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.

Traveller Blog #1. Traveller before the Spinward Marches.

 

So I pulled out Traveller a little while ago and started revisiting the game and its canon setting. I suspect that I have several posts worth of things to say about this old gem of a game, but I’ll start with a little grognardian recollection.

Background. I played Traveller for several years before moving to the Spinward Marches. Traveller was first published in 1977 and it was not too long after when I got my first copy. There is a two year window between when the Traveller rule books are first released (in a little black box full of little black books) and when the most influential and long-lived deep space setting, the Spinward Marches, was published. To be fair, it was probably late 1978 when I got Traveller—so the Marches where only a few months away. But I lived in a remote corner of the world, and I was a poor kid, and they hadn’t invented the world wide web yet, so I didn’t hear about the Marches ‘till about 1981.

Traveller, as written, was designed so that “known space” would be procedural generated. When the group’s ship arrived in a star system, there are rules for randomly generating a string of numbers, called a Universal World Profile or UWP—famously recorded in hexadecimal notation—which describe the physical and social elements of the system. Now days there are all sorts of additional rules which create all sorts of additional details, but back then it was just a few numbers. Planetary population, technology level, Law Level, and Government type defined all the social elements of the world.

As a brief nerdly aside, I was in rural Northern California and what was to later be known as Silicon Valley, the global hub of computers and information technology, was just beginning to develop south of us. So it was very normal for science-nerd kids to lean into things like hex maps and hexadecimal notation—that was what science was like for us. So we loved UWPs and hex maps. Even to this day, graphic artists like to use the hexagon to represent “science”.

Typical play with my buddies would have been for the GM to randomly roll a few worlds, you know, six to eight. And the players—in a Scout ship, we always only had Scout ships—would explore these systems. Since the game was mapped on a hex grid, it was exactly what today we would call a hex crawl.

But it was before the “information age” hit mainstream America.

The coming of the Information Age and TTRPGs. If you want to understand how TTRPGs got to where they are today, I assert (with little evidence) that you need to understand its history and how that interacts with global, real-world, geopolitics. In the 1980’s mainstream America entered the information age. Computers went from being exotic, complex devices that only super nerds understood to common, everyday items that grandma used to find recipes.

Now it didn’t happen all at once, nor did it happen in all corners of the country at the same speed, but it did happen. Before this time, for most people, information was hard to access. If you wanted to know the distance, in kilometers, between the Earth and the moon, you would have to go to a reference book and look it up. If that was something you cared about, you might have the correct book at hand. If not, you would likely need to go to a library. Depending on how obscure your question was, like “What type of polearm would an English soldier use in the 1400s,” the answer might be very hard to find. I don’t think I would have been able to find the answer to the polearm question easily.

Other questions—simple questions about everyday life—often required talking to experienced people. “What store in the next town over would have a copy of Traveller for sale?” “What is the fastest route to drive to that store?” “What if I had to take the bus?” All common questions for which there would be no written answer, and for which you would either ask people about, or just head off and try and find the answer.

This is the real world Traveller was born in. Information is valuable and hard to access. People don’t just know what’s around them. Computers were monolithic machines that were hard to use and only solved complex mathematical problems.

And that’s the way we played Traveller.

My Early Traveller. We would randomly make a small group of player characters. There were never too many people interested in Sci Fi, so it would always be a small group. And this was before the rule which assigns a set of required skills to all the PCs so that they would be able to complete whatever adventure the GM had in mind. Instead, we would make characters who were thrown into a sandbox adventure and the GM had to come up with adventures as we explored.

And that is exactly what we would do. We would set off and explore. Just like in our real world, no one knew too much about the next planet over. The adventurers would make the trip—you were always worried about jumping to a system that didn’t have a gas giant—because then if the world was dry, there would be no way to leave the system and you’d be trapped. TPK for a few bad rolls.

The Spinward Marches Arrive. When I first got a copy of Supplement 3, The Spinward Marches, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It had 36 subsectors filled with planets and worlds, each described with a few paragraphs, a hex map, and a list of those Universal World Profiles. For me, the logical game was for the group to start on some world and start exploring outward.

At first, the characters wouldn’t even have access to the information in the book, though later it became clear that people would at least know the basics of the worlds around their home. But they would only know what was in the book—a few paragraphs per subsector and a map.

But just a few short, real world years later this would all change. Computers were permeating everyday life. Information was becoming progressively easier to access, and the old problems of knowing what is around you and how things worked, were rapidly disappearing.

Traveller computers. I recall conversations and jokes and whatnot – mostly (I think) in the early 1990s – about the computers in Traveller. The game designers had written specifications in modern, real world units, for computers by technology level. And, as we moved up one technology level in the real world, computers blow away all their expectations. What was thought would take centuries to develop took a few years. At the time of this writing, a typical person has a phone in their pocket which more computing power that original Traveller assigned to the Imperium’s best starships.

After this, game designers stopped using real world units to describe things. This avoids the whole “predicting technological change” problem.

But this does leave us with an odd “expectation gap”. I’m thinking about running Traveller, and if I did, my players would, rightfully, expect that their ship’s computer would contain petabytes of data about every world around them. Maps, satellite images, models of global climate, and close to everything that is known about the life forms living on any given system. And politics and trade agreements and legal systems... In fact, they would likely expect that the computer would have records of everything that our 1970s PC would have had adventures learning. So if I ran Traveller today, I would want to alter the adventures to allow for the modern information age.

But this is okay. It is easy to do and fun. I’m looking at setting my own adventure on the world of Tarsus, which is one of the classic Traveller adventure sites. And I’m having a lot of fun modernizing the world to fit my needs.

But there is one thing and it is going to feed into my future posts. When Traveller was written, we were living in a time when physics was the king of sciences. Everybody liked to worry about planetary rotations, interstellar distances, starship tonnage, “How many tonnes of hydrogen can we get from skimming that gas giant”, that sort of thing.

But the king of science today is biology. (Just look at funding levels if you don’t believe me.) And Traveller’s biology is really weak. So in my next post, I am going to look at fixing that. Until then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this, and as always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.