Possible way to take out the OBS

So basically they placed the future of humankind in hands of man, who they knew was unreliable.

And as I said before, not even the conspirators knew without a doubt what Langhorne was up to. As was said in OAR, they estimated a "no more than 40% chance" that Langhorne would follow the mission parameters

Bluestrike2 wrote:
This is a long reply, so apologies in advance.

The idea of enclaves abusing their access to technology is interesting, but highly improbable for a number of reasons. And consequently, the idea that Langhorne chose his path for this reason is also highly unlikely.

First, talking about changes over centuries isn’t as significant as it would seem when you’re talking about individuals whose lifespans are measured in centuries. What you’re really talking about is mere handful of generations, with large numbers of the first generation (the command crew itself) still alive. And the definition of a generation would likely be lengthened due to cultural changes resulting from such longevity, namely lower birth rates like we already see in industrialized societies. Aside from accidental deaths and the occasional medical casualty, the enclave’s entire population would be alive, all of whom have been exposed to the ideals of the Federation and the knowledge that the Gbaba is out there waiting for humanity to resurface. There literally wouldn’t be time for a radical shift in beliefs to occur, particularly when the command crew members are still around to correct anyone who starts to even think in that direction.

At worst, you might see a paternalistic sense of protection towards the outsiders develop. It might be condescending in a way, but that’s something you can still work with. They might “control” progress on Safehold, but it’d be a relatively benign form of control. If someone is about to upset the applecart, they can always just invite them (and their family) into the enclave. That’s a far cry from mass murder. And even if they miss something, it’s unlikely that it’d lead to electricity and an EM footprint in the time remaining before Safehold emerges from hiding. In some ways, it’d probably be beneficial to be able to latch onto a nascent scientific revolution at that point.

Second, the knowledge of the Gbaba alone and the fact that they already beat the TF with the tech the enclave has access to would be sufficient to prevent such a system from arising and becoming socially acceptable. If humanity ever wanted to take the fight to the Gbaba, or just be ready to defend themselves, they need a significant population base to support their industries and military (the TF had over 2 billion in uniform alone), colonies in multiple star systems, and a rigorous R&D program just to start. A small, high tech enclave that reigns over pre-industrial peasants is fundamentally incapable of raising the resources necessary to fight off the Gbaba or even expanding out-system. Any attempt to use the peasant population, while maintaining their control over tech, wouldn’t work. To use them, you’d have to educate them and share the same tech you want to hoard. The only alternative would be to use AIs and automation, but the TF already used those at a much greater scale alongside their population and other resources. Even then, it wasn’t enough to turn the tide against the Gbaba. It certainly wouldn’t be enough for a small enclave to do what the TF couldn’t.

A corollary to this point is the need to defend against other potential threats as well that already exist or may rise in the future. Safehold is in an entirely new, uncharted section of space. Within a relatively small sphere around Sol, they discovered ruins from a number of technic societies right in the Gbaba’s backyard that all date from the same relative time period. It’s reasonable to extrapolate from there that life is common in the galaxy. This has always bugged me a bit about Langhorne; after experiencing what happens when killer neighbors get involved, why was no one concerned about a similar species near their new home? The point here is that you need a large, educated population base to maintain the infrastructure necessary to defend yourself.

Third, the enclave would have access to the complete historical record. They’d know—in excruciating detail—just how nasty peasant rebellions can be. And a peasant rebellion would be inevitable if only through resentment. Seeing your family members die of diseases that you know could be cured would be just one example.And even with their tech advantages, there are a myriad of ways the low-tech peasants could make them bleed. At best, the enclaves would find themselves totally isolated.

Fourth, a high-tech enclave wouldn’t be a magical city with limitless power and technology to lord over others. They’d have the knowledge, yes, but they can’t use it at scale: during the low-tech hiding period, they’d be forced to work under the same restrictions as the rest of the planet to maintain a low EM footprint. Fusion energy would be out; they’d be relying on geothermal and other similar energy sources to avoid large-scale neutrino emissions detectable from space. A large city would drastically increase the chance of detection. Even just the artificial illumination at night would be clearly visible from space.

