. People in developed countries were buying new boxes every year or two. You had to. But, somewhere 10 to 15 years ago, that ended. Computers kept getting smaller for a while, until it reached a point where laptops are used as workstations, and handhelds are all you need for day-to-day computation.

Life Sciences. Biology hasn’t reached that “end-point” yet. But we’re moving quickly towards it. My day job is in children’s health research. When a child presents with symptoms of an in-born error of metabolism—which is fancy, medical speak for, “when parents take their baby to a doctor because something seems wrong,” -- it is not uncommon these days to perform whole exome sequencing. A little saliva (or maybe a drop of blood) will be taken and all of the child’s protein coding genes will be sequenced. For about one third of these children, we will immediately get a diagnosis. A diagnosis can be made, which in the past would have taken up to a decade, in a few weeks. For (about) another third, nothing unusual will be found. There is still plenty of work left to be done here.

But here’s the neat part. For the remaining third (plus or minus), we will find what are known as variants of unknown significance, almost always called a VUS. Figuring out if these genetic variants are important or not an area of active research. But the reason I bring this up in the context of Traveller, is because humans and fruit flies have so much of our biology in common, one thing we like to do—if the VUS has certain technical properties—is to make a fly but remove its version of the gene in question, replace it with the “normal” human form of the gene and another group of flies with the VUS form. If the baby is showing motor problems (which is a fancy way of saying they can’t move right), for example, and the humanized fly does not have motor abnormalities, but the VUS form of the fly does, we take that as evidence that the VUS could be negatively impacting the child’s motor development.

The point is that in 2025, we can just add and remove genes from animals (and to a lesser degree, plants) and we can give those genes whatever genetic sequence we want.

In 1977 the power to do this was considered to be so far in the future that in Traveller, only the ancients – with their super advanced and lost technology – could have uplifted a mammalian species. Now, unless someone finds a currently unseen obstacle, I expect this to be possible within my child’s life time. Maybe 40 years, certainly within 80.

Biological Constraints. On Earth, living systems are complex, self-replicating chemical reactions that are able to evolve over time. All living systems trace back to a single, small population of cells called the Last Universal Common Ancestor – Luca. This Luca appeared on Earth just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed, and it’s decedents have been thriving and diversifying ever since.

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Complex multicellular organisms, plants and animals, create forms of themselves which alternate between different numbers of chromosomes. Mammals will create a sperm and an egg, which are haploid. These two will get together and make a new organism which inherits properties from both parents. This new organism will start from a single cell that divides. As these cells divide, they change the pattern of expressed genes, with this differentiating being an absurdly complex interplay between the genetic code and its environment. Usually, if it is able to secure resources, this new organism will develop into an adult form that can then repeat the process.

Or, to paraphrase, to make a new human a mommy and a daddy both make a haploid form of human, get them together, and that starts the creation of a new person. This new person develops from a lump of tissue undergoing the most complex chemical system currently known in the universe.

The important part, for a science fiction RPG, is that it is relatively easy (at near future technology levels) to modify the initial form of this organism, but very difficult to change it once it has grown.

This suggests that by TL 9, just as humanity is approaching interstellar travel, modifying organisms to meet their environment should be common place. And there is no reason this couldn’t be applied to humans.

So if we were to reimaging the Traveller setting, I argue, we must consider the effects of people being able to intentionally alter their biology, specifically to accommodate the needs of different worlds. Settlers can adjust their children’s metabolisms to accommodate local hazards. That world where everyone needs to wear a respirator mask while outside, not the locals. They’ve modified their lungs 800 years ago. But, it does mean that they may not be interested in travelling to a world where their modified lungs place them at a disadvantage.

And as we start thinking about the effects of information science and biology on the Traveller setting, we have to turn our attention to the development of life on other planets—and how that would effect our starward humans. But that sounds like the theme for the next blog post.

So, as always, thank you for reading this, and please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

Traveller Blog #2: Science looking Backwards

 

This is Part 2 of my current thoughts on the RPG Traveller. Part 1 is here. Full disclosure, I love this game, I’ve been playing it on and off for almost 50 years. So what I’m about to say is not meant as a criticism or some negative assessment, only a statement of fact.

The science in Traveller is backwards facing, not forward.

In other words, it is looking back at old science and not looking forward to the new. The game was published in 1977, just years after physics reached its, shale we say, “social peak”. In the 1960s if you wanted to be a serious scientist working on the great issues of our time, you wanted to study physics. As the game was flourishing, the world was shifting its focus towards computer science and information technology. Sure you could still have a great career as a physicist. But it was becoming just another science.

I had a brother-in-law who was a little over 20 years older than me. He had a PhD in physics, worked on the space shuttle in the 1980s, but then went into business for himself by the 1990s and spent the bulk of his life running his own roofing company. He was very successful as a roofer; he benefited from his education and experience in the field, but he—like many others—left physics. It had become just a job.

The other main science of Traveller is the one that peaked just before physics caught the public eye, geography. Now days most people think of geography as a subject in school, not an active field of study, and certainly not a cutting edge discipline. And this is unfortunate because geography is, and always will be, an extremely important field of knowledge.

