What if Safehold wasn't the Federations only forlorn effort?

Long time lurker, first time poster here...

I personally don't see a problem with a PICA or two (or 20) being sent out by the Federation (either sublight or faster than, whichever had the best chance of survival) carrying a couple of fabbers with lots of blueprints loaded on them and the frozen contents of a fertility clinic as needed to create 50,000 babies.

The PICA's would alternate playing nursemaid and construction workers once the ship got to Planet X. Building both the new human race and the infrastructure they would need to come back and kick the Gdaba's behinds.

Earlier I linked to RFC's post about how creating life from raw organic chemicals was beyond the Terran Federation's capabilities.

Charybdis wrote:I'm re-(to the ^nth time)reading "Midst Toil and Tribulation" (MTaT) and am at the section where Merlin/Nimue awakens Nahrmahn in the VR 'environment'. In the discussion, Merlin speaks of how the Terran Federation (TF) made extensive use of such 'virtual persons' (VPs) in many fields. I also have RFC's comments on VPs (Mon Jul 22, 2013 4:57 am Topic:"Cultural values & conservatism in the late Terran Federation) with the caveat that the use of PICAs, AIs, VPs and other high tech was; "... insufficient to stave off ultimate defeat."

Now, my snippet-starved mind(?) kind of goes hmmm. What if, and with what results, would have happened IF the TF had, with the full acceptance of the involved, setup another anti-Gbaba strategy using these abiotic intelligences? Assumptions are that THEIR seed ships are extremely small (needing no life support), sent out singularly with multiple VPs and AIs in a shut-down mode, disguised as normal space debris, slow ballistic courses taking centuries to get to a point for FTL travel to a random destination. The goal of this effort is to destroy the Gbaba instead of saving the Human Race.

Think Fred Saberhagen's 'Berserkers', only specifically aimed at the Gbaba. Think Cordwainer Smith's short story "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal" and the evolved cats to attack the klopts! Think of the 'machine civilization' that returned V'ger in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"!

Idle minds, waiting for the reveal! Oh the himensity!

Think Isaac Asimov Foundation with "the Other End of the Galaxy" misdirection...
I also think I have seen hints that there is more than one sting in the bow.

ferlazkj wrote:Long time lurker, first time poster here...

I personally don't see a problem with a PICA or two (or 20) being sent out by the Federation (either sublight or faster than, whichever had the best chance of survival) carrying a couple of fabbers with lots of blueprints loaded on them and the frozen contents of a fertility clinic as needed to create 50,000 babies.

The PICA's would alternate playing nursemaid and construction workers once the ship got to Planet X. Building both the new human race and the infrastructure they would need to come back and kick the Gdaba's behinds.

Welcome to the back room... let me buy you a virtual drink.
I guess the only problem that would need to be overcome is the prospect that the PICA's would decide they were obviously superior and why should they have to change diapers??

Potato wrote:Earlier I linked to RFC's post about how creating life from raw organic chemicals was beyond the Terran Federation's capabilities.

Unfortunately, this is future past) I.e. this is avaliable even on our own XXI-century tech level...

C. O. Thompson wrote:

ferlazkj wrote:Long time lurker, first time poster here...

I personally don't see a problem with a PICA or two (or 20) being sent out by the Federation (either sublight or faster than, whichever had the best chance of survival) carrying a couple of fabbers with lots of blueprints loaded on them and the frozen contents of a fertility clinic as needed to create 50,000 babies.

The PICA's would alternate playing nursemaid and construction workers once the ship got to Planet X. Building both the new human race and the infrastructure they would need to come back and kick the Gdaba's behinds.

Welcome to the back room... let me buy you a virtual drink.
I guess the only problem that would need to be overcome is the prospect that the PICA's would decide they were obviously superior and why should they have to change diapers??

Thanks for the drink! <Glug> Here, have one on me...

Yeah, being very careful about who was picked as the personalities for those PICA's would be very important. Safehold lucked out with Nimue.

This strategy would have the advantage that its within the known abilities of the Terran Federation to accomplish. Or other organizations within the Federation's borders <cough cough Nimue's Dad and his friends>.

The main problems I see with it are the fabbers. Was the lift capability available for the fabbers? Those would have been the biggest thing needed to lift. And could the Federation do without the fabbers at that time, since the Gdaba were pressing Earth so hard. No textev on this, so I'm going to have to guess that all of the manufacturing capability they could scrounge up was already assigned to something that needed to be done so that the Safehold mission could fly.

If they could have done this, the plan would have been that the PICA's would fly along in hibernation mode until the ship reached a possible system. Wake up the PICA pilot/survey team, survey the system for feasible planets with compatible biosphere, move on at random to the next star if not. PICA's go back into hibernation.

