The others can keep me entertained in the meantime Go get some sleep and don't worry. We will be talking soon enough.

Very well written post Overload. You are absolutely correct that those in power or comfort will do everything in their power to prevent losing their positions, that is the nature of man. If it were Ethanol that was the big business instead of oil they'd be doing the same thing to prevent solar or wind, etc... Point being you can't just call those in power today evil for wanting to keep what they have, that is in all our natures. It is bad, but the same could be said no matter who the top dogs were.

Second, as much as we would love to go to better processes, you can't just kill the top dogs and replace them. That would create a vacuum for a time and the economy would collapse. See, despite the fact that the big companies have greedy people at the top, below the top they are filled with thousands or even tens of thousands of people just like you and me. Currently the oil and gas industry employees millions of people. Yes, I absolutely believe we should ween ourselves off the fossil fuel, but we can't just go cold turkey, we need to do it over time so that we don't cut off our nose to spite our face. A million people suddenly out of a job would create a new great depression, and I would be willing to bet that there are a lot more people than 1 million involved in the oil and gas industry.

Overload, to Ulric the biggest problem is time. It doesn't look like Cody has enough time to introduce these technologies before the energy is needed. The People are going to be asking Ulric for something better before the 1950's. All the promises for the future won't light a lightbulb.
Remember, we can only push so far beyond the curve. Right now, we are 15 years ahead. It will take us until the 1970's to be 25 years above, and that still doesn't give us what we have today in RL ... and this is 35 years in the future.
Ulric needs to be building power plants today for future needs. He would really prefer to NOT build more coal/oil fired plants. That leaves him with only nuclear as a current alternative. The advanced materials for creating solar panels and wind turbines aren't around yet.
Time is not on your/our side.
Remember also that many of the technologies we have to create for a greener future are in and of themselves energy intensive. Our energy needs will be climbing exponentially.

From Ulric's point of view, better to build reactors now and develop the technology for cleaning them up in the future than having cities blacked out and have the trains stop running.


Also, I don't think psions are any more enlightened than novas. They both use the same gene to become a Special. They both have a variety of powers they can draw upon. The both have the too-human intellects backing them up.
Maybe some form of telepathic union is possible in the future, but current psychics tend to creep me out in their outlook of superiority.

Precisely. Technology doesn't exist in a vaccum. There are all kinds of conciderations in the Game World to look at. Face it, Unity works right now because it brings Prosperity. The power the People give the politicians allows them to do good things, but lets not forget the Politicians can be put out of office.



And Ulric would be duly responsible for doing this thing to these people. The best way to look at things is that the People have to believe in what we are doing for it to work. It's easier to believe when you are fat and happy than when you are hungry and standing in the unemployment line. That's reality.

I'm not sure what this means. We don't have a lot of psions around, or partical accelerators either.

Again, what does this mean, and for that matter, Why? Biotech is going to use energy, and have it's own problems. IMHO we understand the strengths, limitations, and problems of hardtech a lot better than we do biotech. That doesn't imply that biotech's problems aren't worse, they're just less well understood.

Ouch. You're talking about genetic engineering on a scale far, FAR bigger than anything that was possible even in Trinity.

You're also talking about basically gettting rid of novas. For selfish reasons, I don't see the PCs going along with that. Further, the knowledge that Psionics makes you more in touch isn't really known or understood by the PCs.

Exactly.

Ulric. What everyone seems to be forgetting is that we basically introduce nuclear technology as a s"quantum leap" in tech. Ein stein blew people away(god the unintentional puns!) with his theories.

Im just saying that if we are going to introduce advanced tech early, lets skip the dangerous stuff. Rather than going "BEHOLD THE WONDER OF THH ATOM!" we can go "BEHOLD THE POWER OF SOALR" or whatever. A jump in tech is a jump in tech. Either way its going to shcok people but I think they can handle it.

What year is this? 1930 or so? Nuclear power is state of the art 1950's. Just by skipping the great depression we're basically there. And note MANY of nuclear power's problems can be avoided by using a year 2000 design. That's not a real upgrade in the technology, it's just avoiding 50 years of mistakes.

Solar is state of the art 2010, maybe even 2020 or more. I'm not opposed to it... if Fox says it's doable. But there's a limit to the number of hours in a day. If Steve has to choose between Solar Power and giving Negros the right to vote, he'll choose the later. The war wasn't caused by nuclear power, it was caused by social institutions.

Actually the first photovolatic appeared in 1883. In 1954 Bell Laboratories created the first modern silicon version. If you want to skip the 1950's nuclear design for a 2000s model why not do the same for solar?

Guys, I thought I posted earlier, but it seems to have been eaten by the ether.

Basically, the time scale I gave above is for introducing the technology at a good pace and in the best possible order. You can choose to skip something ahead, but doing so will throw other things behind. If you go with the timeline above you don't have to worry about making choices.

