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.
No comments:
Post a Comment