Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?

Hank Plantagenet wrote:My point in describing Lt Commander Alban's plan as a "tyranny" is not to say that she will have to use evil means to force people to carry out her plans. She will not need the lash or the punishment of Scheuler to force people to work once the Rubicon of emissions into space is crossed. Once baseball games are sent over the radio, once television transmitters broadcast re-runs of I Love Lucy from the archives, once the dilithium crystals in the warp engines of Enterprise-class starships in orbit are fired up, there is no more option to hide. They no longer have the choice to do nothing and hide, because those emissions are radiating from the planet. The only choice would be to get with Alban's program, or wait for extinction.

What makes you think that Merlin will introduce electricity and radio before revealing The Truth? And is not Langhorne's decision to not even tell people about the danger an even greater tyranny that should be stopped?

In any case, Langhorne's plan of stopping all innovation for all time was already doomed. Within another few hundred years, Safehold would probably be developing electricity on its own, without any knowledge that they were potentially exposing themselves to extinction. Safehold would have walked right into the Gbaba, just like the Federation did. That was Shan-Wei's entire point--Langhorne's plan would eventually and inevitably fail, and without the knowledge of the Gbaba, Safehold would be doomed. Merlin is just making sure that Safehold knows the danger and can be prepared for it. I can't see how that can be called tyranny, especially when it is intended to end an even greater tyranny of imposed ignorance which would doom the planet.

In LAMA, Seijin Nimue noted that at the time of Operation Ark, the Federation military was "...over two point seven billion active-duty human beings, ninety percent of them combat personnel...", and the Federation lost. Safehold is nowhere near to being capable of fielding a military of that size, let alone build the needed warships.

Merlin is gambling that he can develop the needed technology to defeat the Gbaba, find enough resources and manufactures to build it, and train enough pre- Industrial Revolution level of people to man the fleet before the emissions caused by this program bring the Gbaba horde to level yet another human planet.

Merlin isn't planning to send Safehold against the Gbaba in the next generation. Merlin has hundreds of years to build up the population, settle new colonies, develop Federation technology, and create new weapons to defeat the Gbaba. They won't go against the Gbaba until they are certain they can defeat them. They have plenty of time.

Hank Plantagenet wrote:SNIP

Yet, the Federation lost the war, and their hundreds and thousands of planets (whatever the count may be) across light centuries of space. They lost despite the best efforts of R&D people, and those AIs who went into hyperfast mode to come up with new techniques. The rest of humanity, so far as we have textev, is gone forever.

SNIP

Nit: I had the distinct feeling that the Federation only covered a few, maybe dozens of planetary systems?

From what David Weber has said, that colony was detected by a Gbaba scout ship that was in range of light-speed transmissions.

The Gbaba had known about the earlier escape attempt and had continued to search for it.

The plan for Project Ark was two fold. First, the main Project Ark fleet hide the colony ship fleet in order that when the main fleet was destroyed the Gbaba may have been convinced that they got "all of them".

The plan for Safehold to "go silent" for a long period was to hide was the second part of the plan. It was intended to hide the existence of Safehold from a "just in case" search by the Gbaba.

n7axw wrote:Transmitting radio signals probably is not as dangerous as You might think. They travel at the speed of light, emit in all directions, and lose energy as they go. Safehold is millions of light years from old Sol, iirc. That would mean that it would take a light speed signal that many years to get back to the Gbaba, assuming it didn't completely run out of energy.

That colony that was detected by the Gbaba before Operation Ark must have been tramsmiting FTL.


Don

While the Federation didn't know the full extent of the Gbaba empire, they did know where it was in relationship to the Federation.

All the Gbaba fleets apparently came from the "same direction" in space and the Federation had discovered Gbaba bases.

The Project Ark fleet (and the earlier fleet) would have known "what direction to *not* go" when creating their colony.

The Gbaba knew about these escape attempts and the first colony was discovered by Gbaba scouts looking for it.

The plan to "go silent" for Safehold was to hide from additional Gbaba scouts doing a "just in case" search for escaped humans after the apparent destruction of the Project Ark fleet.

Mind you, Langhorne's plan was unworkable but not because the Gbaba had bases near Safehold.

evilauthor wrote:

n7axw wrote:Transmitting radio signals probably is not as dangerous as You might think. They travel at the speed of light, emit in all directions, and lose energy as they go. Safehold is millions of light years from old Sol, iirc. That would mean that it would take a light speed signal that many years to get back to the Gbaba, assuming it didn't completely run out of energy.

That colony that was detected by the Gbaba before Operation Ark must have been tramsmiting FTL.


