SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

penny wrote:To be clear, the minimum should be what any human being on God's green Earth and universe is due. From Pharaoh's slaves to America's slaves and their brethren. Apart from any government.

Anything else would be uncivilized.

tlb wrote:It is significant that you have not enumerated those rights. But one was listed in the post that drew you response; so let's just consider the "freedom to travel", which you seem to imply is a fundamental right.

People everywhere (either individually or collectively) have the right to build walls, post and enforce "no trespassing" areas and create borders. So the "freedom" to travel means the legal right to wander wherever the ability to access has not been legally restricted. This "freedom" only exists in a negative sense, in that it is allowed where not prohibited and even then might be limited.

penny wrote:The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass.

How can one enumerate an infinite set of rights. Rights that might not yet exist. Sometimes rights do not exist until evil tramples all over it, and only then is it recognized by those of us with a moral conscience who assuredly will go on to say "that is not acceptable." The number of rights that a human has is only limited by the number of inconceivable atrocious acts evil can commit against it. Do you think there is a limit to evil?

How can that which is inconceivable be enumerated?

I completely agree that freedom to travel does not mean freedom to trespass; that is the clear meaning of what I posted. So it follows that freedom to travel is not a positive "right", but resides in what is left after all restrictions on travel are considered.

And that is why it is more concrete to say "And that's not even considering Pritchart's promise to the native Sanctuarians that they deserve to be public in the Galaxy and have the freedom of travel, same as any other citizen of the Republic of Haven". The rights of a citizen of a country can be enumerated and you say the rights of a citizen of a galaxy cannot.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:At any rate, I cannot imagine the average person in the HV not being, at the very least, an armchair or hobby astronomer. And if that person has a photographic memory, all bets are off. Cybernetics, in which case -- though your notion is spot on and brilliant -- would not be needed. And photographic memories should be a lot more common in the HV.

I'd expect that the population of astronomy-enthousiasts to be roughly the same ratio as what it is for us today.

I do not. The explanation is found in your next statement.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:Ask an auto or yard worker if they have interest in astronomy and you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone.

Perhaps. And I can understand why from personal experience. In both of these cases are people who are not exposed to the heavens. An auto worker is inside a building. A yard worker always has his eyes pointing down. I became interested in the heavens at a very early age. There was a hammock on our property where I loved to spend time and do my homework. Many times I woke up the next morning still in it. I would stare at the sky for hours because lying on your back makes it impossible not to do so. There are so many people who go through life never looking up. And they miss the wonder that is right above us. How many of us have parents who have taught us the importance of perfect posture. Keep your head up or you will miss something.

Another very critical thing that you have missed is the effect that having a beautiful unobstructed view of the heavens has on you. Like someone who lives on a high elevation bereft of streetlights. Someone who has seen the heavens through an observatory or with their own personal telescope. Someone who has been in space. An astronaut. Trust me, someone who has been in space will never, can never, ever, fail to be interested in it. I have been in space. Lost in it.

More on that later, but for those who remember when I first joined the forum might remember a post of one of my visits to Bucharest and lying on a mountain top on my back looking up at the heavens without being able to see anything else as a reference point. Your friends remain quiet and just out of your view. You can speak to them for comfort or turn your head to see something that grounds you. After a while it appears as if you are floating in space. It can get so unsettling, and for some down-right frightening, that some people cannot remain in that position for very long. But the view of the heavens is breathtaking. You feel as if you are in space. Lost in it. Floating without a tether. It reminds me of a certain passage in the book. Made it more real for me. It is surreal. It is scary.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:It would be similar to asking them if they have a passing knowledge of aviation: just because they take planes to go somewhere does not mean they know the difference between indicated air speed, true air speed, and ground speed.

Nor does it imply the opposite. But I think you are wrong. A lot of flying might indirectly expose them to an entry level curiosity in aviation because of questions that might arise because of so many flights. For instance, "Why is there a 1.5 hr difference in flight time on this flight that I have taken for years. We arrived an hour and a half earlier because of winds?"