Fifth, you’re presuming that an enclave has to be a fully modern TF city. OAR suggests otherwise; the Alexandria Enclave had colonists in it and villages nearby (as evident by Jeremiah Knowles, his family, and the others Shan-wei educated with NEATs) and used technology that was significantly less advanced than the angels’ aircars.

Under the original Ark mission plan, an enclave would actually be pretty simple. You don’t need the gleaming towers of Oz. Vaults containing computer support (AIs and possibly virtual personalities), a fabrication module and supplies/stockpiles, a complete database of Terran history and knowledge, and anything else that would be helpful when it came time to bootstrap Safehold. None of that would have to be visible on the street. And an informed population that’s passed the knowledge of their mission down to their children in case they die early.

Based on the description of Alexandria, it seems like the “enclave” was more or less a regular city with libraries that kept records of the TF and Gbaba alive and maintained those supplies. In an enclave setup like that, there’s no tech imbalance in use on a daily basis that’d tempt the development of an oppressive, aristocratic regime.

Finally, if the mission planners genuinely believed this to be a possibility, they could have built in a fail-safe. Watchdog AIs could have been used to monitor an enclave’s activities and take corrective actions where necessary. But I don’t think this was ever really a concern. The enclave members would have largely been TF military personnel. Personnel who were trained to the highest of professional standards and part of a military organization with an esprit de corps developed over the course of centuries. The same people the Terran Federation trusted with starships capable of scouring life off of entire planets. They weren’t a third-rate military built on nepotism and corruption. Worrying about them taking over and abusing their power would have been like the United States worrying about the Joint Chiefs leading a military coup. A possibility, but one with such a low probability that it’s effectively meaningless.

*******

Now, compare this to the Church that Langhorne setup. You’re worried about a high-tech enclave abusing their technology and power, but that’s exactly what Zion is even if they mistake technology for divinity.

Just look at the Temple. It’s a massive modern complex, with all the luxuries and benefits that Terran technology could provide. They have heating and air conditioning while the poor huddle around the Temple’s vents in a futile attempt to stave off the cold of Zion’s winter. The Temple’s leadership luxuriates in the benefits of a high tech enclave, maintains the very stranglehold on Safehold that you feared an enclave might reach for, and they have the benefit of a divine imprimatur to justify their position. In that context, the Temple becomes an even more sinister force: it isolates its inhabitants from the world around them, and subtly warps their worldview as they live in a little, literal slice of the divine on Safehold.

Is the Church model predictable? Absolutely, and that’s why it never would have been an option without Langhorne’s neo-luddism and megalomania driven by the irrational belief that humanity brought the Gbaba on themselves. To be an effective means of control, the Church would have to have absolute power to enforce the Proscriptions and prevent the rise of technology. There are *countless* examples of religion being abused by secular authorities and powerful Churches/religious institutions alike for even more reasons. All under the justification that “God demands it.” The surprise isn’t that the CoGA became corrupt; it’s that even Langhorne and his supporters were able to convince themselves that—this time—things would be different. The CoGA’s corruption was inevitable. No objective mission planner would ever think it was an acceptable option for safeguarding humanity.

Finally, you suggest that it could have been used as a temporary means of control and could have been overturned by a returning angel. That’s highly unlikely, even if they were working from the original Writ in its pre-Rakurai form. Religions have a tendency to grow in unexpected directions, even one that was carefully manufactured to guide humanity in a certain direction (or stop them altogether, I suppose you could say). And after a thousand years of control, there’s a large degree of institutional momentum.