Don

The problem here is that the Federation never knew the total extent of Gbaba holdings. There could be a Gbaba virtually next door to Safehold and the Operation Ark crew never make sure there wasn't without tipping off the Gbaba that Operation Ark existed, triggering the very hunt they were trying to avoid.

Besides which, staying hidden for "all time" is a daunting proposition when you realize that "all time" is at LEAST the billions of years that Safehold has left. And the galaxy is only 100,000 lightyears across. Staying hidden for a few thousand years? Not even an eye blink as far as "all time" is concerned, especially if the Gbaba can sieve Safehold radio noise out of the background noise at a few hundred or thousand lightyears.

Any way you look at it, Langhorne's plan is ultimately unworkable in the long term.

Hi Drak,

You might be right on this one, but would a signal even travel that far before it ran out of energy? How strong of a signal would it take to drive a radio signal for a thousand light years? 100 watts? 1000 watts? 1,000,000 watts? We know from physics that an omnidirectional signal will expand in an ever widening circle as it travels from its sourse. As it expands its energy gets less and less until the signal falls below detectable level. Then it runs out of energy and is gone.

Don

has it been confirmed that safehold is "Millions" of light years distant of earth?? that seems extreme considering our entire galaxy is only 100,000 light years from edge to edge. is Safehold really in another galaxy? at that distance it makes the Gbaba danger seem remote and unlikely especially if they flew in the direction of "not Gbaba" for millions of light years

Any stray emissions from safehold would no doubt weaken into nothing but noise before it got close to where the Gbaba currently dwell. It seems clear however that they are actively hunting for competition to snuff out before it can match them. The Federation was close, it was implied in one of the books that they HAD the tech towards the end of the war. But it was already to late. If they had what they had at the end, at the beginning, it would have been a different conclusion.

The problem that we have is that we have no idea how close the Gbaba scouts were when they picked up the signals and what sort of signals the Gbaba detected.

However, logic would show that the Gbaba could not detect signals "one thousand light years away" if the colony only existed for ten years.

For that matter, first contact with the Gbaba occurred in 2378 and Project Ark was launched in 2421. By my math, that's 43 years.

We don't know when the first hidden colony fleet was launched, we don't know when the hidden colony was settled and we don't know when the first hidden colony was destroyed.

Even with this lack of knowledge of the time involved in the destruction of the first hidden colony, our knowledge of the First Contact date and the Project Ark date gives us some clues.

My guess is that the Gbaba scout either entered the star system holding the first "hidden" colony or was within one or two light-years of the star system.

That would make it easier for the Gbaba to detect signals created by high tech devices.

By the way, David Weber has said that Earth learned of the destruction of the first hidden colony by way of a FTL spaceship that was on stand-by in the colony's star system so that Earth would know when/if the Gbaba discovered it.

n7axw wrote:Hi Drak,

You might be right on this one, but would a signal even travel that far before it ran out of energy? How strong of a signal would it take to drive a radio signal for a thousand light years? 100 watts? 1000 watts? 1,000,000 watts? We know from physics that an omnidirectional signal will expand in an ever widening circle as it travels from its sourse. As it expands its energy gets less and less until the signal falls below detectable level. Then it runs out of energy and is gone.

Don

Since we're also talking about Gbaba detecting high tech civilizations, David Weber has reminded us that the Gbaba had explored the star region that was later home to the Terran Federation.

From what he said, the Terran Federation strongly suspected that Gbaba found the Federation because 1) they routinely sent survey ships out into territory that they had visited in the past (remember the destroyed civilizations found by the Federation) or 2) that the Gbaba had automatic "listening posts" in that region of space. Thus, either via survey ships or listening posts, the Gbaba became aware of Federation colonies or Federation starships.

By all available information, the Gbaba have not visit the region of space that contains Safehold.

As Drak said. As far as Merlin (and Shan-Wei before him) can tell based on what the Federation knew, the danger to Safehold is not from accidental detection by the Gbaba. It is the danger of Safehold eventually breaking from Langhorne's plan, developing technology, going into space, and accidentally running into the Gbaba without forewarning. There was a period in which the Gbaba might have been looking for a secret colony, but Federation planners were confident that 500 years of radio silence would be more than enough to eliminate that danger. Far more than that has passed.

Merlin's goal is to eliminate the danger of Safehold accidentally running into the Gbaba and being destroyed. And the way he intends to do that is to tell Safehold the truth. But before he can do that, he has to break the stranglehold of the Church of God Awaiting, and get people to think on their own.