Flying along a jet stream can reduce flight times substantially. British Airways recently hit a new record by flying from New York to London in 5 hours: 1 hour and 15 min ahead of schedule!

At any rate, curiosity does not always kill. It drives imagination, interest and involvement. It is a natural part of humanity. There is not a single person on Earth who does not want to know where they are in the world. It is natural. There are a lot of people that I personally find it difficult to fathom that they have never been out of the city they were born in. I hope they all at least peer at themselves on a map. But you'd have a hard time convincing me that anyone would travel anywhere and not want to know where they are. Even a child will wake up from a long trip and the first thing they ask is "Where are we?" Because it is natural. Have you ever heard the saying "you don't know where you're headed unless you know where you've been?"

At any rate, living a life aboard a warship going where no man has gone before, seeing planets that are so diverse, beautiful and hideous, and seeing systems that are so rare (like the Manticore Binary System) makes it almost impossible not only to be interested in astronomy, but it supercharges it. Who doesn't want to share with friends back home their first look at a binary system? Or simply a new system?

Thinksmarkedly wrote:Photographic memory does not mean literally photographic.

It does. I shared with the forum about a friend of my family who has it. I have read articles about its limitations. Some are dead on the money. Many are incorrect. I understand their ignorance because they do not have many people to study. They do not have many people to study because, I think, these people are reluctant to come forth. Our family friend's parents did not want their child to be singled out. They did not want her studied. Or kidnapped. Did it give her an unfair advantage in school? Is she dangerous? They do not want the world asking those questions.

She had limitations as well. Studying for an exam was not one of them. She could recall complete pages of text easily. The longer she looked at them the longer she would retain them. The interesting part is that she has a way of recalling a page for a very long time that she discovered by accident. She cut her finger and dropped blood on a page in one of her textbooks. She can recall that page with complete clarity even now probably. She started using crayons, or anything with color to imbed a page deeply in her memory. Then she discovered that squiggly marks does the same thing. Some sort of doodle on a page makes it stick for a very long time. Dunno if this is common, it works for her. Imagine if she is a painter.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:In general, someone's memory is not going to be enough to re-draw the night sky of an unfamiliar location and the human eyesight is not good enough to tell the relative luminosity of all but the brightest stars. For example, you can readily tell the strongest dots in the night sky are Venus, Sirius, Jupiter, Arcturus, Vega. But can you tell just by eyeballing it whether Alpha Centauri is brighter than Beta Orionis (Rigel)? They aren't next to each other in the sky.

There may be people who actually can remember the relative positions of stars in sufficient detail, but those are likely to be savants off-the-median for the population and thus would not be generic yard workers. They may be a part of the R&D team, though. On the other hand, they're also far more likely to understand the importance of the information.

Education goes a long way to preventing this, but you're still going to run into people being people. Someone is going to take a picture for their girlfriend back home with this asterism in the background that they think she'll find lovely and think "it's just a picture, what could go wrong?"

Savant is the operative word. My notion draws on the intuition, right or wrong, that a galaxy of genetically enhanced minds narrow the gap between savants. And the frequency of them born.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:To be clear, the minimum should be what any human being on God's green Earth and universe is due. From Pharaoh's slaves to America's slaves and their brethren. Apart from any government.

Anything else would be uncivilized.

It is significant that you have not enumerated those rights. But one was listed in the post that drew you response; so let's just consider the "freedom to travel", which you seem to imply is a fundamental right.

People everywhere (either individually or collectively) have the right to build walls, post and enforce "no trespassing" areas and create borders. So the "freedom" to travel means the legal right to wander wherever the ability to access has not been legally restricted. This "freedom" only exists in a negative sense, in that it is allowed where not prohibited and even then might be limited.

For example: the National Park System in the US has rules and regulations that can limit access.

National parks have specific regulations in place to ensure the safety of visitors, protect the environment, and maintain the natural beauty of these pristine areas.

