Guild Navigator: Ah! Kinkajou. I felt your approach in quantum space-time deformation. How can we of the Guild help you?
Kinkajou: My readers would like to be enlightened about some of the technology of your time.
Guild Navigator: In spite of the apparent simplicity of our technology is to the uninitiated observer, our humans have developed significant technologies. This has enabled them to escape the domination of the Cymeks, the thinking machines.
The development of the energy shield led to the discovery of interactions of coherent photon energy with the multiple dimensions accessed by energy field technology. Lasguns area notoriously difficult piece of technology to maintain in operation and they interact in unpredictable ways with energy shields. They can trigger an explosion with energy potential of a simple explosive device or they can trigger explosions that are almost nuclear in scope.
Energy shields have led to the development of repulsors which allow the denial of gravity ‘s influence on a mass. Repulsors have developed to support diverse applications including making a fat man float, allowing vehicles to fly and allowing access to planetary orbit.
Guild Navigator:
It is the ability to access planetary orbit which has freed the human peoples from the surfaces of celestial bodies such as planets. Once orbit is attained, little energy is required to synchronise with one of our HeighLiners. The ships are truly big. A single Heighliner can hold all the frigates and transports from a single planet in a little corner of its vast bulk. To maintain security we do not allow ship personnel to leave their vessels. This is part of the price for Guild security. All know better than to endanger their shipping rates.
Once a Heighliner is loaded, the navigator is employed to fold space with his mind and to move the ship to a new location. Our navigators are specially bred and imbued with spice to allow them to process the multidimensional mathematics required in moving through space. We must always remember the restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad. Though shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind. In forcing us to develop the navigators, the Jihad took away a crutch. It forced the human mind to develop. The navigators’ school is just one of the schools that developed to train human talents.
The advantages of using Guild are obvious. A vessel arrives at its destination with essentially no delay between its leaving and arriving. The journey is essentially over before it has even begun.
Warrior Kinkajou
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Kinkajou: But this world would not be possible without the spice.
Guild Navigator: True. Spice is a rare and incredibly valued commodity. A single handful of spice can buy you a home in the most prestigious habitations of our galaxy. It cannot be manufactured. It must be mind on Arrakis. It is unique and has true geriatric properties. The spice enables the human mind to access higher dimensions and the Sigma Psi psychic reality. The spice prolongs life. The spice enables communications in the plane of Sigma Psi and appreciation of alternate realities
. Even mentats may use spice to read the future, but they must have special skills dictated by their genetics to be able to do so. Still, humans are able to travel between the stars using spaceships, bypassing Sima Psi travel. Humans had developed the repulsor technology, shields and lasguns. The spice is simply added another dimension to our ability to manipulate and control the universe. The ability to fold space also allows us to communicate across vast distances without recourse to the limitations of the speed of light. This effectively allows us to equal the developments of quantum communications in your era.
Kinkajou: Do you believe there are any technologies existing within my era that Sigma Psi suggests may allow us to approach your own achievements?
Guild Navigator: Yes young Kinkajou: I believe the development of the Memristor will allow for an explosion in the development of machine computing abilities. The ability to go from off state to a non-state with instant awareness of stored knowledge, would rival the ability of humans to function soon after leaving the sleep state. It will allow the development of new logic processes. It may allow machine’s to imitate the human ability to think. In our era, the development of machines to mimic the human mind is abhorrent to us.
Human minds are significant resources which can be developed. A natural human’s mind is an animal without logic. The projection of logic onto the affairs of the environment is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness. In our world the embodiment of human logic is the mentat. However, the mentat has decided advantage over machine intelligence.
Mentats are human and have a healthy respect for the error factor in the computations. I believe in your era machines are unable to escape from the prison of logic. However, the Memristor may become the first beachhead for the development of machine intelligence to rival that of humans.
We believe that a man who weighs decisions, who thinks of consequences has “Stature”. Where does a human learn such balance? The young Reed does so easily. Beginnings are a time of such great peril. This leads to our emphasis on the training of young human minds, bypassing the need to employ machines.Machines sought to dominate humans. What eventuated was a no holds barred convention of warfare we know as Kanly. It is a form of warfare that can destroy you even as it gives you victory. A man must die because he helps your enemies. The price of Kanly can be seen between many conflicting Houses. Guards throng everywhere and weapons carry that special sheen that tells a trained eye that they are in regular use. Servants carry their military training in the way they hold their shoulders and the way they turn their eyes while they watch, watch and watch.
