Naval technology at the time of creation

isaac_newton wrote:[snip]

Well - lets think about the main aim of the Archangels after the war?

It is to have the church in tight control over the entire of Safehold... no little enclaves going their own way and doing an Alaxandria on them! I would have thought that they would have provided any - safe - technology that would have helped maintain that grip. So providing at least close guidance on sea going shipping whould surely have been part of that.

Also wouldn't leaving the people to develop their own shipping have fostered that 'evil spirit' of creativity that thay didn't want...

The objective which was the starting point for the whole Safehold setup was to eliminate any possibility of a technology which would emit detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which would alert any entity with sensors good enough to pick it up. Everything that happened after that comes under the headings of ways, means, and consequences – unintended or not.

I think I remember a comment by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s or 1980s to the effect that Earth was putting out as much electromagnetic radiation as a medium-sized star. How much it must be emitting now, I wouldn't like to guess.
.

It was somewhere in AMF that the Dean of the Royal College (Roger McClain - whose name I cannot probably garble into Safeholdian) reflects upon the Holy Writ and how they were using it to figure out the truly scientific reasons behind various instructions, injunctions, warnings and prohibitions. His reflections included a realization that while the "Archangels" wanted to lock Safeholdian humans into a low tech society, they still needed to terraform the planet in order to ensure the survival of this last remnant of humanity. Therefore, the Holy Writ became not just a book of religious laws and proscriptions but also a manual for terraforming, agriculture, animal husbandry and healthy living. Realizing that they would have to provide instructions for the human colonists to not only survive the alien planetary environment but also thrive yet also needing to curtail any technological innovations beyond a certain point, they created the religion and the Church to act as the controlling mechanism.

People in this thread have already pointed out the need to maintain communications between the Church (which was always designed as a planetary government, according to RFC) and the various enclaves and later cities, towns and villages. They also pointed out the threat of allowing any human society on Safehold to exist in isolation from the Church and the other secular realms. Obviously the oceans pose a serious concern for maintaining that communication and that political unity. Yet at the same time they couldn't ban all sail vessels and restrict occupation to the Continents of Haven and Howard since it was always possible someone would build a boat to escape some sort of persecution. The planet was a big enough place to find such hiding places after all and some of the land masses are sufficiently close enough to see from the mainland on a good day. So assuming the surviving "Archangels" were thinking in such depth, I would guess that sailing vessels were viewed as a necessary evil and allowed to exist within the limited confines of allowable technology while they trusted the Inquisition and the Order of Jwo-Jeng (and later Schueler) to perform their assigned duty to make sure sailing technology doesn't get out of hand. And they also trusted that they could make the necessary corrections during their millennial visits if all else failed.

Peter2 wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:[snip]

Well - lets think about the main aim of the Archangels after the war?

It is to have the church in tight control over the entire of Safehold... no little enclaves going their own way and doing an Alaxandria on them! I would have thought that they would have provided any - safe - technology that would have helped maintain that grip. So providing at least close guidance on sea going shipping whould surely have been part of that.

Also wouldn't leaving the people to develop their own shipping have fostered that 'evil spirit' of creativity that thay didn't want...

The objective which was the starting point for the whole Safehold setup was to eliminate any possibility of a technology which would emit detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which would alert any entity with sensors good enough to pick it up. Everything that happened after that comes under the headings of ways, means, and consequences – unintended or not.

I think I remember a comment by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s or 1980s to the effect that Earth was putting out as much electromagnetic radiation as a medium-sized star. How much it must be emitting now, I wouldn't like to guess.
.

OK I mixed up aims and objectives

Let me reword it ... their chosen strategy to impliment that objective was to have the church rule as described and they clearly put a massive amount of effort into that even [or perhaps especially] after the war against the Fallen - e.g. building the Temple. They neglected nothing to increase the prestige & power of the church. Therefore I'd think it likely that they would have given some serious effort into building 'out island' communications to prevent fractures etc.

evilauthor wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:I'm certain they did. I'm not certain they would have seen a need to provide working models.

