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Speculation regarding the return.

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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by SWM   » Tue Mar 31, 2015 4:19 pm

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Bkwormlisa,

There are actually quite a few things that would have shown things were going off the rails hundreds of years ago. For example, the drastic changes which ended up consolidating the power of three different branches of the church (essentially judge, prosecutor, and jury) into the Order of Schueler was a major disruption to the plan. No single Order was supposed to have that much power. They were supposed to provide checks and balance against each other. With that much power in the hands of a single Order, it is inevitable that corruption would follow. And corruption would inevitably lead to deviation from the Plan. If anyone had been checking up on the Church in the hundreds of years since then, they would have immediately stepped in to fix this.

bkwormlisa wrote:Everyone including Merlin is assuming that if there was anything intermittently active under the Temple, it would have realized that things were going wrong centuries ago. I question that, because it depends on how they're gathering information.

Merlin apparently sent SNARCs out and collected information, probably for months, before he acted. I presume Owl did a lot of the sorting for relevant information which is pretty impressive from so much data. And it got him a really good picture of the current world.

But what if the APs or PICAs or cryo-suspended angels or whatever under the Temple didn't do that? Say they left instructions for the Temple historians to write up a history every, pick some number of years. Say once every fifty years, they write up a few (or a lot) of pages indicating anything major that had happened since the last time, wars and maybe innovations and whatever else they thought relevant. Heck, maybe there are already periodic histories published. And the whatever wakes up, snitches the history, and stays up to date that way. On the surface, that's a much more efficient way of getting the information than what Merlin did.

But it would be subject to severe bias. Aside from the invention of gunpowder (probably called blasting powder or mining powder or something similar, since that's why it was invented) and later guns (which also go by a completely different name), what would be in the official histories that would indicate that things were going off the rails? Even if they're looking at histories written by the Inquisition or other specialized group, would the histories really reveal the internal Church corruption and the loss of faith it caused? I'm sure there would be at least some talk about increasing heresy and uppity islanders, but I doubt anything published by the Temple (which is the main official source on the planet, and I doubt any government would ever call itself corrupted) would indicate the real, serious problems.

To me, relying on some sort of official history seems like an easy, obvious solution for whatever is under the Temple to believe it's keeping up to date with how everything is going, and that would have done a lot to conceal the problems.

As I recall, gunpowder is a century and a half old, but does anyone know how old guns are? Those two things are the only worrisome pre-Merlin details I really think would have made it into such a history.

So it's possible that with those major exceptions (which might be recent enough the whatever won't know yet, especially if it's in cryo for 150 years at a time), there could actually be something or someone that thinks it's checking up on things and yet has no clue how screwed up it's all become.
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by Keith_w   » Tue Mar 31, 2015 6:41 pm

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Maybe Schuler lied to the Wilsons...
--
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by n7axw   » Tue Mar 31, 2015 8:16 pm

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Keith_w wrote:Maybe Schuler lied to the Wilsons...


I've wondered about that. At this point it would be hard to give Schuler a character reference as a fine, upstanding fellow.

Don
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by bkwormlisa   » Thu Apr 02, 2015 6:39 pm

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I don't remember when the Order of Schuler became so powerful, but you're right, anything that could think critically about human weaknesses would know that was a warning sign. Though the people that seriously thought this would work don't, in my opinion, know much about human weaknesses.

What other examples of early signs that the plan was going wrong do you think would have shown up in Church-written histories? There's probably more, but I'm not coming up with them right now.

SWM wrote:Bkwormlisa,

There are actually quite a few things that would have shown things were going off the rails hundreds of years ago. For example, the drastic changes which ended up consolidating the power of three different branches of the church (essentially judge, prosecutor, and jury) into the Order of Schueler was a major disruption to the plan. No single Order was supposed to have that much power. They were supposed to provide checks and balance against each other. With that much power in the hands of a single Order, it is inevitable that corruption would follow. And corruption would inevitably lead to deviation from the Plan. If anyone had been checking up on the Church in the hundreds of years since then, they would have immediately stepped in to fix this.

bkwormlisa wrote:Everyone including Merlin is assuming that if there was anything intermittently active under the Temple, it would have realized that things were going wrong centuries ago. I question that, because it depends on how they're gathering information.

Merlin apparently sent SNARCs out and collected information, probably for months, before he acted. I presume Owl did a lot of the sorting for relevant information which is pretty impressive from so much data. And it got him a really good picture of the current world.

But what if the APs or PICAs or cryo-suspended angels or whatever under the Temple didn't do that? Say they left instructions for the Temple historians to write up a history every, pick some number of years. Say once every fifty years, they write up a few (or a lot) of pages indicating anything major that had happened since the last time, wars and maybe innovations and whatever else they thought relevant. Heck, maybe there are already periodic histories published. And the whatever wakes up, snitches the history, and stays up to date that way. On the surface, that's a much more efficient way of getting the information than what Merlin did.

But it would be subject to severe bias. Aside from the invention of gunpowder (probably called blasting powder or mining powder or something similar, since that's why it was invented) and later guns (which also go by a completely different name), what would be in the official histories that would indicate that things were going off the rails? Even if they're looking at histories written by the Inquisition or other specialized group, would the histories really reveal the internal Church corruption and the loss of faith it caused? I'm sure there would be at least some talk about increasing heresy and uppity islanders, but I doubt anything published by the Temple (which is the main official source on the planet, and I doubt any government would ever call itself corrupted) would indicate the real, serious problems.