There is no common ground.
Those in power may well wear the title well. However, you must realise that such thoughts embrace death. The machines in the end sought to destroy human life. It is only the resilience of the human spirit that allowed us to endure, to fight and to succeed. We have a saying, “do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake”. Kinkajou: Unfortunately, in my experience man has only one science, the science of discontent. Humans always strive for that which they do not have and look with envy on what others possess.
Kinkajou: Are there any other aspects of the Navigator Guild’s function that you believe to be important?
Guild Navigator: I think too many men look at us with envy. They dream of the day the Guild may be circumvented. They believe the Guild bleeds off just enough money to keep the client from objecting. And then when the client is in our fist they accuse us of forcing the clients to pay and pay and pay.
The cost of the spice which enables our Heighliners to travel through space is astronomical. These ships are large and expensive. Our ability to build and maintain a Heighliner fleet enables us to support trade throughout the galaxy. Trade goods can be moved with consideration only of the cost of attaining orbit.
Technology has reduced this cost enough that it is only a small addendum in the cost of galactic trade. We can move materials such as perishable foodstuffs and other perishable materials due to our ability to instantaneously travel across the galaxy through folded space. I believe we have become successful simply because of the incredible advantages gained through travelling folded space, not necessitating the use of spaceships requiring substantial transit times from one star system to another.
Arrakis Noble Too many of the great houses have looked for only two things from Arrakis – income and a merciless fist. We seek to maintain the cohesiveness of human civilisation throughout the galaxy by allowing trade, migration and the movement of information and technology. Our greatest achievement is the binding of the humans living on many different planets into one cohesive whole.
Kinkajou: I thank you Navigator for your insight.
Guild Navigator: We must all learn what history has taught us. We cannot pause for an instant in our learning. Those who have died in allowing us to stand with technology in civilisation must not be forgotten.
MemristorsTrue.html |
Herbert, Frank |
Guild Navigator |
Dune |
Orbital EngineTrue.html |
Herbert, Frank |
Guild Navigator |
Dune |
QuantumRadioTrue.html |
Herbert, Frank |
Guild Navigator |
Dune |
WorldTradeTrue.html |
Herbert, Frank |
Guild Navigator |
Dune |
Kinkajou interviews Mark Ten Roos
(Gordon R. Dickson: The Outposter).
Kinkajou: I understand that your civilisation has made contact with real aliens. What can we find to share or trade with creatures, whose outlook on life and civilisation is so different from our own.
Mark Ten Roos: I met one of the aliens on a spaceship when I was in transit to one of the colonies on Garnera. I want to send a message to them that Abruzzi 14 station and its colony was open for trading. Other more experienced Outposters were very sceptical of my intentions. The Meda V’Dan only trade when they have to. Otherwise they raid the outposts for supplies. They thought that I actually wanted my station to be raided just so I could kill some aliens. Raids on outpost stations caused supplies to be lost. When I grew up on the Abruzzi 14 station, I realised how critical supplies were. When supplies don’t get replaced in time, people die.
Kinkajou: The poor colonists.
Mark Ten Roos: No, it is the poor Outposters. There are ones who get killed when their stations are raided. If the colonists have the training, guts and energy, they can scratch a living until fresh supplies come.
Kinkajou: So how does trade help the outposts and colonies to survive?
Mark Ten Roos: The colony system is gradually bankrupting the Earth City economically. The colonies were founded nearly hundred years ago, but they still aren’t able to run themselves without supply shipments. They aren’t able to face the Meda V’Dan aliens without either the Navy or us to fight for them.
Earth City still ships out machine tools, instruments, weapons and especially involuntary colonists to the worlds of our era. We call the colonists garbage, because the Earth City must get rid of – well what doesn’t want.
Firefly Spaceship
You can buy almost anything back on earth, but the one thing that isn’t for sale anywhere is Earth City’s own survival. To allow even one man’s return is too many. One man is a precedent and there aren’t going to be any precedents for colonists escaping once they have been lotteried and sent off earth to the space colonies. Earth wants them gone for good and without recourse. There is no single individual the Earth City wouldn’t sacrifice to make sure the excess population it bleeds off – stays bled.