Markusschaber wrote:The "freedom of travel" actually has a different meaning, with two aspects. Back then in the cold war, most "eastern" states hat strict travel restrictions for their citizens out to foreign countries. So your home country must grant you permission to leave. Such permission was much easier to get for travels to other members of the Warshaw treaties, and a lot harder or even impossible to western countries. The idea was to prevent dissidents from fleeing the country, that's also why they built a wall in Berlin (whose official purpose was to protect eastern Berlin against fascists...). Nowadays, this is rather rare for most countries, although exceptions still exist (e. G. North Korea). A limited aspect of this can be found for example for people applying for Asylum in Germany. They must not leave the district they've been assigned to, so they cannot even travel freely within the state or country they're, until their application has been granted. No visits to Munich or Berlin for the guys here in our city, for example.

The other side of freedom of travel is the freedom to enter another country: Within the european union and the other "Schengen treaty" members, I can travel freely just with a simple ID. When traveling e. G. to Kenya, I need to apply for a Visa an need a Passport. When traveling to the US, I also need to apply for a Visa, with a much more strict check, and the US also invented the requirement of digitally stored fingerprint in passports, which has been followed by most other countries by now.

This is what I unerstood to be defined as "freedom of travel", not the freedom to wander around into everyones property, with no restricted areas.

I agree. Nowadays the phrase is probably interchangeable. Distinguished by the content of the discussion. Thanks for the post. I played around with bringing up the days of the "Iron Curtain." And who does not sympathize with the plight of the citizens of North Korea. It is uncivilized. What is the difference at the end of the day of being incarcerated in a small jail cell rather than a city. Metrics?

penny wrote:Perhaps. And I can understand why from personal experience. In both of these cases are people who are not exposed to the heavens. An auto worker is inside a building. A yard worker always has his eyes pointing down. I became interested in the heavens at a very early age. There was a hammock on our property where I loved to spend time and do my homework. Many times I woke up the next morning still in it. I would stare at the sky for hours because lying on your back makes it impossible not to do so. There are so many people who go through life never looking up. And they miss the wonder that is right above us. How many of us have parents who have taught us the importance of perfect posture. Keep your head up or you will miss something.

I am like you in that aspect, but then we have a selection bias because we're already posting on this forum, thus we both enjoy Sci-Fi and Military Sci-Fi in specific.

But I think you're making a generalisation from that biased sample. Where a person works has little to do with what they may enjoy. I used to work in an office pre-pandemic but that did not make me an enthusiast for concrete (I am an Electrical Engineer, so I do have a passing knowledge of Civil Engineering that is above average). Now I work 50% of the time from home but that has not improved my home economics.

Another very critical thing that you have missed is the effect that having a beautiful unobstructed view of the heavens has on you. Like someone who lives on a high elevation bereft of streetlights. Someone who has seen the heavens through an observatory or with their own personal telescope. Someone who has been in space. An astronaut. Trust me, someone who has been in space will never, can never, ever, fail to be interested in it. I have been in space. Lost in it.

I think you're also transferring your (and mine) wonder of space that exists in our current age. Yes, the Blue Marble Effect (Orbital Effect) is real, today. There isn't a single astronaut who isn't taken by it... though again there's a selection bias.

In 2000 years, with space travel and orbital industries commonplace, it won't be novelty at all. The fact that the yard workers work in orbit won't be imply they are space lovers. Not any more than working on Earth today makes us geologists! I remember the first time I saw snow (I grew up somewhere where it didn't): the first day was marvellous and bright; the second day we had a snowball fight; but by the end of the first week cooped up inside, I just wanted that "cold white s**t" to go away. The same goes for air travel. My first plane trip (to Disney, at 12 years of age) was an event of wonder, everything was new. I didn't even try to sleep. Last year, I had 60 distinct flights. I have a routine I follow every single time (noise-cancelling earphones, Kindle e-reader loaded with Military Sci-Fi, aisle seat so I go to the restroom). I barely take pictures at all when travelling these days. The last one I remember that wasn't a selfie to let my family know where I was, it was a 10x zoomed in shot of Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Adams on a bright, clear day, and I don't even think it was in 2023.

Chances are that any yard worker who's been sent to the Refuge System has been to space hundreds of time, if not an order of magnitude more. People commute to space in the Honorverse. The only difference is that they're now in a system they hadn't been to, before. So maybe they'd want to take a picture at this new place... but we don't know what the sky looks like from there. We know there's a dust cloud, so maybe the heavens are actually quite dull (literally and figuratively).

