Gaming w/Jemal : Star Drift

[Jemal]

I was hoping not to get too deep into the humanoid thing, because it IS a plot point later in the story. Suffice to say that there are answers, your characters just won't have them yet, and if the game lasts long enough, things shall be revealed.

I'd be open to a character such as Shayuri suggested, one that is baffled by the existence of so many humanoids and looking for answers, though keep in mind that they've been common place for a couple centuries, so you would be a major oddity, questioning something that's been an accepted fact since centuries before the downfall of civilization. Even if you're right, nobody's likely to listen to you because they KNOW that all the intelligent life encountered - with the exception of that from another GALAXY - is at least vaguely similar to humans. If you're OK with being 'that scientist' though, it could make for some interesting roleplaying, especially given the events of the game.
VV: I've also msg'd you back about the possibility of being an extra-galactic being. Though I'd prefer the characters to all be from the Milky Way, I could accept a single 'oddity'.


Also, I do have an understanding - albeit informal - of Chemistry, Biology, Evolutionary theory, Physics, Astrophysics, and Astrobiology, and often converse with true scientists, and enjoy research, so I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my 'portable hole'.

However, in the end what matters is that this is the story I'm telling, and if you'd like to be a part of it, I'm afraid you'll have to find a way to either suspend or harness your disbelief for the good of the story.
However, I too enjoy a good debate, so as long as we can do so without interfering in the game:
[sblock=Debate]

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Saying that an assumption of carbon based life is a leap into fantasy seems to indicate a lack of chemical and cosmic understanding. In Astrobiology, it's generally accepted as common sense that WHEN we find other life, it should be carbon based.

There has been a staggeringly large amount of exceptionally varied life forms on earth, and the one thing they all have in common is their chemical basis being Carbon.
That's not something unique to our planet, Carbon is the most likely chemical for life to form around and is the fourth most abundant chemical known to man, preceded only by Hydrogen and Oxygen(Water), and Helium (Which is noble and inert). The next most likely chemical in the milky way that COULD form the basis of life is Silicone. Even if we assume Silicone WOULD form life, (which is something we haven't seen on the entirety of our planet, or in any of the organic compounds and hydrocarbons we've found on meteorites/etc), it's only about a tenth as abundant as Carbon. This would seem to indicate carbon based life as being 10x more likely than silicone simply by dint of abundance alone. Add on top of that the fact that any form based on Silicone would require an environment free of Oxygen - a chemical even more abundant than Carbon - and Silicone's likeliness as a candidate drops even further.
And Silicone is the leading contender among alternate biochemistry theories, even people who sneer at 'carbon chauvinism' concede that after silicone the statistical probabilities of variant life drop dramatically.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMIyYwq_A8E Neil Degrasse Tyson describes it better than I, and you may pay more heed to him since he's got 'official lurnin'.
Part of his rant is about the fact that life DOES exist, and thus inconsequential to our current debate, I'm just pointing out his support of carbon-based life.*

RE: Humanoid - Keep in mind that the term 'humanoid' is rather open-ended in science fiction.

And you don't need to go into the fossil records to see the variety of life on earth, there's no question that any style of life form IS possible, however in the galaxy of this science Fiction Game (Emphasis on the fiction and the game), as with most games and fiction, artistic license is often taken in order to tell a story.
Both Science Fiction and Games are about suspension of disbelief, if you need sheer gritty realism this is not the place for it.

Also, 'Stochastic phenomena' is just a scientific way of saying luck.


*SIDE NOTE: I find it amusing that no matter what game I play, the argument always seems to be about minor scientific anomalies rather than the stuff that is a much greater breach of science? in D&D I always have to mediate arguments over falling speed, but nobody gives a damn about the two mile tall giant swinging a mountain and flinging lightning...