The colonies are not becoming self-supporting because the colonists didn’t want to emigrate in the first place and because they were culls to begin with. Most of them are people who have already failed in the society that were born into. The colonies aren’t going to stand on their own 2 feet – but they are multiplying every week. The cost of supplying them, the Navy and the outposts is getting out of hand.
And we have the Meda V’Dan to wreck the situation even more now.
The Meda V’Dan never bother to trade anymore. They take what they want from Earth produced supplies at the Outposter stations and keep the Navy quiet with gifts from the unknown races further in to the galactic core. Only the gifts aren’t worth 2% of what they take.
Trading
Kinkajou: Why should they raid Outpost stations?
Mark Ten Roos: Because there’s no point in trading for anything if they can just take it.
What is interesting is that when they raid, they usually take any stored grain or harvested agricultural products. There were also known to trade for agricultural products. Assuming they can harvest the nutrients they want from the outside world, namely the carbohydrate part, they could grow their protein under laboratory conditions. In fact, with all the evidence of technologies of that we see them kicking around, you would think that this would be a good method for them.
Kinkajou: Why synthesise when growing is easier?
Mark Ten Roos: Ah! That forms part of the puzzle in understanding this alien civilisation. We believe that they synthesise much of their food using food biotechnology and also grow food integrated vertical farms within their cities. However, I suppose variety is always welcome.
Kinkajou: So have you actually done any trading with the aliens?
Mark Ten Roos: I asked some of my management level colonists to set up profit-making systems for the colony. In particular, I asked them to find something right away that we could trade directly with the Meda V’Dan. The answer was that we needed everything we had to survive. The only thing we could really spare were figurines and art objects. The problem was of course that the Meda V’Dan didn’t trade.
Kinkajou: I think I can see that peace is a prerequisite for trade. A respect for your counterparts somewhere else. Trade involves an exchange of goods, services or knowledge. You swap what you are good at making with what someone else is good at making. Both are enriched by the process. It seems that these conditions did not exist in the contact with the Meda V’Dan.
Mark Ten Roos: I concur.
FoodBiotechTrue.html |
Dickson, Gordon R. |
Mark Ten Roos |
Outposter |
VerticalFarmsTrue.html |
Dickson, Gordon R. |
Mark Ten Roos |
Outposter |
WorldTradeTrue.html |
Dickson, Gordon R. |
Mark Ten Roos |
Outposter |
Kinkajou interviews a 2 North (Peter F. Hamilton – Great North Road)
Kinkajou: The North story has everything to do with cloning and life extension. Tell us about it.
2 North: The North story began when grandfather got himself shipped out to Afghanistan. That’s where he got hit by an IED – improvised explosive device. The fucking thing blew his balls off. So he eventually moved to Scotland and began recruiting members of the Dolly team – the ones who first cloned a sheep by the name of Dolly. The gamete fixing techniques were very crude back then.
Once upon a time there were three brothers. They were triplets. Born to separate mothers. Perfect clones of their incredibly wealthy father, Kane North. He named them Augustine, Bartram and Constantine.
Although there are excellent replicas of their brother/father – who in turn had possessed all their families’ notorious drive, worship of money, and intellectual ability that all the North’s inherited – they had a flaw. The genetic manipulations which produced them was technology still in its infancy. Kane’s DNA was fixed by rudimentary germ line techniques inside the embryo. It’s meant that Kane’s distinctive biological identity was locked in and dominant in every cell throughout the new body, including the spermatozoa.
Any woman having a child by one of the brothers produced yet another copy of the original. This was the flaw in the new domestic order: as with all forms replication, copies of copies inevitably saw some deterioration. Errors began to creep into the DNA as it reproduced itself.
2Norths as the next generation were called, were almost as good as their fathers – but there were subtle deficiencies now. 3Norths were of even lower quality. 4Norths had both physiological and psychological abnormalities. Rumour had it that after the first 5s appeared, the 4s were also quietly and diplomatically sterilised by the family.
The triplets were outstanding men. It was they who embraced the new technological development of trans-spatial connection which was in its formative years. But, it was the 2Norths that made up the higher echelons of the company management.
