Should Safeholdians say NO to Gbaba war?

Fascinating! Thankyou, Harold.
Cheers
JOhn

Weird Harold wrote:

John Prigent wrote:Since both Arabic numbers and Greek mechanical philosophers (to define them loosely) have come up in this thread it prompts me to ask: what kind of numbers did Pythagorus etc use? Were they what we now call Arabic numbers, Roman numbers, or something else?

Cheers

John

Greek numerals are a system of representing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. These alphabetic numerals are also known by names Ionic or Ionian numerals, Milesian numerals, and Alexandrian numerals. [Click for more]

SWM wrote:What do you consider "a reasonable timeframe"?

The timeframe that the Gbaba will survive in their current state (which is also probably not at all infinite), perhaps...

Safehold has already been here for a thousand years. How far do you see Safehold falling? Back to medieval technology? Bronze Age? Unless you want to push it back to Stone Age, it is still only a matter of thousands of years, and even Stone Age is only tens of thousands.

And if you push it so far back that they never regain technology, it is still a failure of the Langhorne Plan.

That assumes that the natural tendency is progress and a "fall" only temporarily interrupts that, after which progress resumes - which is exactly the view I'm challenging.

I'm talking more like a broadly stable state in which things do get invented, but not necessarily widely spread, and over long stretches of time inventions are balanced out by loss of knowledge due to records not being copied, regional collapses and dark ages, etc.

Safehold started out at a tech level where they already had most of the stuff that is easy to invent without science.

I'd say it's not guaranteed that WE will get to a point at which we would be noticed by "the Gbaba" (if they existed in our universe), even at our tech level, given the general lack of progress in really exploiting space.

ecortez wrote:The scientific method and mindset is so useful human beings would be bound to rediscover it no matter how many times you wiped all evidence and memory of technology from the world and started over.

The problem is that you cannot set out to discover/invent the scientific method because it is useful unless you already know it exists and is useful -- in which case it has already been discovered. It's a catch 22.

ecortez wrote:Over the long term I think science and technology were always a foregone conclusion - provided something like an asteroid impact didn't intervene first. It couldn't happen while humans lived in scattered bands of hunter gatherers, because they were always on the knife edge of survival and everyone's efforts had to be focused in that direction. Once we discovered agriculture and the domestication of animals, our population could expand to the point where the smarter members of society could dabble in things not immediately essential to staying alive. That increased population also meant a labor force big enough to build large structures and our first cities.

I dunno. This is the traditional view, yes, but given recent evidence (Gobekli Tepe) that settled life may have originated before agriculture, I'm not sure that it necessarily holds (especially as a "it must happen this way" rule).

ecortez wrote:The scientific revolution might have kicked off in ancient Greece. They had enough raw data and knowledge of mathematics that someone could've made the same leap of insight which led Isaac Newton to the law of gravity in 1666. Why this failed to happen I don't know. Maybe someone more familiar with the period could hazard a guess. Roman civilization adopted many of the Greeks' ideas but despite some impressive engineering accomplishments never experienced their own enlightenment. China, as well as the Middle East during Europe's Dark Ages, had the necessary ingredients. And in America both the Aztec and Inca civilizations could have developed advanced technology in time.

That's kind of my point... it could have happened here, there and everywhere. But in fact it only happened one place. Which suggests to me that it wouldn't necessarily happen again if you started over with a different set of cultures.

Much less if you started out with an unified world intentionally rigged to prevent it, as in Safehold's case.

Cralkhi,

I see where you are coming from. You believe that progress is not inevitable, that it is possible to reach a semistable state where technology does not advance beyond a certain point. I disagree, but it is impossible to prove either way. Our only evidence is Earth, and the evidence suggests (but does not come close to proving) that civilizations are UNstable, and that in the long run there is either progress or disintegration.

Moving to the Safehold universe, we have the evidence that progress was already happening, and hints that cultural change was imminent even without Merlin's advent. I believe you are wrong, but I will allow the possibility that crisis may have passed and Safehold civilization might have never have achieved industrial revolution. Safehold might never have reached the stars. But that still does not mean that Langhorne was right.