To me, relying on some sort of official history seems like an easy, obvious solution for whatever is under the Temple to believe it's keeping up to date with how everything is going, and that would have done a lot to conceal the problems.

As I recall, gunpowder is a century and a half old, but does anyone know how old guns are? Those two things are the only worrisome pre-Merlin details I really think would have made it into such a history.

So it's possible that with those major exceptions (which might be recent enough the whatever won't know yet, especially if it's in cryo for 150 years at a time), there could actually be something or someone that thinks it's checking up on things and yet has no clue how screwed up it's all become.
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by McGuiness   » Thu Apr 02, 2015 7:11 pm

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bkwormlisa wrote:I don't remember when the Order of Schuler became so powerful, but you're right, anything that could think critically about human weaknesses would know that was a warning sign. Though the people that seriously thought this would work don't, in my opinion, know much about human weaknesses.

What other examples of early signs that the plan was going wrong do you think would have shown up in Church-written histories? There's probably more, but I'm not coming up with them right now.
I don't advocate this theory, but the Inquisition would certainly catalog any technological "improvements" that it turned down, and a record of those would then be sent to the Temple. Were I an archangel who woke up on a regularly scheduled basis, that's the first place I'd look for deviation from the plan. If the number of times the Inquisition had to deny a proposed improvement is climbing rapidly, then something is wrong and needs to be investigated more thoroughly. The type of improvements that were turned down would be important as well.

The second thing I'd look at would be the list of improvements and new devices that have been approved or given dispensations. That would have caught gunpowder, which is why I don't think anything is checking in on a regular basis to make sure the plan isn't running off the rails.

Regardless of how biased the Inquisition might become, those two items - the number of innovations and the type of innovations denied approval or accepted would be enough to determine if Langhorne's plan was still working.

"Oh bother", said Pooh as he glanced through the airlock window at the helmet he'd forgotten to wear.
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by SWM   » Thu Apr 02, 2015 7:18 pm

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bkwormlisa wrote:I don't remember when the Order of Schuler became so powerful, but you're right, anything that could think critically about human weaknesses would know that was a warning sign. Though the people that seriously thought this would work don't, in my opinion, know much about human weaknesses.

What other examples of early signs that the plan was going wrong do you think would have shown up in Church-written histories? There's probably more, but I'm not coming up with them right now.

That's an interesting question. Let's start by listing some of the signs that can be traced back far enough. Gunpowder probably won't be on the list, for instance, because it is too new. Here's a few signs I can think of, besides the changes in the Inquisition:

Declining literacy
Archbishops permanently absentee from their Archbishoprics
Increasing severity of Inquisition punishments
Increasing wealth of the clergy
Increasing number of poor in Zion
Patterns in church elections

Whether any of this is obvious in the records depends on what is being recorded, and how carefully they are analyzed. Some of this is pretty subtle over the short term, even if it is recorded. Are there any other obvious signs that I'm missing?
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by lyonheart   » Wed Apr 15, 2015 12:56 am

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Hi SWM,

Kudos, these are all excellent signals that things have changed and need to be fixed if there were any monitoring by any AI's or personalities in a VR like Nahrmahn.

The fact there's been such drift proves no such monitoring is or was being done by the 'archangels' or whatever is in the basement.

L


SWM wrote:
bkwormlisa wrote:I don't remember when the Order of Schuler became so powerful, but you're right, anything that could think critically about human weaknesses would know that was a warning sign. Though the people that seriously thought this would work don't, in my opinion, know much about human weaknesses.

What other examples of early signs that the plan was going wrong do you think would have shown up in Church-written histories? There's probably more, but I'm not coming up with them right now.

That's an interesting question. Let's start by listing some of the signs that can be traced back far enough. Gunpowder probably won't be on the list, for instance, because it is too new. Here's a few signs I can think of, besides the changes in the Inquisition:

Declining literacy
Archbishops permanently absentee from their Archbishoprics
Increasing severity of Inquisition punishments
Increasing wealth of the clergy
Increasing number of poor in Zion
Patterns in church elections

Whether any of this is obvious in the records depends on what is being recorded, and how carefully they are analyzed. Some of this is pretty subtle over the short term, even if it is recorded. Are there any other obvious signs that I'm missing?
Any snippet or post from RFC is good if not great!
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Re: Speculation regarding the return.
Post by Storm_Rider   » Wed Apr 22, 2015 10:34 pm

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I believe that the only realistic mechanism to permit a return is the use of a PICA. After all, OWL was able to create one even though it did not have all the specifications. The libraries retained on the Hamilcar certainly would contain more than enough information to allow one to be created from scratch.

Now concerning the Key and the Return. I support the idea that the Key contains a download personality - probably Schueler's since it was given to the Wylsynn family. However, the Key is probably not the copy of the personality that would be used for the Return.

The Return was scheduled for 1000 years and I do not believe it said anywhere that the Key was required for the Return.

The Key was intended for use in an emergency. Since the Key could only be used once, it is unlikely that it was the only copy of a personality stashed away. That way, if an emergency did happen, the Return could still be accomplished by the other stored image(s).
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