We 2Norths built Northumberland interstellar. Nearly 200 of us in total back then, all having the same drive, the same direction, possessing the same determination. The world has never seen anything like that since the days of the kings who ruled by divine right.
However the technology that made us is flawed. We original 2Norths are a dying breed. We will never be repeated. Our era is over.
North Clones
Kinkajou: Certainly the Norths would have formed a powerful force for construction of an empire. However, I can see how society would look with disdain upon the use of cloning to build an empire such as yours. Why not also focus on life extension technologies as a way of also maintaining the same direction and cohesion?
2 North: Anti-geriatrics therapies don’t wind the clock back – they just slow it down a bit. Like one in 10. Rejuvenation operates largely on the same principle. It just doesn’t work as well and it’s mostly cosmetic. If you’re going to rejuvenate someone in either of the techniques that Bartram North developed, they are phenomenally expensive. There are about 100 trillion cells in the average human body and thank fuck that us Norths aren’t fat bastards. The true rejuvenation, the DNA in each cell needs a specifically tailored repair sequence effected in. It takes over a decade of treatments to complete. Not even Northumberland interstellar could afford that for 100 of us.
Kinkajou: Just what is it that Northumberland interstellar does which makes it so valuable?
2 North: Northumberland Interstellar opened the world of St. Libra for colonisation. The entire world is covered by these bloodied great algae paddies leaching bio- oil all across the nice clean landscape. The soil on earth is too valuable for anything other than food crops. The main crop derived from the algae paddies is biological oil, hence the name bio- oil.
The producers have essentially combined to form an almost monopoly. They break anything that threatens to change the price as they set it, a price which is enough to make a healthy profit, but not enough to strangle interstellar economy. So if you want you can try to go against that monolithic monopoly with its vested interests and unlimited funds and hardwired political support, for example to introduce a futures market in some backdoor fashion, don’t be surprised that you may wind up floating along some river. The price of bio – oil actually has nothing to do with production costs and quantity. It is meticulously calculated to the last percentage point so as not to cause any dip in the trans-stellar finance markets.
Though of course, there are plenty of bio – oil subsidiary markets to choose from. You could target in mission bonds, carbon exchange certificates, clean burn validates, double back users, post – spot delivery leverages – they’re all open to manipulation, if you got the balls.
The economy of human space depends on supplies of bio – oil to maintain energy production. It is certainly the lifeblood of the economy and for these reasons must be secured.
Kinkajou: I’ve read somewhere that St. Libra’s biosphere is itself very unusual, a real anomaly. There are no animals and insects present. A suspiciously unique situation.
2 North: Indeed no other world that humanity has found, has just plants. That is never been a lot of research into St. Libra’s fossil record. However the results that have trickled in over the last 30 years have given us cause for concern. As far as the found, there was no life on St. Libra prior to about one half million years ago.
There’s also the problem that St. Libra’s botany is simply too sophisticated even if you disregard the lack of a fossil record. This has led to the development of a theory postulating that what we have on St. Libra is an artificial bio-forming event instead of natural evolution.
In other words someone manufactured St. Libra’s biosphere, a couple of million years ago by dumping a whole batch of bacteria and algae and later other plants on the planet and then leaving them to get on with it.
The only reason you would do such a thing is if you’re developing real estate for your own species. Biological life builds an environment suitable for other biological life in effect terraforming a planet such as in this instance St. Libra.
Kinkajou: Incredible to realise biological life is the ultimate terraforming technology. As life establishes itself, it replicates creating more life and an environment suitable for other and more complex forms of life. An interdependent ecology rapidly evolves changing the natural environment to an environment more favourable to the support of biological organisms. And all this work is done by the organisms themselves with no further input of intelligence or direction.
I would like to thank you for your insights 2 North: The technologies of trade, cloning, life extension and climate control through bio engineering feature prominently in your era. Thank you again for sharing your knowledge.
ClimateControlTrue.html |
Hamilton, Peter F. |
2North |
Great North Road |
CloningCellGrowthControlTrue.html |
Hamilton, Peter F. |
2North |
Great North Road |
LifeExtensionTrue.html |
Hamilton, Peter F. |
2North |
Great North Road |
WorldTradeTrue.html |
Hamilton, Peter F. |
2North |
Great North Road |