The main focus would be development of the mainland realms, where the canals and high roads provided the transport infrastructure. More isolated enclaves wouldn't require ocean going vessels before they developed enough to need or want to venture beyond their own lands. People back on old Earth developed things like galleys and galleons from scratch when confronted with the need. With centuries to expand, there is no reason why Safeholdians couldn't do likewise.

When you get right down to it, galleys and galleons are just row boats and sail boats writ large. Ship wrights are going to build bigger and bigger boats as the need arises and as long as it floats, they can put oars and sails on them.

I can just imagine an "Angel" seeing one of the first attempts at making large ships and going, "Hey, that's a galley/galleon".

Refining ship design to the point where galleys and galleons are no longer interchangeable would be a process of centuries. But then, it's been centuries since the last Angel walked Safehold.

Yep.

I don't recall seeing any description of just where the original enclaves were. We know there was one at Zion, another in Harchong, another on what is now Armageddon Reef, and a tiny one at Tellesberg (which might have been seeded from the Alexandria Enclave.)

The impression I've gotten is that the island realms came later, as colonies sent out from the mainland to places they could see. This would not have occurred till some time after the settlement of the mainland, and would require the development of vessels that could make the trip. Local shipwrights could do the development. They wouldn't need working models provided by the Archangels.

For stuff that is visible, the semaphore provides communications, and local bishops (and when development reached that point, Archbishops) could keep in touch with Zion and get instructions, so the likelihood of any place developing in isolation and growing significantly different is unlikely.

(Even Charis wasn't that different from everyone else, and would have been happy to remain loyal and obedient to Mother Church save that Zhaspar Clyntahn didn't give them the option. The Brothers of St. Zhernau knew that telling everyone the truth would be a long term effort to create the conditions where they could and have what they said accepted, and no one who knew the truth thought they were anywhere near ready to go public.)
_______
Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:Yep.

I don't recall seeing any description of just where the original enclaves were. We know there was one at Zion, another in Harchong, another on what is now Armageddon Reef, and a tiny one at Tellesberg (which might have been seeded from the Alexandria Enclave.)

The impression I've gotten is that the island realms came later, as colonies sent out from the mainland to places they could see.

I doubt that. Alexandria was founded right at the start on a separate continent from Howard and the Havens and had more than one village on its continent. Tellesberg is similarly implied to have been around since Creation, and it's on a land mass described to be comparable in size to Australia.

I think that paints a pretty clear picture that the initial colonists were spread all over the planet and placed on any land mass big enough to be called at least a small "continent". Yeah, Howard and the Havens got most of the colonists, but they didn't get all of them. I suspect that the reason for the spread was to prevent any unexpected disaster on one continent won't wind up killing off the entire human race.

And all that reasoning for preventing the isolated communities from evolving away from Langhorne's model? That's PURE HINDSIGHT on us readers' part. Do recall that Langhorne and Bedard expected their brainwashing and artificial static culture to hold up for eternity much less a thousand years. With that level of arrogance, community isolation would be a non-factor to them; all the communities started off the same way with the same religious mindset. Certainly little things like trivial environmental differences won't shake cultural paradigms so much as to break the Church's hold on Safeholdian life, right?

The thing is, by the time it starts being obvious that this view is wrong, it's TOO LATE to move everyone back to Howard and the Havens. The communities are thriving and possibly even in the process of forming the modern Kingdoms. Short of using the Rakurai to wipe them out, there's little the remaining Angels can do about isolated island communities.

Also, why would any village/nation colonize some place an ocean away when there's still plenty of empty land right next door? Especially with the kind of crappy sea going technology the Angels bequeathed to them?

If you wanted to isolate yourself from the Temple on Safehold, I would wager there are still places on Safehold where a small group could go and terraform enough ground for subsistence living and no one would notice as long as you didn't make waves.

Don

-

Peter2 wrote:
The objective which was the starting point for the whole Safehold setup was to eliminate any possibility of a technology which would emit detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which would alert any entity with sensors good enough to pick it up. Everything that happened after that comes under the headings of ways, means, and consequences – unintended or not.

I think I remember a comment by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s or 1980s to the effect that Earth was putting out as much electromagnetic radiation as a medium-sized star. How much it must be emitting now, I wouldn't like to guess.
.