Nor does it imply the opposite. But I think you are wrong. A lot of flying might indirectly expose them to an entry level curiosity in aviation because of questions that might arise because of so many flights. For instance, "Why is there a 1.5 hr difference in flight time on this flight that I have taken for years. We arrived an hour and a half earlier because of winds?"

You and I would not only wonder about that, but would also likely know the answer. But again: self-selection bias. Next time you're flying, try asking the person seating next to you if they had ever noticed this.

Let's try the geology case instead. I live on Earth (on the ground floor, actually!), so does that mean I should have a passing interest for what types of rocks exist? What's an igneous rock? (I can deconstruct the root of the word "igneous" so I can probably make a guess that may not be too far from correct...) Should I know if there are different types of earths because I live on Earth?

At any rate, living a life aboard a warship going where no man has gone before, seeing planets that are so diverse, beautiful and hideous, and seeing systems that are so rare (like the Manticore Binary System) makes it almost impossible not only to be interested in astronomy, but it supercharges it. Who doesn't want to share with friends back home their first look at a binary system? Or simply a new system?

Binary and multiple systems are the norm, not the exception. Whether inhabitable binary systems will be so or not, we can't tell right now (there's exactly one inhabitable system we know of).

I agree with you that people may want to take a picture of their new destination. However, what they may take a picture of is open to discussion: I'd much rather take a picture of the planet and of landmark structures on it than of the background of stars. Unless you know more about them than the vast majority of people, stars are just stars. Same as when arriving at a different city, you don't take picture of trees unless you're into the subject or they happen to stand out for some reason.

That's not to say people won't do it. They might show up in lots of selfies...

She had limitations as well. Studying for an exam was not one of them. She could recall complete pages of text easily. The longer she looked at them the longer she would retain them. The interesting part is that she has a way of recalling a page for a very long time that she discovered by accident. She cut her finger and dropped blood on a page in one of her textbooks. She can recall that page with complete clarity even now probably. She started using crayons, or anything with color to imbed a page deeply in her memory. Then she discovered that squiggly marks does the same thing. Some sort of doodle on a page makes it stick for a very long time. Dunno if this is common, it works for her. Imagine if she is a painter.

I believe you, but I still don't think it follows from there that she can accurately recall the positions of stars. Remembering text and associating information with it (drop of blood fell on this word) does not equate to remembering the typography and kerning of the text itself. Oh, she may look at a different edition and say "there's something uncanny about this." The amount of information that one needs to store to remember not just the text, but the types, the word flow, the variations on page colours is orders of magnitude. Same as comparing a scan or picture of a page to its original text (or OCR) with some meta data.

Savant is the operative word. My notion draws on the intuition, right or wrong, that a galaxy of genetically enhanced minds narrow the gap between savants. And the frequency of them born.

I don't know. Maybe their savants will just be as far off from them as ours are from us.

Besides, the increased memory capacity and cognition in enhanced minds for non-savants is going to be used for other things than to remember unnecessary detail. They'll instead remember more of the things that do matter to them.

Markusschaber wrote:The "freedom of travel" actually has a different meaning, with two aspects. Back then in the cold war, most "eastern" states hat strict travel restrictions for their citizens out to foreign countries. So your home country must grant you permission to leave. Such permission was much easier to get for travels to other members of the Warshaw treaties, and a lot harder or even impossible to western countries. The idea was to prevent dissidents from fleeing the country, that's also why they built a wall in Berlin (whose official purpose was to protect eastern Berlin against fascists...). Nowadays, this is rather rare for most countries, although exceptions still exist (e. G. North Korea). A limited aspect of this can be found for example for people applying for Asylum in Germany. They must not leave the district they've been assigned to, so they cannot even travel freely within the state or country they're, until their application has been granted. No visits to Munich or Berlin for the guys here in our city, for example.

