Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

Surviving-everywhere-ism

12 posts / 0 new

Last post

Mon, 2010-12-13 09:06

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Surviving-everywhere-ism

As cool as civilization is, there's this innate, squirrel-like part of my being that loathes the concept of reliance on others. It's not so loud as to make me like the idea of pulling up stakes to go and become a subsistence farmer, but it does influence my particular pleasures in escapism. As such, there's something I wanted to bring up: Is there a movement dedicated to being able to survive anywhere and everywhere? I admit, the Ultimates are probably the faction that expresses this best, but their creation of the Remade suggests a love for an aesthetic I just can't get behind. Working with biology feels like playing with something else's leftovers when we could just start from scratch. So is there a movement that espouses this ideal? Is there a way to design a morph that'd be just as comfortable on the surface of Venus or sailing along the solar lines as it would shining a light on Pluto? I admit, on that scale, it'd probably be more like a starship than a morph...

—

[img]http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/982/exhumanbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/4473/scumbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/1396/gatecrasherbar.jpg[/img] [code][@-rep +1, f-rep +2][/code]

Mon, 2010-12-13 10:08

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Brinkers? It is difficult to survive truly everywhere. The adaptations you need to survive close to (or within?) the Sun seriously reduce the adaptations required to survive out around Pluto. But the idea of being self-sufficient is almost a requirement for just about anyone in EP. Everyone carries their own air, vac suits and water supply, whether you're on Mars or anywhere else, 'just in case'. Taking it to the next step of intentionally cutting those ties seems like it'll be so common and reasonable it would be too broad to apply to a single faction. In this world, you take care of yourself, or you die. (Of course, if your issue is that you want to rely not even on yoru community or family, like you want to be a hermit, that would be different. I'd say Brinker again. But most people feel you're still self-reliant if you are working with a larger family.)

Mon, 2010-12-13 13:15

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

The question of if you're self-sufficient is "If everyone and everything resembling civilization vanished tomorrow, would it harm me in any way?" and answering no. If you can ask yourself "What if disaster X happened?" and the answer is "I'd be fine", that's the case of surviving everywhere. When you're able to answer both, you're effectively fitting into the line of thinking I have going here. So, yes, it'd be more like being a hermit than anything. Doesn't mean you can't have contact with others or what not, but it's a lack of reliance on them that defines the philosophy.

—

Mon, 2010-12-13 13:26

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Autarky? See Robin Hanson's essay Dreams of Autarky, which analyses and criticises transhuman autarky. Basically, it might be possible, but you get so big benefits of being part of a civilization that it is nearly always an advantage to be in. I think making something that can survive *anywhere* is about as cumbersome. It would need to handle not just high and low temperatures, but also very different chemical and radiative environments. By specializing to one environment you win a lot.

—

Mon, 2010-12-13 14:05

GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Water Bear Morphs. Those little bastards are physically very survivable.

Mon, 2010-12-13 17:36

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Arenamontanus wrote:
By specializing to one environment you win a lot.

You also limit yourself by becoming tied to that environment. The history of life is littered with cases of species going extinct for going either way. I'm not saying that I want to cut myself off from civilization, civilization is great and provides a lot of benefits. However, being able to survive anywhere, living without fear or restriction of movement, sounds pretty good to me. There's no reason to have one and not the other. Also, that Dreams of Autarky page was neat but I was a little freaked out when the link under "genie nanotech" led me to a site whose front page was an essay about 9/11 being an inside job and denying the Holocaust.

—

Mon, 2010-12-13 19:14

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
Arenamontanus wrote:
By specializing to one environment you win a lot.
You also limit yourself by becoming tied to that environment. The history of life is littered with cases of species going extinct for going either way.

Exactly. So the real trick of survival of your descendants is to constantly split into new species. But for your own survival you need to make an informed gamble.

Quote:
Also, that Dreams of Autarky page was neat but I was a little freaked out when the link under "genie nanotech" led me to a site whose front page was an essay about 9/11 being an inside job and denying the Holocaust.

Always a problem with old links. Domains change hands, you know. I'll tell Robin he needs to fix it.

—

Mon, 2010-12-13 19:21

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Well, at the moment, we're surrounded by an immense, nearly-empty vastness we call space. Surviving there would seem to be the top priority. If you can survive searing heat, frigid cold, and grinding radiation, anything planets can throw at you is comparatively minor. If you can gather energy and materials in that environment too, more's the better.

—

Tue, 2010-12-14 06:54

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Being able to survive the collapse of society in Eclipse Phase isn't difficult , unless it was brought on by rampant grey goo or something, and you happen to live on that planet. So, you'd want a rocket ready to take you elsewhere if there's a sufficient amount of damage to the planet you're on to render it uninhabitable. Other than that, though, just implant a protean nanoswarm nanohive in yourself, along with storing every open-source blueprint you can find in your mesh implant, and you're good to go.

—

+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Tue, 2010-12-14 07:49

#10

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

nick012000 wrote:
Other than that, though, just implant a protean nanoswarm nanohive in yourself, along with storing every open-source blueprint you can find in your mesh implant, and you're good to go.

That assumes you know how to use them. Sure, you have built a space shuttle, but can you fly it? There is an extensive section about in the Wikipedia copy you got, as well as a pile of manuals and tutorials. And do you know that you should monitor the 20 MeV sensor? And how the heck do you plant a callus? Do you know you should be careful about GLAV3 in that case? It is all there in the manual *somewhere*, but you might not even know what to search for or that you ought to search for it. AIs might give you extra help, but they have the same problem.

—

Tue, 2010-12-14 08:13

#11

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

That and Protean swarms can only make a single item type. So you would also need to get the blueprints to make each different type of Protean swarm for each different type of item. And the OS movement in EP is very vague, a GM could easily say that such blueprints are not available for every item, at least not for free. And then suddenly you need to buy an extremely expensive collection of blueprints just to use the blueprints you already have. And then you still have to have access to all the radical elements to make the more exotic goods. Sure, you might always have the needed items to make food and basic equipment, but if you want to start making cyberbrains or railguns you are going to need elements that are not just lying about all over the place.

—

Tue, 2010-12-14 09:15

#12

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: Surviving-everywhere-ism

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
Well, at the moment, we're surrounded by an immense, nearly-empty vastness we call space. Surviving there would seem to be the top priority. If you can survive searing heat, frigid cold, and grinding radiation, anything planets can throw at you is comparatively minor. If you can gather energy and materials in that environment too, more's the better.

More specifically, you're surrounded primarily by deep space. You don't need to be able to survive heat or cold (deep space has neither), and even radiation concerns can be minimalized. If you can survive on a trickle of solar energy, then you're set - not only for now, but until the sun has gone nova and the solar system is dead. You could survive grey goo. You can survive, effectively, until the heat death of the universe. You may be the first to colonize other star systems (for what that's worth). You would also, most likely, be living in slow motion, as intelligence is limited by energy. You'd be a space tortoise. Setting yourself up to be able to survive in deep space AND close to the Sun is a loser's game. You'll never be at both locations simultaneously, and the adaptations to one become vulnerabilities when living in the other. And even if you manage both, the adaptations required to suffer the pressures of Jupiter, the caustic environment of Venus, the cold of Pluto, the fashionistas of Mars, the TITAN relics of Earth and the PLASMA of the Sun are all significant expenditures again, each of which makes you suck worse at surviving anywhere else.