I don't mean to be dismissive, I'm actually curious : Does the concept of Carbon based humanoids from another planet really bug you more than ships travelling thousands of times the speed of light, teleporting ships, and an intergalactic war that managed to wipe out the vast majority of civilization, life, and knowledge across the entire galaxy? Because scientifically, I would understand the former to be the MOST plausible of all that.[/sblock]

interresting. Speaking of that place, how about this to make it more Victorian: The system/empire instituted severe voluntary cut-backs on all luxuries during the war (The Austerity, with a rallying cry of "Overcome!"), going from streamlined product lines (much less variety, yearly contests to get the few available production mandates from the Queen (*)), to voluntary personal austerity (modest/practical fashions (by today's standards), subdued colours, politically correct understated consumerism from the rich, pious shows of low consumption from everybody that doesn't want to be shunned), to deep cuts in personal transports (cabs and shuttle coaches heavily favored vs owning your own ship) and "voluntarily" reduced human rights and freedoms. Since the war ended, the system is slowly heading towards a more liberal clime, with arts and architecture making their re-appearance and luxuries slowly flooding back in from re-opened trade lines. Much of the war restrictions are still in place though, with a sizeable conservative element that seems to feel they are now part of the "proper, Victorian way".

*= an industry council based in the town of Queens, as I didn't want to go *too* Victorian with an *actual* queen, but up to you Drothgery. Maybe the planet housing the capital is called Queen?

The way I viewed it, None of the current civilizations/governments really existed in a big way during the war. When I say civilization FELL, I mean it fell HARD. The Victorian empire could be one of the first to have clawed its way back up, or it's possible that some of the planets managed to survive partially intact.
The devastation caused by the extra-galactic Enemy was near-total. The majority of sentients that survived did so on less advanced planets that weren't targeted, or on mobile ship convoys(ALA Battlestar Galactica), only re-colonizing after the war. Perhaps the Victorian empire was stagnant, uninspired monarchistic planets that were skipped as 'unimportant targets' during the war. They're not advanced because they were important before, but because they WEREN'T, they're 'advanced' now because everybody who WAS more advanced than their slow-moving ways was destroyed.
Imagine everybody in the world today reduced to Dark Ages level technology - except some which were on the level of the Old West.. advanced enough to understand and maybe begin reproducing some of the 21st century technology even though they didn't have it before.
They may have been far behind before, but they're ahead of the curve now.
The more liberal recent leanings could come from the realization that they are now at the technological forefront, and have the opportunity to seize the day and expand. Possibly they could see themselves as the light of humanity destined to lead the rest out of the darkness.

Keep in mind humanity was a galaxy-spanning type-2 civilization, much bigger and more advanced than the Star Trek Federation or Star Wars Empire, and is now split into many splintered groups centuries behind what they once were.

 

[Voda Vosa]

VV: I've also msg'd you back about the possibility of being an extra-galactic being. Though I'd prefer the characters to all be from the Milky Way, I could accept a single 'oddity'.
[sblock=Debate]

Saying that an assumption of carbon based life is a leap into fantasy seems to indicate a lack of chemical and cosmic understanding. In Astrobiology, it's generally accepted as common sense that WHEN we find other life, it should be carbon based.

There has been a staggeringly large amount of exceptionally varied life forms on earth, and the one thing they all have in common is their chemical basis being Carbon.
That's not something unique to our planet, Carbon is the most likely chemical for life to form around and is the fourth most abundant chemical known to man, preceded only by Hydrogen and Oxygen(Water), and Helium (Which is noble and inert). The next most likely chemical in the milky way that COULD form the basis of life is Silicone. Even if we assume Silicone WOULD form life, (which is something we haven't seen on the entirety of our planet, or in any of the organic compounds and hydrocarbons we've found on meteorites/etc), it's only about a tenth as abundant as Carbon. This would seem to indicate carbon based life as being 10x more likely than silicone simply by dint of abundance alone. Add on top of that the fact that any form based on Silicone would require an environment free of Oxygen - a chemical even more abundant than Carbon - and Silicone's likeliness as a candidate drops even further.
And Silicone is the leading contender among alternate biochemistry theories, even people who sneer at 'carbon chauvinism' concede that after silicone the statistical probabilities of variant life drop dramatically.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMIyYwq_A8E Neil Degrasse Tyson describes it better than I, and you may pay more heed to him since he's got 'official lurnin'.
Part of his rant is about the fact that life DOES exist, and thus inconsequential to our current debate, I'm just pointing out his support of carbon-based life.*

RE: Humanoid - Keep in mind that the term 'humanoid' is rather open-ended in science fiction.

And you don't need to go into the fossil records to see the variety of life on earth, there's no question that any style of life form IS possible, however in the galaxy of this science Fiction Game (Emphasis on the fiction and the game), as with most games and fiction, artistic license is often taken in order to tell a story.
Both Science Fiction and Games are about suspension of disbelief, if you need sheer gritty realism this is not the place for it.

