A few issues with the SA setting

A few issues with the SA setting

Irioth 09 Jul 2013 20:06

Hello, first of all allow me to express my deep appreciation and gratitude for the existence of this nifty game, which has done a lot to counter my traditional distrust towards sci-fi RPGs and the space opera subgenre of sci-fi (which in most cases, boiled down to antipathy for the "20th century humans with starships and rayguns" clichè of a static humanity beyond a few superficial trappings). Overall I'm quite pleased with SA, and much more so with the upcoming 2nd edition, which I regard as superior in many aspects.

I only have a few serious criticisms, which basically boil down to SA not completely fulfilling its mission of bringing speculative hard science to its extreme foreseeable possibilities and/or reflecting IMO obsolete assumptions.

a) the assumption that in the setting, habitable planets are very rare, and their number would not be substantially increased with terraforming. Now, the results of exoplanet search in the last few years gives strong indication that planets are very abundant in the galaxy. Although sampling bias still makes discovery of Earthlike planets difficult, indirect evidence seems to suggest that they are relatively plentiful, too. Moreover, terraforming seems to be a relatively cheap and simple task for SA technology. So I find only reasonable that in the 2nd edition, the number of habited planets by each civilization and mankind in general should be increased by at the very least 1-2, quite possibly 3, orders of magnitude. Given how decentralized the various human civilizations seem to be, I assume the setting would not suffer serious changes if each of them would spread across thousands of planets or so.

b) the assumption that in the setting, gravitational warp drives remain impracticable and wormholes are the only feasible FTL method. Now, recent studies seem to indicate that the energy requirements of the Alcubierre drive are much, much less intensive than previously thought, and may easily be competitive with the wormhole technology in SA terms. Therefore, I think it would be fitting if in the 2nd edition, warp drives do exist as a feasible alternative to wormholes, especially for those civilizations that make extensive use of starships.

c) the assumption that with SA level of technological development, physical immortality remains impossible and humans are bound to a finite lifespan. Thankfully, it seems such a notion shall be discarded in the 2nd edition, since I cannot begin to tell how much irrational, arbitrary, and annoying such an assumption seemed. As far as I can tell, physical immortality seems to be a relatively simple Biotech (with secondary Nanotech and Cognitech elements) achievement.

d) the assumption that body swap means death. Thankfully, it seems this is another irrational, arbitrary, and annoying setting assumption that shall be discarded in the 2nd edition. As far as I can tell, given the metaphysical premises of the setting, it seems right to expect that the continuity of identity, not the one of the body, is the person, so the sum of my memories, personality, and selfhood in a new body is still me for all the aspects that really matter. I agree that a duplicated mind in multiple bodies is a potentially trickier case, and different experiences would sooner or later drive the copies to diverge into different individuals, unless memories are kept aligned. However, if they are, then it's simply a case of the same mind in multiple bodies.

Re: A few issues with the SA setting

Colin_Fredericks 09 Jul 2013 22:07

Thanks for the post! It's always nice to have new folks on the message boards.

I think that one of the things that makes sci-fi difficult to write, and one of the things that keeps it from being a more popular genre, is that things that are annoyingly nonsensical to one person can be perfectly sensible to someone else. The "harder" and more accurate-to-life the sci-fi is, the worse this problem gets. Other settings have "inconsistencies;" only sci-fi settings have "bugs." :)

I'm generally willing to be convinced on these points. Immortality was a great example here - I believed that the 6000 years posited as the original length of the Great Diaspora would not have been enough to conquer aging, especially with what we know about cancer right now (every cancer cell may actually be its own semi-unique type of tumor). However, enough people assured me that it was (see the immortality challenge), so immortality is now a big factor in SA2. It's a huge change to the setting, and one that will probably see a good amount of discussion in the advice section of the book. I need to write into every civilization the way in which they either handle immortality, or choose not to be immortal.

I've been following exoplanet research with great interest. Originally, the assumption of a sparse inhabitable universe served to drive up competition for habitable planets, and also to spread humanity more inexorably across the wider universe (something I really like in this setting - not many people live in Andromeda, or can even see it from where they live.) An increase in the number of inhabitable planets seems pretty likely. Terraforming is not particularly easy or fast - it's still at the high end of Bio, Cog, and Nano to do it right - but it definitely seems like there will be less of it that needs to be done.