The other side of freedom of travel is the freedom to enter another country: Within the european union and the other "Schengen treaty" members, I can travel freely just with a simple ID. When traveling e. G. to Kenya, I need to apply for a Visa an need a Passport. When traveling to the US, I also need to apply for a Visa, with a much more strict check, and the US also invented the requirement of digitally stored fingerprint in passports, which has been followed by most other countries by now.

This is what I unerstood to be defined as "freedom of travel", not the freedom to wander around into everyones property, with no restricted areas.

penny wrote:I agree. Nowadays the phrase is probably interchangeable. Distinguished by the content of the discussion. Thanks for the post. I played around with bringing up the days of the "Iron Curtain." And who does not sympathize with the plight of the citizens of North Korea. It is uncivilized. What is the difference at the end of the day of being incarcerated in a small jail cell rather than a city. Metrics?

The ability to cross a border is a small part of what I was discussing (I did mention the creation of borders). What you say is in agreement with my main point: the ability to move about, either locally or internationally, is bound by restrictions. Eloise Pritchart was mainly talking about the ability to leave the Refuge System, but you can infer the ability to travel to another country.

Therefore freedom of travel is NOT a fundamental right.

PS: There is a major difference between being confined to a cell versus to a city: it is the number of the people with whom you can freely interact. If your only contact with loved ones is through a barrier, then being able to share a living space with them is not just a matter of "metrics".

tlb wrote:PS: There is a major difference between being confined to a cell versus to a city: it is the number of the people with whom you can freely interact. If your only contact with loved ones is through a barrier, then being able to share a living space with them is not just a matter of "metrics".

But you can be "confined to a jurisdiction" under certain pending judicial cases.

I think the difference between confinement and not is what your freedoms and rights are compared to your peers: if your liberties have been restricted compared to what's allowed to everyone else. If you can't leave the city while others can, you're confined. If you can't leave your house because you're agoraphobic but others can, you're not confined: that was your choice, but you retain the right to leave. If you can't leave the country but no one else in your peer group could (assuming they had the financial means, of course), then you're not de jure confined. In the latter case, you can argue differently by expanding the peer group: East Germans weren't allowed to leave their country, but West Germans living a few hundred metres away on the other side of the wall could, and ditto for North and South Koreans today.

tlb wrote:PS: There is a major difference between being confined to a cell versus to a city: it is the number of the people with whom you can freely interact. If your only contact with loved ones is through a barrier, then being able to share a living space with them is not just a matter of "metrics".

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But you can be "confined to a jurisdiction" under certain pending judicial cases.

I think the difference between confinement and not is what your freedoms and rights are compared to your peers: if your liberties have been restricted compared to what's allowed to everyone else. If you can't leave the city while others can, you're confined. If you can't leave your house because you're agoraphobic but others can, you're not confined: that was your choice, but you retain the right to leave. If you can't leave the country but no one else in your peer group could (assuming they had the financial means, of course), then you're not de jure confined. In the latter case, you can argue differently by expanding the peer group: East Germans weren't allowed to leave their country, but West Germans living a few hundred metres away on the other side of the wall could, and ditto for North and South Koreans today.

I agree that a person can be considered confined if they have less freedom of movement than a peer. So a hierarchy of confinement might be: cell, house, jurisdiction and country. As you progress from cell to country, the freedom increases and the amount of hardship goes down.

I understood Penny to be talking about North Korea and suggesting that they are confined to their town or city unless receiving government approval. To say that the difference between being confined to a city versus a cell is just a matter of "metrics", is to do a disservice to the hardships undergone by the person in a cell (particularly perhaps in North Korea).

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:To be clear, the minimum should be what any human being on God's green Earth and universe is due. From Pharaoh's slaves to America's slaves and their brethren. Apart from any government.

Anything else would be uncivilized.

tlb wrote:It is significant that you have not enumerated those rights. But one was listed in the post that drew you response; so let's just consider the "freedom to travel", which you seem to imply is a fundamental right.

People everywhere (either individually or collectively) have the right to build walls, post and enforce "no trespassing" areas and create borders. So the "freedom" to travel means the legal right to wander wherever the ability to access has not been legally restricted. This "freedom" only exists in a negative sense, in that it is allowed where not prohibited and even then might be limited.

penny wrote:The freedom to travel does not imply freedom to trespass.