Sound reasonable?
Kevin

Only about 3 weeks until AtSoT and even less until SoV... I am rereading HFQ to avoid political season and terminal boredom...

Don

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evilauthor wrote:I've thought of the idea as well. However, by authorial fiat, no such expedition was ever launched.

In our-of-universe reason is that any other Terran colony that was MORE successful than Safehold would effectively render Safehold's story moot. A thousand years of bloodshed, Langhorne's Plan, the War of the Fallen, Merlin's current war, etc etc all rendered worthless because some other colony they didn't know about took care of the Gbaba for them. Why did this thousand year conflict get fought if not for fear of the Gbaba?

The IN-universe reason is that multiple colonies if successful would ultimately result in multiple competing star nations and all the potential for war and bloodshed that implies as each one asserts themselves as the TRUE inheritor of the Federation. In the face of the Gbaba threat, that disunity could doom humanity. One colony means one unified humanity.

Secondly, multiple colony expeditions mean greater chances of the Gbaba discovering one. If one hidden colony is found, it's going to spur the Gbaba to start looking for OTHER hidden colonies which increases their odds of being found before they're ready. The entire premise behind Safehold's security is that the Gbaba don't know to look for it; they think humanity is dead and finding another colony will compromise that.

Whatever happened elsewhere wouldn't affect the Safehold story up to now. The people chosen for this particular expedition would probably not have been told about any others. And, of course, if any such were launched *after* theirs they couldn't know about them anyway.

Remember, the original blueprint for Safehold isn't what actually happened. The story about it's alteration, and what followed because of that, is a story all it's own.

Except for RFC saying otherwise, for all Safehold knew, the Federation *could* have made some startling and unexpected discovery that saved at least the solar system and Earth at literally the 11th hour. Since the Safehold expedition likely had no exact destination in mind when escaping, the Federation finding it, especially after the war and reconstruction, would take a massive effort; for which resources likely weren't immediately available.

And, of course, nearly a thousand years later, the Federation would probably have expected *some* indications of advanced technology use while searching, since the original plan called for repressing such use for only a few hundred years. If automated probes were sent in the general direction looking for such traces, and not finding any, it could reasonably be assumed that the colony failed to survive for some reason.

ferlazkj wrote:Long time lurker, first time poster here...

I personally don't see a problem with a PICA or two (or 20) being sent out by the Federation (either sublight or faster than, whichever had the best chance of survival) carrying a couple of fabbers with lots of blueprints loaded on them and the frozen contents of a fertility clinic as needed to create 50,000 babies.

The PICA's would alternate playing nursemaid and construction workers once the ship got to Planet X. Building both the new human race and the infrastructure they would need to come back and kick the Gdaba's behinds.

Welcome to the back room... let me buy you a virtual drink.
I guess the only problem that would need to be overcome is the prospect that the PICA's would decide they were obviously superior and why should they have to change diapers??[/quote]

Thanks for the drink! <Glug> Here, have one on me...

Yeah, being very careful about who was picked as the personalities for those PICA's would be very important. Safehold lucked out with Nimue.

This strategy would have the advantage that its within the known abilities of the Terran Federation to accomplish. Or other organizations within the Federation's borders <cough cough Nimue's Dad and his friends>.

The main problems I see with it are the fabbers. Was the lift capability available for the fabbers? Those would have been the biggest thing needed to lift. And could the Federation do without the fabbers at that time, since the Gdaba were pressing Earth so hard. No textev on this, so I'm going to have to guess that all of the manufacturing capability they could scrounge up was already assigned to something that needed to be done so that the Safehold mission could fly.

If they could have done this, the plan would have been that the PICA's would fly along in hibernation mode until the ship reached a possible system. Wake up the PICA pilot/survey team, survey the system for feasible planets with compatible biosphere, move on at random to the next star if not. PICA's go back into hibernation.

Sound reasonable?
Kevin[/quote]

Kevin...

The size of the fabber is a non-issue! Build them in space with raw materials recovered from asteroids so, all one would need is an adequate supply of raw materials and time. "Ask me for anything but time!"

Oh by the way, I think I'll sip the drink
Keep the ideas flowing

Charlie

C. O. Thompson wrote:
Kevin...

The size of the fabber is a non-issue! Build them in space with raw materials recovered from asteroids so, all one would need is an adequate supply of raw materials and time. "Ask me for anything but time!"

Oh by the way, I think I'll sip the drink
Keep the ideas flowing

Charlie

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my last post. The size of the fabbers would probably decide the size of the ship since they would have been the biggest thing involved. No way to figure out from the textev I remember from OAR how big that would have been. Could it have been big enough to require an effort similar to the suicide mission that was used to allow the Safehold group of ships to escape the Gdaba? Yep, if the Boss says so.

Kevin