Give me a link to some citations for the cheaper warp drive. Last I knew the energy requirements were truly staggering (a Jupiter-mass worth of energy to cross the galaxy), but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

As far as body swap meaning death… well, it's not so much that it's being discarded as that I realized my definition of death was inadequate and didn't need to be part of the game. "Continuity of identity" is pretty meaningless - if a completely different set of atoms is encoding my consciousness, there isn't anything that could be less continuous there. (Seriously, "define what death is" should be the next challenge.) (Hmm…)

Re: A few issues with the SA setting

Irioth 09 Jul 2013 23:16

Thank you for the nice, reasoned answer.

I'm going to wait for the revision of the setting re. the immortality psychohistorical challenge for the various civilizations with the greatest interest, just as I'm quite curious to see the SA2 versions of the civilizations and societies I fancy (only two - Stardwellers and Logicians - made it into Sufficiency 3.2).

Here are the links for the cheaper warp drive. It seems like the energy requirements have been reduced to a Voyager-mass worth of energy.

io9.com!5963263!how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive (popular science resume)
ntrs.nasa.gov!archive!nasa!casi.ntrs.nasa.gov!20110015936_2011016932.pdf (technical paper)

Apparently the system won't let an unworthy scrub like me to insert links in a post, so I tried to seek a loophole. Please replace exclamation marks with slashes in the above.

Yes, of course terraforming is not particularly easy or fast, but it looks like it would be a definitely doable public works project for civilizations with high Bio, Cog, and Nano. The mounting RL evidence that exoplanets are plentiful in the universe means that there is in all likelihood going to be a good amount of habitable planets to begin with, and even many more 'easy' candidates for terraforming.

I recognize the semantic pitfalls in the discussion about the meaning of death. In a very rough way, I'd define death in this context as the permanent annihilation of consciousness, and its lack as the persistence of consciousness (notwithstanding temporary lapses such as sleep), regardless of the framework that it is encoded upon. Basically, I tend to find the notion that body swap is death just as bizarre as the notion that to transfer a file from a recording device to another means its destruction.

Re: A few issues with the SA setting

Colin_Fredericks 10 Jul 2013 13:33

Cool, I'll look up the warp drive. I see the references to lower energy (which is cool), but it doesn't say for how far you get to go with that much energy. There are other issues that might still make wormholes the method of choice. The idea of "space races" is always nice to include in a game, though.

On the death issue: There's no such thing as "transferring" a file. You're either changing the link that points to where the data is stored on the disk, or (in a better analogy to the physical world), you're writing ones and zeroes in one place on your substrate and overwriting with zeroes in another place. The latter is definitively a "copy-and-erase", not a transfer. There's no reason you couldn't have both copies. Doing the same with your body or mind, it's hard to argue that only a single consciousness will then exist. It's clear which is the original, and which should be "you". If you're "transferring," that's really a copy-and-delete, and the original is then gone. That's the approach that SA1 took.

SA2… well, you can find the whole description elsewhere on the boards here, but I realized that the case is a little confused when you have indistinguishable particles involved.

Re: A few issues with the SA setting

Irioth 10 Jul 2013 17:47

As far as I'm concerned, no problem in keeping wormholes the most used/preferred FTL system in the SA2 setting. However, this new evidence is IMO good justification to make warp drives a relatively widespread auxiliary system, for all those circumstances when wormholes may not be so optimal or even fanciful. E.g. starship-based civilizations like the Stardwellers or the Spacers likely make routine use of both methods; on the contrary, wormholes are obviously the pretty much exclusive method of choice for the Disciples who live deep into the intergalactic void.

As far as I can tell from Sufficiency 3.2, I'm entirely at ease and satified with the stance SA2 takes on the death issue with the Existentialism rules, esp. the Rule of Intent and less importantly the Rule of Identity. From a philosophical PoV, theoretically speaking, I agree that when you have multiple copies of the same mind simultaneously and independently existing, it is hard to say they remain the same individual, since sooner or later different experiences shall make them diverge into different individuals.

However, when experience divergence does not really occur (they share memories, either by permanent mind-link or by frequent merger of memory recordings), this is much less of an issue. As far as I can tell, whenever people (mostly the Replicants) do use multiple copies in the SA setting, they take care to keep their memories aligned. So the Rule of Identity finds good justification in the setting.

However, my main 'vehement' objection to the SA1 approach on the issue was about treating copy-and-delete from a body to another (with little difference if biological or mechanical, or a virtual environment) as death. As far as I'm concerned, in such a case the original is not gone, but simply changed its place. Everything that really matters to make a person a person is in, and goes with, the mind, not the body, which ultimately is little more than a vehicle and medium of interaction with the physical world. So there is no such thing as a brain transplant, but always a body transplant, properly speaking (and just like a new limb or organ does not make a new individual, so neither does a new body). Again, as far as I'm concerned, the Rule of Intent now deals with such cases to my entire satisfaction.