The problem is that Safehold might also have had that industrial revolution and eventual star travel, just as Shan Wei feared. If it is possible that Safehold does not reach the stars, you must admit that it is also possible that they do gain star flight. It took innumerable tries, but it happened on Earth (at least in the Safehold storyline), so it is clearly possible. Even you have admitted that Langhorne's structure could have broken down--you are only suggesting that a cycle of civilizations which never reach high technology might follow. But if civilizations rise and fall, it is also possible that a civilization would rise that does have an industrial revolution, just as it eventually happened on Earth. The Gbaba have apparently been around for many tens of thousands of years, at a minimum, so there is plenty of time for change to come to Safehold.

Langhorne took it on himself to decide the fate of humanity, throwing the dice on a bet that the best minds of the Federation disagreed with. He didn't have any more information than the Federation scientists. He didn't have any special insight. He just disagreed with them. (I will leave out any claims of paranoia, phobia, or megalomania, in this analysis.)

Now, I do believe that sometimes you have to make a stand for your beliefs, even when everyone else thinks you are wrong. That is a noble thing. But the actions that Langhorne took in his belief were far from noble. He modified the memories of almost the entire surviving human race without consent. He didn't try to change their minds--he ripped it from their minds and forced them to think the way he wanted them to think. He stole from the colonists the high ideal they thought they were sacrificing themselves for, trying to seal humanity into a bottle. And when other people in Alexandria disagreed with him and made a stand for their beliefs, he struck at them with hidden weapons with no warning. Struck viciously, not merely killing them, but destroying the very continent they lived on, pounding it over and over again.

Standing up for your beliefs is noble. Forcing an entire population into a form of mental slavery to align with your beliefs is just wrong, no matter how noble your aim (and I don't really believe his motivations were that noble). And when doing so brings a very strong possibility of dooming the entire human race to destruction (in one form or another), the magnitude of the wrong is incalculable.

SWM wrote:Cralkhi,

I see where you are coming from. You believe that progress is not inevitable, that it is possible to reach a semistable state where technology does not advance beyond a certain point. I disagree, but it is impossible to prove either way. Our only evidence is Earth, and the evidence suggests (but does not come close to proving) that civilizations are UNstable, and that in the long run there is either progress or disintegration.

Moving to the Safehold universe, we have the evidence that progress was already happening, and hints that cultural change was imminent even without Merlin's advent. I believe you are wrong, but I will allow the possibility that crisis may have passed and Safehold civilization might have never have achieved industrial revolution. Safehold might never have reached the stars. But that still does not mean that Langhorne was right.

The problem is that Safehold might also have had that industrial revolution and eventual star travel, just as Shan Wei feared. If it is possible that Safehold does not reach the stars, you must admit that it is also possible that they do gain star flight. It took innumerable tries, but it happened on Earth (at least in the Safehold storyline), so it is clearly possible. Even you have admitted that Langhorne's structure could have broken down--you are only suggesting that a cycle of civilizations which never reach high technology might follow. But if civilizations rise and fall, it is also possible that a civilization would rise that does have an industrial revolution, just as it eventually happened on Earth. The Gbaba have apparently been around for many tens of thousands of years, at a minimum, so there is plenty of time for change to come to Safehold.

Langhorne took it on himself to decide the fate of humanity, throwing the dice on a bet that the best minds of the Federation disagreed with. He didn't have any more information than the Federation scientists. He didn't have any special insight. He just disagreed with them. (I will leave out any claims of paranoia, phobia, or megalomania, in this analysis.)

Now, I do believe that sometimes you have to make a stand for your beliefs, even when everyone else thinks you are wrong. That is a noble thing. But the actions that Langhorne took in his belief were far from noble. He modified the memories of almost the entire surviving human race without consent. He didn't try to change their minds--he ripped it from their minds and forced them to think the way he wanted them to think. He stole from the colonists the high ideal they thought they were sacrificing themselves for, trying to seal humanity into a bottle. And when other people in Alexandria disagreed with him and made a stand for their beliefs, he struck at them with hidden weapons with no warning. Struck viciously, not merely killing them, but destroying the very continent they lived on, pounding it over and over again.

Standing up for your beliefs is noble. Forcing an entire population into a form of mental slavery to align with your beliefs is just wrong, no matter how noble your aim (and I don't really believe his motivations were that noble). And when doing so brings a very strong possibility of dooming the entire human race to destruction (in one form or another), the magnitude of the wrong is incalculable.

Hear Hear!

Very well thought out and written response. I tip my hat.