The 2000s model for nuclear can be built in 1950 with 1950's materials. The design changes are the result of experience and practice, but not break throughs in engineering theory. I could give a 1950's engineer the design and he'd slap himself on the forhead and say "Now why didn't I think of that?" It'd be like introducing the wheelbarrow to year zero farmers. They could do it but no one thought of it.

The 2000s model for a solar cell is based on micro-engineering that came out of learning how to miniturize silicon circuts on a waifer. If I give those designs to a 1950's engineer he'd say it can't be done. They don't have the tools to build the tools to build the tools.

I remember seeing it... I'll look back for it and repost it in Lorean's thread.

Well, She and I are going to learn a lot about one another, and I just bought a lot of time.

If she refuses I'll ask how I'm supposed to demonstrait to Omar and (more importantly) the others that she really is the real deal.

FYI, Ulric has already told Matt that the Team has captured the "Mastermind".

Hmm... maybe that could be altered to "have already captured someone abusing another nova mentally, physically, and sexually."

...and re-reading things I don't think Steve knows you did tell him.

So we show them how it's done. Call it a "breakthrough." I don't think people will mind a mild case of technoshock, especially if it leads to a Utopis.

Consider the retro sci-fi and world's fair glamorized ideals about the near future.

Automated homes, cheap energy, robots and flying cars. Heck people still wonder where the flying cars are. (Aberrant: Year One

My point is that especially in the 50's there was a sort of idealized marketing of the "future." We can capitalize on that by actually making good on the advertised hype...

Overload, doesn't that bring up the problem of "Pacing our Technology" once again? Isn't that akin to ending all diseases before creating any kind of birth control?

What other problems will this tech jump cause because its operating in a vaccum?

Isn't this a case of acting out of fear instead of logic? You are afraid of nuclear technology so you are doing WHATEVER it takes to not have it, damn the future cultural cost?

As it stands, we would have some kind of nuclear technology for about 30 years before we could move past it. The victory for Clean Power Technology should be in the Society, not in the Board Room. Let's allow the people to make the right decision.

I just wanted to tell you guys that Joani is barely 19 years old. Just in case someone was wondering.

"Based on" should be also read as "requires". And I wasn't kidding about "tools to build tools to build tools". 2005 computer wafer technology comes out of Billion dollar factories. We'd be skipping to the end of 11 or so generations of computer innovations. That's not one breakthrough, that's not even 11 breakthroughs, that's 11 generations of breakthroughs.

And we'd want to supply the entire world with these solar cells. That's a big scale to work on with us as the only people who understand this technology.

For a rough idea on how hard this would be, it'd be similar in scale and complexity to trying to eliminate all horses from mid-evil Europe by replacing them with air planes. Massive amounts of refining, massive amounts of digging for oil, massive amounts of metallurgy, massive amounts of construction for planes, airports (requiring concrete), electricity, etc.

We have Lorean, detailed specs on how to do all this, huge amounts of money, influence, and we have multiple mega-int novas. IMHO this would take most or all our resources, but it's not impossible. Assume it could be done, but...

...let's say we do this. Whatever country has our chip making plant just became the next OPEC. No one will be able to copy this technology to make their own plants because it's 10+ generations too advanced. Ditto reverse engineering it. I suspect the US just economically enslaved the rest of the world. All of the various economic problems Oil brought in RL to the Middle East would now be present in spades in the US. It's going to be very hard to prevent the US from riding roughshod over the rest of the world.

Ulric...
In case you were not aware, but Omar is President of the Central Asian Confederation.

With regards to technological advances: I think it is necessary to first industrialize the world's economies before introducing advanced technology. The planet's population also needs to be educated and stripped of simple concepts like 'tribalism'. Women will also need global emancipation. Introducing advanced technology before these things are complete, will create a gap between those who an afford them, and those who cant. This will create envy and alienation. Do we want wars for technology on our hand?

In other words, we move too fast, and we may create a whole bunch of unintended consequences.

What Courier and Omar just said is basically what I'm talking about. The timeline I gave is the timeline for doing things systematically so that nothing falls through the cracks, women don't get left out, third world countries don't get left behind, the US or any other particular country doesn't grab global domination, etc. Why do we keep discussing this? We aren't talking about the real world here, we are talking about the timeline in which we are ensuring that dirty nuclear energy doesn't happen, and oil doesn't dominate, and doing it at a healthy pace.

Just caught up with the morning's posting. Good job all around as always, Cody very nice job on the mall scene.

I think the next step is between Cody and Joani.

PM's sent to Cody and Joani about what they discover. B

tw, you rolled 6 successes on your attempt Cody, and the diff also was easier than normal since you were dealing with a subject who was actively assisting your efforts.

I sent a question back

How good is this psi shielding?