Also, 'Stochastic phenomena' is just a scientific way of saying luck.


*SIDE NOTE: I find it amusing that no matter what game I play, the argument always seems to be about minor scientific anomalies rather than the stuff that is a much greater breach of science? in D&D I always have to mediate arguments over falling speed, but nobody gives a damn about the two mile tall giant swinging a mountain and flinging lightning...

I don't mean to be dismissive, I'm actually curious : Does the concept of Carbon based humanoids from another planet really bug you more than ships travelling thousands of times the speed of light, teleporting ships, and an intergalactic war that managed to wipe out the vast majority of civilization, life, and knowledge across the entire galaxy? Because scientifically, I would understand the former to be the MOST plausible of all that.[/sblock]

And I msg'd you back with a reply.

[sblock=Debate, weee!]
I'll reply to the bolded sections in order:

1: That's because we all share a common ancestor, a life form based con carbon (Known as LUCA, last universal common ancestor). Once there is life, it is hard for it to surge again from another source, given the sheer amount of competence. We do not know for sure if there ever was other types of life before ours, but there could have been. As of now, there's only one type of life, with one type of biochemistry. I remember, if memory doesn't fail me, that there was this theory of silica being a primordial component of what eventually led to life on earth, aiding the pre biotic component selections.

2: Agreed, it's less likely because its less abundant. But is as abundant as Nitrogen, and that too is a principal component of carbon based life, without which life wouldn't be possible in the more strict sense (No RNA). That isn't really a reason for it not to be a plausible option. We are speaking a quite large amount of planets, and not a large difference in concentrations.

3: What? In fact silicon creates its more stable compounds binding with oxygen.

4: Yeah I know, I'm just debating cuz I like the subject.

5: And that's the meaning I intended for it. Random would be more precise. Luck is tendentious.

6: Perhaps, but we don't know to what extend future technology will advance. However, basic principles of life don't depend on the time factor. Additionally, I'm a biologist, if I were an engineer, I'd probably argue giant light speed travelling ships
[/sblock]

 

[Moon_Goddess]

[sblock="Debate"]

I'm not a biologist, or an engineer, or a physicist, I work IT at a bank, but I am a geek so I study random stuff.

1 2 and 3: If you know biology you should know there are some good arguments about carbon life being more likely than silicon. Those stable bonds you mention with oxygen are part of the problem they are too stable.

6: I definitely have more problem with FTL than with carbon biology. You are looking at it backwards, you say time doesn't change life. It is implausible, that life would be carbon-water based, with humanoid features. It's not impossible, cuz it happened here, just unlikely for it to happen again. So given infinite time and infinite universe, it statically HAS to happen again, in fact an infinite number of times. Faster than Light travel on the other hand, violates everything we know about physics. Because of relativity, FTL is time travel, and violates cause and effect. Paradoxes galore.

So basically, you are complaining about something that is unlikely, (but possible it's happened once that we know of) but ignoring something that is Impossible.

But, space RPG can get boring without FTL so we just accept it, and promise to not duel with our tachyon pistols.

I look at the biology the same way, I just don't know what I'm suppose to promise not duel with[/sblock]

 

[Shayuri]

[sblock=My wall of text, encapsulated in this tiny place]In fairness, a hypothetical drive that doesn't involve actually traveling through spacetime doesn't violate physics. We just have no idea how to actually do such a thing. The 'hyperdrive' from this setting is therefore physically plausible, albeit entirely magical in terms of how it causes the ship to exit spacetime, then re-enter it.

The 'slow' FTL drives of course are another matter entirely. Maybe some kind of Alcubierre warp drive or something. Still leads to a huge pile of issues of course, but we can sweep those comfortably into the gap between 'what we know now' and 'what we know in The Future.'

As for the proliferation of various types of life...I don't know much about the math involved. My sense however is that we have a very narrow understanding of how life might develop on worlds with significantly different chemistries than Earth. The closest thing to 'alien' life we can find here that I am aware of is the life that develops around thermal vents in the deep sea; life that develops metabolisms entirely different than most other life on Earth...and even it is 'carbon based.'

