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.