Currently we are consuming around 16 terawatts of electricity (up from 10 in 1970) significantly less than the average star's output. Jupiter's RF output makes Earth look quiet, however an alien radio astronomer would be puzzled by the modulated carrier signals that got through the ionosphere.
EM emissions have been decreasing steadily since the 1970's as we move to optical land line data transmission from radio broadcasts. Power consumption in most developed countries as been decreasing for the last ten years (thanks to LED lighting and improvements in efficiency of electric motors and insulation). De-industrialization in the west is having an impact too but China's power consumption has also peaked and they are shutting down power stations on the lower efficiency end of the spectrum.

AirTech wrote:

Peter2 wrote:
The objective which was the starting point for the whole Safehold setup was to eliminate any possibility of a technology which would emit detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which would alert any entity with sensors good enough to pick it up. Everything that happened after that comes under the headings of ways, means, and consequences – unintended or not.

I think I remember a comment by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s or 1980s to the effect that Earth was putting out as much electromagnetic radiation as a medium-sized star. How much it must be emitting now, I wouldn't like to guess.
.

Currently we are consuming around 16 terawatts of electricity (up from 10 in 1970) significantly less than the average star's output. Jupiter's RF output makes Earth look quiet, however an alien radio astronomer would be puzzled by the modulated carrier signals that got through the ionosphere.
EM emissions have been decreasing steadily since the 1970's as we move to optical land line data transmission from radio broadcasts. Power consumption in most developed countries as been decreasing for the last ten years (thanks to LED lighting and improvements in efficiency of electric motors and insulation). De-industrialization in the west is having an impact too but China's power consumption has also peaked and they are shutting down power stations on the lower efficiency end of the spectrum.

Very interesting – many thanks!
.

It's possible that at the time the remark was made we were generating as much _radio_ frequency radiation as a medium-size star. Stars don't generally create a lot of that, and we certainly did at the time, but I'd need to do a fair bit of digging to confirm or deny. A lot of it would have been trapped inside the atmosphere [which isn't nearly as transparent as we tend to assume], so actual radiated power would be a lot lower.

I'm not sure that even the fact that it's modulated would be picked up more than 10-20 parsecs out unless you were doing a targeted, high-gain, search. By 100 parsecs, it takes something like Areciebo running in radar mode to be noticeable.

AirTech wrote:

Peter2 wrote:
The objective which was the starting point for the whole Safehold setup was to eliminate any possibility of a technology which would emit detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which would alert any entity with sensors good enough to pick it up. Everything that happened after that comes under the headings of ways, means, and consequences – unintended or not.

I think I remember a comment by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s or 1980s to the effect that Earth was putting out as much electromagnetic radiation as a medium-sized star. How much it must be emitting now, I wouldn't like to guess.
.

Currently we are consuming around 16 terawatts of electricity (up from 10 in 1970) significantly less than the average star's output. Jupiter's RF output makes Earth look quiet, however an alien radio astronomer would be puzzled by the modulated carrier signals that got through the ionosphere.
EM emissions have been decreasing steadily since the 1970's as we move to optical land line data transmission from radio broadcasts. Power consumption in most developed countries as been decreasing for the last ten years (thanks to LED lighting and improvements in efficiency of electric motors and insulation). De-industrialization in the west is having an impact too but China's power consumption has also peaked and they are shutting down power stations on the lower efficiency end of the spectrum.

I've read the "Earth putting out as much radio as the sun" (not radiation in general) thing too, and yeah, the Earth's radio emissions have decreased a lot as we've moved to cables.

AirTech wrote:Currently we are consuming around 16 terawatts of electricity (up from 10 in 1970)
.

I believe that's the total energy consumption - including non-electricity power such as combustion engines - not just electricity.

I don't know exactly how that's measured/calculated or precisely what's included, though.

Louis R wrote:I'm not sure that even the fact that it's modulated would be picked up more than 10-20 parsecs out unless you were doing a targeted, high-gain, search. By 100 parsecs, it takes something like Areciebo running in radar mode to be noticeable.

I don't remember where I read this, but IIRC even at Alpha Centauri distinguishing Earth's stray signals from random natural/cosmic radio noise would be highly questionable. (At least with current observational technology.)