We don't really know if life based on other compounds is possible. All we know is that other compounds could chemically have many of the same traits carbon has that makes it work for life here on Earth. Until we actually FIND alien life though, any features it has or doesn't have is entirely speculation.

Which is self-evident. I only bring it up to try to defuse the tendency people have when debating to assume a sort of authoritarian stance.

At some point, when discussing alien biologies, we have to develop a more general definition of life, I think. The line that divides 'just a series of chemical reactions' from 'a living being' is grey even here. That would only get greyer when we look at really alien environments. I think there's a very good chance that a great deal of life we find in the cosmos will be chemically similar to us, largely because the life that is NOT chemically similar to us we will not find. Or will misinterpret if we do.

I also think it's fair to say that while a lot of living things will be completely different from us, beings who occupy similar ecological niches that we have, and come from similar environments, may well be physically similar to us...in a very broad sense of the term. There's no reason it HAS to be...but it's fair to say such a being would have features that are analogous to ours, because they would have experienced similar environmental pressures. They might use tentacles instead of fingers, but they'd still have to manipulate their environment dextrously, for example.

Then there's the question of intelligences that develop in radically different, but chemically similar, environments. Those, I'd argue, we have trouble recognizing even here on Earth. Why should space be any different? So it may well be that a great many sentient beings do not form these spacefaring compacts and collusions...not because they don't exist, but because only a certain type of being (the ones similar to us in evolution and traits) tend to do that sort of thing. [/sblock]

 

[Voda Vosa]

[sblock=debate]1-3: Not really, the problem with silicon is that it has low affinity to other chemical species as nitrogen, phosphorus and that the compounds it makes are levorotatory, while most compounds used by earth life forms are dextrorotatory.

More likely as I already said, yes. But as you say in point six: "So given infinite time and infinite universe, it statically HAS to happen" so everything is possible in the realm of probabilities. Just consider that the number of combinations needed to decode a human randomly are higher that the number of atoms in the universe. We are unique in the most broad of senses.

I am not complaining, I'm merely puzzled by the fact of such an unlikely phenomena, of a galaxy of humanoids. Also I'm not ignoring the other stuff, I'm not in a position to objectively say anything about it.

Shayuri has a point in that, if we encounter other forms of life, based on completely different chemistry, we would hardly recognized them as living beings. They might have too brief life spans, of too long, they might move so slowly that we would not even see it. Who knows?
I would agree that if we ever find intelligent life, we will find something similar to us, because that would be what we would be searching for, but that doesn't mean they will be humanoids, or have internal skeleton, or eyes, or mouth, or legs, or head... and so on.[/sblock]

 

[Shayuri]

They might not have exactly the same traits as us, but I'd expect them to have traits that serve the same basic purpose.

 

[Binder Fred]

The way I viewed it, None of the current civilizations/governments really existed in a big way during the war. When I say civilization FELL, I mean it fell HARD. The Victorian empire could be one of the first to have clawed its way back up, or it's possible that some of the planets managed to survive partially intact. [Snippety]

Hm. Well this is more Drothgery's baby than mine, so I'll let him work out his preferred sequence for his victorians. The victorian aspect doesn't really inspire me, really... Or rather, I think I'd prefer to be one of the 'barbarians'. Say one of the last system the Victorians "civilized" in their (re)expension? Just to be absolutely un-subtle about it, how about I give my PC a swarthy east indian complexion? (Alright, alright, so maybe that's too much. Keeping the Hindi theme though ).

[sblock=Hira ki chiriya, "The adamant/diamond bird"]A sparkling system with abundant gas giants and not one but two asteroid belts, both rich in volatiles, hence its name. It's three main habited world were blasted to smithereens during the War (litteraly in two cases: Eka Kavita (One Song) has mostly collapsed back onto itself by now, but a good three-quarters of Deju (Home) was knocked clean off the ecliptic by some sort of gigantic hammer blow and still hasn't fully stabilized into its new orbit; as for Bagica (Garden), it's still technically there, but its surface is a roiling, half-solid sea of wild nanoes and nano-counters busily changing the now triple-quarantined planet into... something). The survivors were mostly all asteroid and gas-giant miners, now stranded in backwaters facilities and a few vacation/refuelling moons...

