Merlin and Nimue

evilauthor wrote:Besides which, PICAs are vastly superior to organic human bodies anyway. The only thing they can't do better is produce biological children.

Damn---there goes a possibly somewhat sick plot element!

Chuckle Chuckle

When we look at the standard uses of PICAs in the Terran Federation, adding the ability of having children seems strange.

First, they were used to enter dangerous situations where you needed a human mind but a human body would quickly be killed.

Second, they were the ultimate "wheel-chair" to allow badly crippled people to live a more normal life.

Third, they were devices to allow busy people to have vacations while continuing their normal job. IE upload your mind into a PICA, send it out to have a vacations and when it returns download its experiences into your memory.

Only the second reason could involve having children and it is very likely that things like artificial wombs exist in the TF.

jgnfld wrote:

evilauthor wrote:Besides which, PICAs are vastly superior to organic human bodies anyway. The only thing they can't do better is produce biological children.

Damn---there goes a possibly somewhat sick plot element!

Storing the DNA as chemical molecules is rather primitive and insecure. The complete sequence including all the methylations etc in digital form is more likely. You might plausibly want the full record so that if some odd medical issue arose you could sequence the current DNA of the person and see if something had tampered with it.

I would have said the useful half of recreating the cells...though perhaps the technology had not yet been developed by the Federation...was to arrange things so that Nimue Alban could have biological descendants.

Dauntless wrote:while i agree it is unlikely that nimue had eggs frozen and that they came with her to safehold.

She was deeply loved by both admiral's Pei and Shan-wei, very much the daughter they wished they they had taken the time to have.

is it possible they took a DNA sample, hair etc and kept it in stasis?

of course if they had it was probably stored in Alexandria and got vaporized along with the entire enclave.

still there are ways it can be done, but mentioning them this late might be seen as excessive hand wavium.

Back to if Merlin will be around to fight the gabba.
One consideration is that Safehold will need better tech than what the Federation had to fight the gabba.
So by the time the fight happens Merlins pica will probably be obsolete.
Admittedly Merlin/Nimue could get an upgrade.
And it brings up the question as to Merlin/Nimue role
as improving tech removes all their "special powers"

But that's not for this series.

Peppero wrote:Back to if Merlin will be around to fight the gabba.
One consideration is that Safehold will need better tech than what the Federation had to fight the gabba.
So by the time the fight happens Merlins pica will probably be obsolete.
Admittedly Merlin/Nimue could get an upgrade.
And it brings up the question as to Merlin/Nimue role
as improving tech removes all their "special powers"

But that's not for this series.

Ah hA, (thought I'd make it look more reflective)

Welcome to the spotlight of public discourse (or is it public intercourse) but I think that Midshipman Peppero brings a valid point and I look forward to future input from you on these forum topics.

to a certain extent once safehold becomes a new TF then Merlin/Nimue are redundant.

their job is to get safehold ready to fight the Gabba and win this time.

now as the only "living" people to have served in a space navy they are going to have a lot to say about ship design, training curiculms etc but even there the records (assuming OWL has everything up to operation breakaway) should be able to tell as much Merlin/Nimue.

I expect they will become living legends, much like the sejin legend, except with physical proof. Advisor to admirals and world king/president.

they will be revered by common sailor and most officers. they kind of veneration that we reserve nowadays for battle of Britain pilots and Churchill, and others who fought an impossible fight and won

Dauntless, do you really believe you can learn everything from the manual?

Brigade XO wrote:How likely is it that there is ANY sample of Nimue's DNA on Safehold or in some installation/ship stored in the Safehold system.
Using such a sample to effectivly clone Nimue could be done IF there was such a sample (which I doubt) but then you would still have to wire the clone up with TF tech and transfer her recorded mind to the clone. Or you could make the clone and raise it without transfering anybody's mind- just a sort of normal human child.
Doesn't see realistic for Safehold, now or in it's future unless you are going to head in the direction of the StarWars Storm Troopers.

We have text evidence that such DNA information is available. As for whether it is a complete sequence or not, remember that all humans share 99%+ DNA sequences; in fact we have considerably less genetic diversity than most other species. We already have the capability to do full genome sequencing for less than $5,000 a person, in three centuries I imagine it will be routine at birth or before - if nothing else than to identify any mutations that might need treatment - and kept as part of a standard medical record.

Given the text's comments on the capability of Federation medical technology, it is evident that you could either a) make a clone from infancy (probably illegal), b) regrow the adult body and implant the adult memories (which we know was done in some cases from the text and took about a year).

Note that in b) they apparently regrew the person to the same biological age, but is is likely they could have selected the biological age (again, likely illegal). I suspect there may have been pressure during the later phases of the war to do just that - why regrow a Marine to 60 years old when you could regrow him to 25 and have the advantage of 35 years extra service of an experienced combatant?

The ethical debates must have been quite interesting - far more than the debate that concluded last week.

ayg wrote:No. It may become possible one day, but that does not mean it should be done.

The idea runs into a rather serious ethical dilemma.

A clone is NOT the same as a Pica.

A PICA would not have a personality without someone's downloaded memories. A clone, especially one grown from babyhood, could develop it's own personality.

You need to decide, in-universe, if a clone will have the same legal rights and responsibilities as a natural human. If it does, it is a unique person. Giving it someone else's memories means taking away the original person's right to it's own personality.

We already have a good idea what the Federation would have allowed. Remember, the concept of emancipated PICA existed, and some even held high political office. They would legally be people with the same rights as anyone else.

The corollary, if you overlaid one persons memory with a completely different personality - that is, if you made a clone and allowed its own personality to develop then overlaid it losing the original personality, would probably be considered murder.

Not a reply but a question of clarification. What story/book did Nimue and Merlin (as characters but not humans) appear in? And NO not Arthurian. Webber's works.