SWM wrote:Cralkhi,

I see where you are coming from. You believe that progress is not inevitable, that it is possible to reach a semistable state where technology does not advance beyond a certain point.

Essentially, though I'd describe it as a state in which 'falls' and 'rises' more or less balance out -- not "stable" on the scale of human lifetimes.

And I think the possibility of us getting stuck in that state is still "live", unfortunately. If we screw up and wreck technological civilization too thoroughly (major nuclear war, biological warfare etc.), we might not get it back, especially if the collapse ended up making people afraid of technology, so that by the time people started trying to re-invent stuff the records had all rotted away.

Safehold might never have reached the stars. But that still does not mean that Langhorne was right.

Certainly not morally!

The Gbaba have apparently been around for many tens of thousands of years, at a minimum, so there is plenty of time for change to come to Safehold.

I don't think we actually know that the Gbaba starfaring "civilization" is that old. They've been stable with no advancements for at least 2000 years, though.

(And given that we know at least 3 technological species (humanity, the Gbaba, and the one the Gbaba wiped out before humanity) originated in a very small area of the galaxy, intelligent species are likely common in the Safeholdverse... and if the Gbaba can only attack, sooner or later they will meet somebody more powerful and be destroyed.)

So there is a pretty good chance that their expected lifespan as a threat is not very long on the timescale we're discussing.

(If it wasn't for an authorial comment that we will see the Gbaba again, I'd be wondering if Safehold would get back to space and instead encounter somebody worse who had already wiped out the Gbaba.)

--

It does seem odd to me that Merlin, Shan-wei et al. thought/think that Safehold would be essentially doomed if they reinvented space travel without knowing about the Gbaba. Safehold is much farther from Gbaba space than Earth, so a Safeholdian-origin interstellar civilization would be much bigger and older (and likely higher tech) than the Terran Federation was before they met the Gbaba.

Obviously it's not a risk you want to take, but it does seem odd.

Langhorne took it on himself to decide the fate of humanity, throwing the dice on a bet that the best minds of the Federation disagreed with. He didn't have any more information than the Federation scientists. He didn't have any special insight. He just disagreed with them. (I will leave out any claims of paranoia, phobia, or megalomania, in this analysis.)

Now, I do believe that sometimes you have to make a stand for your beliefs, even when everyone else thinks you are wrong. That is a noble thing. But the actions that Langhorne took in his belief were far from noble. He modified the memories of almost the entire surviving human race without consent. He didn't try to change their minds--he ripped it from their minds and forced them to think the way he wanted them to think. He stole from the colonists the high ideal they thought they were sacrificing themselves for, trying to seal humanity into a bottle. And when other people in Alexandria disagreed with him and made a stand for their beliefs, he struck at them with hidden weapons with no warning. Struck viciously, not merely killing them, but destroying the very continent they lived on, pounding it over and over again.

Standing up for your beliefs is noble. Forcing an entire population into a form of mental slavery to align with your beliefs is just wrong, no matter how noble your aim (and I don't really believe his motivations were that noble). And when doing so brings a very strong possibility of dooming the entire human race to destruction (in one form or another), the magnitude of the wrong is incalculable.

Oh, I most certainly agree that Langhorne was completely morally wrong.

cralkhi wrote:

SWM wrote:The Gbaba have apparently been around for many tens of thousands of years, at a minimum, so there is plenty of time for change to come to Safehold.

I don't think we actually know that the Gbaba starfaring "civilization" is that old. They've been stable with no advancements for at least 2000 years, though.

(And given that we know at least 3 technological species (humanity, the Gbaba, and the one the Gbaba wiped out before humanity) originated in a very small area of the galaxy, intelligent species are likely common in the Safeholdverse... and if the Gbaba can only attack, sooner or later they will meet somebody more powerful and be destroyed.)

So there is a pretty good chance that their expected lifespan as a threat is not very long on the timescale we're discussing.

We know that new-build Gbaba ships are nearly identical to ships which have been dated as 2000 years old. But we know the Gbaba have been around far longer than that. As I recall, the lost civilizations the Federation discovered (wasn't there more than one?) were destroyed a lot longer than 2000 years ago. What I recall is tens of thousands of years. I will have to check the book again to be sure, but I think the evidence is that the Gbaba are a threat over the timescales we are talking about.