Thing is that the way we're burning through L's juice it's going to be a lot less than a day.

If we could drop some of our biggest power drains (cloak, engines, & lifesupport), wouldn't that free up power to keep the p-shield up longer? Or is the problem that Matt and Joani are outside the shield now?

Re: Nuclear.

The reason I kept talking about it is because I went to an ecological design school that was on the cutting edge of all these awesome ideas and technologies as well as systems design to integrate them.

if you all say we are going to have super clean, non polluting, no melting down nuclear energy then fine. I still think that if we are going to bother with that kind of stuff we should skip to anti-matter reactors or at least cold fusion. Still for the Grid I think the eventual goal should be a very temporary nuclear phase moving into totally green and renewable sources on a total global scale.

Our education programs will be good for that...keeping people intellectually curious in the next better step, rather than getting comfortable fat and lazy.

2 problems...

1) Matt and Joani are outside the shield and right now their biggest protection is being where Harold doesn't think to look for them.

2) Lorean is currently configured to resemble the Star Trek Enterprise D. That's not a vehicle to be entering earth's atmosphere with or landing. She would expend more energy doing that than maintaining the shield and doing what you want done, ie shielding another room and transporting the sphinx into it.

Has Cody looked for Harold yet? I mean, we have his psyhic fingerprints on Matthew's mind, a name, and one of two locations (New York or London). Harold also may have had contact with Joani's mind.

Not yet. He wanted to check with Joani first, Matt and Harold come next.

Oh, and Fox, I thought the inside of Lorean looked Enterpriseish (which I still think is kinda silly) while the outside she looked sort of like an angel with long sweeping feather-styled wings.

This is treatable if Cody takes them out in that car.

Ouch, this is not treatable.

That was what she looked like, but back in 1922 she was feeling kinda silly and fully reconfigured to be just like the Enterprise. She figured it would be more comfortable and it just plain amused her to do it. Besides, there is lots of crew space in the Enterprise D, very useful for the crew to use as a central meeting point given your current activities.

Since then there just hasn't been the need or whim to change to anything else. Just be thankful she can't morph into Babylon 5.

Just so long as you realize its silly! ^_^

Oh yeah, Lorean was very amused by it and was just doing it on a whim because she could. After realizing she would be stuck in this timeline for an extended period she thought it might just be a comfortable arrangement for the crew.

Also, what Donnighal is proposing is to lend his own telepathic strength to you in a cooperative effort. Over the last decade he has developed telepathy to assist in your adjusting of politicians and troublemakers. Basically, his own successes will be added to yours.

Oy, you guys have been busy.

I'm still plowing through the recent posts hopefully I can post by the end of the day if I manage to get through this all.

One problem I can see Steve mentioned something about Andrew working on a Quantum Nullifier. Andrew hasn't so much as looked at that thing since we picked it up. That alone means he probably couldn't get it working in less than a few days at least (remember I still don't have any mega Int dice). Also Andrew wouldn't risk working on it directly anyways, it would have to be on earth and have to be via remote observation/manipulation. Depending on it's effect it could damage Lorean when swithed on; that's bad. Worse it could kill Andrew outright; without quantum Andrew is little more than 200 pounds of undifferentiated tissue, again not cool.

Anyways I just wanted to put my two cents in on that one. I'll post when I catch up and have time.

Yah, those are problems, but you're the best we have. In theory it might be as easy as just checking to see it still has a charge and then turning it on (although maybe Andrew could just check to see it has a charge and then ignore it as too risky).

I'd missed the problem with Andrew dying if it's turned on btw, sorry.

In our future down time (i.e. in Steve's abundant spare time ) maybe I'll have him look into it... although that's not exactly risk free either. I *think* if he got nailed he'd just lose his powers and age normally during the hour or so he'd be without juice. That's not bad... but the other possibility is he'd turn back into a dying 70 (or even 80 now) year old man who just had a heart attack. Maybe I should learn dorm at some point and check on that.

Andrew would be more than willing to work with you (or somebody else) on getting it working and uncovering it's fuction and operation. As has been pointed out, if it can be used safely on 90+% of novas we have a good way to deal with nova criminals w/o resporting to special "ultra-max" Triskellion type prisons. Similarly we may be able to work out a nullifier for Psions.

And for all we know Andrew may just gell up some bones and organs instead of dying. Chances are though it would just eliminate his quantum, and he'd revert to a pool of goo, it might not kill him outright but without lungs and a circulatory system he would begin to die soon enough.

I think physical changes are not likely to get reversed only Quantum ones, Andrew relies on a reflexive use of Shapeshift to retain his human appearance but I consider his natural form to be the "gel" state. Similarly I think you woul stay your current age just loose all your megas and your powers. Our body snatcher would probably die though as it sounds like she had no ability to be sustained w/o Quantum.