How can one enumerate an infinite set of rights. Rights that might not yet exist. Sometimes rights do not exist until evil tramples all over it, and only then is it recognized by those of us with a moral conscience who assuredly will go on to say "that is not acceptable." The number of rights that a human has is only limited by the number of inconceivable atrocious acts evil can commit against it. Do you think there is a limit to evil?

How can that which is inconceivable be enumerated?

I completely agree that freedom to travel does not mean freedom to trespass; that is the clear meaning of what I posted. So it follows that freedom to travel is not a positive "right", but resides in what is left after all restrictions on travel are considered.

And that is why it is more concrete to say "And that's not even considering Pritchart's promise to the native Sanctuarians that they deserve to be public in the Galaxy and have the freedom of travel, same as any other citizen of the Republic of Haven". The rights of a citizen of a country can be enumerated and you say the rights of a citizen of a galaxy cannot.

I see the disconnect. I was not saying that Pritchart is incorrect, within the context and the meaning of her statement. She is proudly acknowledging that freedom to travel is a right of all citizens of Haven; that her beloved Republic recognized the right. Apart from that, I am attempting to make it clear that it is more than that. That the right to travel is a right of all human beings, separated by any right or lack thereof granted by any government. After all, Saint Just's government might not have recognized the right.

There are exceptions. Our own pandemic is one of them. But that is different. It is a measure taken to protect all of mankind. Just as it were during the Final Wars. At any rate, the inherent rights of human beings should not be dependent upon any government.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:PS: There is a major difference between being confined to a cell versus to a city: it is the number of the people with whom you can freely interact. If your only contact with loved ones is through a barrier, then being able to share a living space with them is not just a matter of "metrics".

But you can be "confined to a jurisdiction" under certain pending judicial cases.

I think the difference between confinement and not is what your freedoms and rights are compared to your peers: if your liberties have been restricted compared to what's allowed to everyone else. If you can't leave the city while others can, you're confined. If you can't leave your house because you're agoraphobic but others can, you're not confined: that was your choice, but you retain the right to leave. If you can't leave the country but no one else in your peer group could (assuming they had the financial means, of course), then you're not de jure confined. In the latter case, you can argue differently by expanding the peer group: East Germans weren't allowed to leave their country, but West Germans living a few hundred metres away on the other side of the wall could, and ditto for North and South Koreans today.

Both of you are beating around the bush. You're hammering away at the nail and totally missing it. Stop it before you crush your finger. Either a man is free or he isn't. West Germans, as human beings, were free. East Germans were not. Was it acceptable to say that it was morally right that there was a lack of freedom in East Germany since the entire country was imprisoned? Of course not! That is part of the reason that the wall came tumbling down. Ditto North Korea.

Incarceration. One man's claustrophobia, cannot and should not be measured by another's.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Perhaps. And I can understand why from personal experience. In both of these cases are people who are not exposed to the heavens. An auto worker is inside a building. A yard worker always has his eyes pointing down. I became interested in the heavens at a very early age. There was a hammock on our property where I loved to spend time and do my homework. Many times I woke up the next morning still in it. I would stare at the sky for hours because lying on your back makes it impossible not to do so. There are so many people who go through life never looking up. And they miss the wonder that is right above us. How many of us have parents who have taught us the importance of perfect posture. Keep your head up or you will miss something.

I am like you in that aspect, but then we have a selection bias because we're already posting on this forum, thus we both enjoy Sci-Fi and Military Sci-Fi in specific.

But I think you're making a generalisation from that biased sample. Where a person works has little to do with what they may enjoy. I used to work in an office pre-pandemic but that did not make me an enthusiast for concrete (I am an Electrical Engineer, so I do have a passing knowledge of Civil Engineering that is above average). Now I work 50% of the time from home but that has not improved my home economics.