Surprisingly enough, they were almost all the way out when the victorians found them again: They'd lost all types of anti-grav/artificial grav technology (which the victorians have in spades (?)), but as spacers they still had a firm grasp of genetics, advanced material assembly and were still in full control of their specialized medical micro-hives - if not the universal assembler nanoes of their ancestors. Newly-built 'Beanstalk' orbital elevators now sprouted from partially terraformed moons, they were busily harvesting the ressources of their system (including the now-bared cores of both Deju and, more-interestingly, Eka Kavita) to feed and sustain their arithmetically growing population (which outnumbered, and still outnumbers, the victorians four to one) and were even working on trying to re-understand the few remaining FTL drives that they had (none of them in full working order, sadly (*)). This last proved catastrophically detrimental in the carefully orchestrated conflict that followed.

*= Historians pointed to evidence of a giant, probably desperate muster of all Flight-capable crafts just prior or possibly just after the final blows to the system, vessels which obviously never returned, but, just as obviously, did what they were suppossed to do (whatever that was), for the Enemy never returned.The lost ships are refered to in the books as Bijano (or Chura) ki Andhara (seeds/daggers of the tempest).[/sblock][Sblock=Rough character concept]Udas Kankara ("Blackstone" on his victorian papers): Heavy-worlder EVA specialist/tech with hands-on experience in industrial blasting. Minor gene optimization (Diminished O2 consumption, efficient digestion/water recycling, 0-gee bone loss, long term rad tolerance, emergency induced coma), welding/metal artiste as a hobby. Comes from a 1.5g gas giant moon. Heavy base substance mining background (mostly ice, O2, N2; some base metal asteroids/micro-moons), furnishing the inner and outer system. Used to bulky suits with combination mag-surface tension gripers. Gear: Mandatory rad detector wrist-band, "Mind-reader" demon implant (micro-grown direct mind-machine interface; which I'm going to guess the victorians disaprove of as "breaking the sanctity of the human body and soul" ) + implanted wireless jack (left cheek-bone), external utility computer at waist (runs augmented reality, sensory filtering/augmentation, mapper, desktop/productivity apps, tech database, ...).[/sblock]

EDIT= That could be our link with each other: that we are all the disparate children of Her Majesty's victorian empire?

 

[Binder Fred]

They might not have exactly the same traits as us, but I'd expect them to have traits that serve the same basic purpose.

Physically. The mind is another universe entirely, of course. Strangely enough, even the most foreign looking sci-fi critter usually has human-like, easily comprehensible intelligence (is, in fact, usually *less* alien in thought than any two people from different cultures here on earth: Star Trek's "Americans with one(1) randomly-selected 'weird' custom" is a good example, but star Wars suffers from this too). As one who'se travelled a fair bit, I can tell you that we have problems understanding the actions of people with the exact same genetic makeup (at 3 decimals) but slightly differing childhoods, beliefs and/or cultures. They're perfectly sane, and when they explain it to you (when they can, "semi-rational" pretty much defining the human condition ), it often makes a weird kind of sense, but it draws relations were you wouldn't have and comes to conclusions you wouldn't have even thought of on your own. So "human-thinking" aliens are not that surprising, really - people want to be told stories where they understand the players' motivations - but you'd think the writters could go at least as far as "alien X has a distinct *culture* from alien Y" (Cherryh has some very nice examples of this in, amongst others, her Chanur novels, where the Hani, Kifs, Mahendosat, etc each have their very own culture (and she even went above and beyond to include aliens with "still somewhat understandable but definitively non-human" logic systems (The matrix-thinking -ack, <has to look it up>- The matrix-thinking Tc'a, the unpredictable Chi))... That's my personnal sci-fi pet peeve right there.

That said, I don't usually buy the "totally incomprehensible" alien concepts either (no offense, Jemal). As Shayuri pointed out, we do share a physical universe if nothing else. We might never agree on anything, but *some* form of communication, no matter how labourious, time-consuming and difficult, should always be possible. At least enough to say "hunger" or "1+1". And if you have that, well.... That very difficulty then becomes the beauty of true first contacts.

 

[Jemal]

Don't have time to respond to most of the debate points, just curious why BF said "no offense jemal". I don't recall saying anything about other types of life being 'incomprehensible'.

Anyways, unless we get an influx of people insisting otherwise, I'll be going with M&M. Will post some official character rules when I can.

 

[Binder Fred]

What about the Enemy?