Now imagine how a new angel, commanding humanity to ignore *everything* Langhorne originally told them and embrace what has been forbidden for over a millennia, might be received. One word. “Demon!” Even without the Books of Chiriho and Schueler, the angel would be in for one hell of a tough sale. Why did God change his mind? How could an omniscient being command one thing and then need to reverse course in the future? Did God lie? Or might this new ‘angel’ be lying instead? Could it be a test of some sort?

At the very best, humanity embraces the new technology without ever really understanding it. Because why would they? The technology is divine. And things like fabrication modules really would look like magic. But there’s an even bigger problem: aside from having no scientific tradition, there’d be no reason to even wonder whether this new, divine technology might be improved. The Writ works against you here; all of the guides and suggestions just work as-is (strangling independent thought before it can emerge, as was intended). You don’t need to improve upon anything in the Writ, so why in the world would they need to improve upon this new technology? Any suggestion to the contrary would raise difficult questions, such as how God could give you technology that can be improved upon. And if that's the case, is it actually God offering this technology or...something else? Not a good train of thought, that. Best case, humanity lets the magic boxes build magic things, they go on a holy crusade against the Gbaba with their magic toys, and then they die. Oops.

At worst, the new technology and anything connected to it will become tainted. Maybe people will shy away from it “just in case.” Maybe they’ll become actively opposed to it. At that point, it’s worse than doing nothing at all because you’re going to forever tar the scientific method and technology for the future by association.

Or, perhaps even worse than that, humanity will accept the new angel’s warning about the Gbaba and go about their business as before. At that point, God has intervened multiple times to save humanity. If they Gbaba ever show up again, there’d be a pretty decent justification for the belief that he’d intervene to save them again.

In short, Operation Ark was meticulously planned at every level. Langhorne’s bright idea to use religion to permanently handicap humanity clearly wasn’t. There are so many possible—and likely, as born out by human history—problems and pitfalls to be accounted for under the approach that no planner with even an ounce of objectivity would consent to it. Langhorne’s religious creation speaks more to his own personal beliefs and psychological scarring—not to mention ego—than any genuinely objective desire to protect humanity from possible harm even if his delusions made him believe otherwise. He threw out the plan for a more complex one, one that would eventually go off the rails. And which point, humanity is gone.

Duckk wrote:http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6072&p=155902

I should qualify that by saying that at least initially, it was an indication of how anti-technology the conspirators believed him to be. They were, after all, taking precautions against something which — at the time — they couldn't be certain was going to happen and which they knew was in direct contradiction of the original mission plan.

Which, again, shows they suspected but they did not know. And, again, by people who had their own set of biases against him. They were willing to hedge their bets by stowing the PICA away, but they fully knew that Nimue's death had a good chance of being meaningless if their assessment of Langhorne was in error.

Which, again, shows they suspected but they did not know. And, again, by people who had their own set of biases against him. They were willing to hedge their bets by stowing the PICA away, but they fully knew that Nimue's death had a good chance of being meaningless if their assessment of Langhorne was in error.

Duckk wrote:

Max wrote:I was thinking it more likely that:

A) They ran a sim with a high tech enclave to see what was likely to happen. In fact they would have run several...

B) The enclaves leaked radiation; enough that the Gabba were sure to find it...

C) Various alternates were tried with various rules and all the less drastic alternatives either broke down or leaked tech...

D) They concluded that something more drastic was needed. The sims made the religious repression route the most viable.

E) In the same spirit as the old "Cosmic Computer" story, letting people know what to expect made the result ineffective. The only way to make it work was to shoot the opposition...

That assumes facts not in evidence. For one, that Langhorne ran said sims, came to that conclusion, but then told no one on the opposition side about them. For another, that said emissions of their muted tech base are obvious on an interstellar scale (which, as the current existence of the Temple and the OBS indicates, strikes me as unlikely, to put it mildly). Or for that matter, that said emissions problem wouldn't have been noticed and rectified by the operation planners before they ever left Earth. Given the paranoia and degree of care that went into planning Operation Ark, I find it highly implausible - to say the least - that the mission planners wouldn't have field tested or run their own simulations.