In the late 1800s, geography was a big deal. Humanity was finally gaining an understanding of the physical nature of our world, and who lived where. The peoples of many nations were interested in things like finding the source of the Nile and the unification of countries like Italy and Germany and the development of topographic maps of the major mountain ranges and rivers and just knowing our world.

Aside. I like to say that Lovecraft, writing in the 1920s, was writing just after the Age of Geography. He was writing at a time when the only places left in the world where there might be giant, alien, forgotten cities and civilizations, were in the most remote corners, in Antarctica or the furthest reaches of Africa. But his readers were in living memory of a time when such things could have existed. Our knowledge of geography had been so bad that there could have been hollow mountains in Main topped with undiscovered standing stones—at least when his older readers where young. But at the time of his writing, all that was past. But I think this is part of the enduring legacy of Lovecraft. His writings hinge on an incomplete knowledge of geography.

(Image, ©2017 Peter Saga used with permission. All rights reserved. )

Traveller in play. So Traveller is a game about the interplay of geography and physics set in an imagined far future where both of these disciplines affect everyday life of the characters and the people they encounter.

The physics part of that last statement is easy to defend. The game attempts to autogenerate realistic solar systems (you know, using mechanics from before when the first exoplanets were detected, but still, they try). They have a whole starship construction system with Drive Potential versus Hull Tons and the like, and the formulas for calculating interplanetary travel times.

It is this last bit which ties the game into geography. Traveller starships do not move at the speed of plot. They do not hop characters from one system to another, appearing at just the right time to maximize the drama. Nope. They have a fixed travel time, and it’s slow. Not generation ship slow, but it takes a little over a week to travel from one star system to the next. And you can’t go very far. Traveller is the original hex crawl-centric game. You start with a hex map with systems in maybe half the hexes, laid out at random, and your starships can move from one to six hexes per jump. In the games I played, typically two hexes.

Oh, and one more thing, there is no way to communicate between star systems that is faster than travelling there by starship.

The slowness of travel and communication creates a setting something like the late British Empire. It takes something like seven months to a year for information from the Home Office in the Imperial Core to get to the Spinward Marches, and the same for a response to return. Information can move, and troops can travel, but just not fast enough to replace the local governments.

This is the exact opposite of cyberpunk games. In a cyberpunk world the evil corporation has access to vast amounts of knowledge and can play the characters like pawns. In a Traveller game, everyone is scrambling for information. Everyone is wondering who they can and cannot trust. Everyone need to know the geography of their surroundings. Which systems are aligned with which. Which systems have resources, how much, and of what type. What can they do with all these things.

Geography, not Economics. Traveller tries to say it is focusing on economics. Characters have mortgages to pay on their ships. They are always trying to earn a credit hauling cargo. There are charts for the number of passengers you can find in each system and how much and what type of cargo you can get.

But those things don’t usually define the adventure. It is the geography. Frontier wars breakout and affect hundreds of systems. Evil Imperial megacorps have secret drug production factories on border systems and are selling them to the forces on the other side of that Frontier war. That’s geography, not economics.

Non-late-stage Capitalism. It is kind of funny to me, but just like the British Empire, Traveller is in a non-late-stage Capitalism setting. But the writers were writing from a Capitalist culture that was already in decline. The most obvious (to me) place where this comes up is with technology breaking. There are constant references in the later works about how technology cannot be effectively moved from high tech worlds to low tech worlds. TL 9 people will not pay a premium for TL 15 gear, because it will soon break and be useless.

But there are also TL 16 (above what the Empire can create) items that have lasted for a thousand years.

Even by the late 1970s we were talking about built-in obsolescence. About how manufacturers were purposefully making things that will fail with time so they could sell a replacement. If Traveller had real economics, it would allow that TL 15 cultures could make TL 9 items that would last close to forever.

Last summer, in real life, I got to volunteer on the oldest running steam train in North America. Our group’s Engine #3 was built in the 1880s and has been in continuous service. It went out of industrial service in 1972, when it was sold to the Vintage Locomotive Society. This organization keeps it in service, running on their 15 KM of rail line. (I jokingly tell people I’m into 1::1 scale model railroading.) As other industrial lines were converting to diesel engines, the local energy company (here in Manitoba) used the #3 to run back and forth on one specific line. I believe it would run from our city out to a remote power generation facility and back, moving supplies and personal. It only went out of service as it get to hard to maintain.

Imagine a steam engine made on Mora (the TL 15 industrial hub of the Spinward Marches setting). It’s properly engineered fittings would last a thousand years without maintenance. It would be light and easy to use. If manufactured for remote worlds, it could have 3d-printable replacement parts. If Traveller had real-world economics there would be a flow of useful technology moving from the developed worlds, out to the remote areas, and resources moving back. Companies would be fighting over markets—trying to determine how they could, more cheaply, solve a developing world’s problem. How they could profit from the technology gap between worlds.

Instead, the late-stage Capitalist idea that technology will fail rules all the markets of the Empire. But for this to be true, the manufacturers on Mora have to be purposefully making things to fail. And they would only do this with the hope that they could then sell more. But by doing this, no one is buying their tech.

Conclusions. I’m heading towards a re-imagination of the Traveller setting. One that is substantially more solarpunk. One that thinks about the economics of unbounded markets coupled with the isolation created by long travel times and the lack of instantaneous communication.

But before we get there, we have to think about Traveller’s missing science, biology. And that will be my next post.