Another very critical thing that you have missed is the effect that having a beautiful unobstructed view of the heavens has on you. Like someone who lives on a high elevation bereft of streetlights. Someone who has seen the heavens through an observatory or with their own personal telescope. Someone who has been in space. An astronaut. Trust me, someone who has been in space will never, can never, ever, fail to be interested in it. I have been in space. Lost in it.

I think you're also transferring your (and mine) wonder of space that exists in our current age. Yes, the Blue Marble Effect (Orbital Effect) is real, today. There isn't a single astronaut who isn't taken by it... though again there's a selection bias.

In 2000 years, with space travel and orbital industries commonplace, it won't be novelty at all. The fact that the yard workers work in orbit won't be imply they are space lovers. Not any more than working on Earth today makes us geologists! I remember the first time I saw snow (I grew up somewhere where it didn't): the first day was marvellous and bright; the second day we had a snowball fight; but by the end of the first week cooped up inside, I just wanted that "cold white s**t" to go away. The same goes for air travel. My first plane trip (to Disney, at 12 years of age) was an event of wonder, everything was new. I didn't even try to sleep. Last year, I had 60 distinct flights. I have a routine I follow every single time (noise-cancelling earphones, Kindle e-reader loaded with Military Sci-Fi, aisle seat so I go to the restroom). I barely take pictures at all when travelling these days. The last one I remember that wasn't a selfie to let my family know where I was, it was a 10x zoomed in shot of Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Adams on a bright, clear day, and I don't even think it was in 2023.

Chances are that any yard worker who's been sent to the Refuge System has been to space hundreds of time, if not an order of magnitude more. People commute to space in the Honorverse. The only difference is that they're now in a system they hadn't been to, before. So maybe they'd want to take a picture at this new place... but we don't know what the sky looks like from there. We know there's a dust cloud, so maybe the heavens are actually quite dull (literally and figuratively).

Nor does it imply the opposite. But I think you are wrong. A lot of flying might indirectly expose them to an entry level curiosity in aviation because of questions that might arise because of so many flights. For instance, "Why is there a 1.5 hr difference in flight time on this flight that I have taken for years. We arrived an hour and a half earlier because of winds?"

You and I would not only wonder about that, but would also likely know the answer. But again: self-selection bias. Next time you're flying, try asking the person seating next to you if they had ever noticed this.

Let's try the geology case instead. I live on Earth (on the ground floor, actually!), so does that mean I should have a passing interest for what types of rocks exist? What's an igneous rock? (I can deconstruct the root of the word "igneous" so I can probably make a guess that may not be too far from correct...) Should I know if there are different types of earths because I live on Earth?

At any rate, living a life aboard a warship going where no man has gone before, seeing planets that are so diverse, beautiful and hideous, and seeing systems that are so rare (like the Manticore Binary System) makes it almost impossible not only to be interested in astronomy, but it supercharges it. Who doesn't want to share with friends back home their first look at a binary system? Or simply a new system?

Binary and multiple systems are the norm, not the exception. Whether inhabitable binary systems will be so or not, we can't tell right now (there's exactly one inhabitable system we know of).

I agree with you that people may want to take a picture of their new destination. However, what they may take a picture of is open to discussion: I'd much rather take a picture of the planet and of landmark structures on it than of the background of stars. Unless you know more about them than the vast majority of people, stars are just stars. Same as when arriving at a different city, you don't take picture of trees unless you're into the subject or they happen to stand out for some reason.

That's not to say people won't do it. They might show up in lots of selfies...

She had limitations as well. Studying for an exam was not one of them. She could recall complete pages of text easily. The longer she looked at them the longer she would retain them. The interesting part is that she has a way of recalling a page for a very long time that she discovered by accident. She cut her finger and dropped blood on a page in one of her textbooks. She can recall that page with complete clarity even now probably. She started using crayons, or anything with color to imbed a page deeply in her memory. Then she discovered that squiggly marks does the same thing. Some sort of doodle on a page makes it stick for a very long time. Dunno if this is common, it works for her. Imagine if she is a painter.

I believe you, but I still don't think it follows from there that she can accurately recall the positions of stars. Remembering text and associating information with it (drop of blood fell on this word) does not equate to remembering the typography and kerning of the text itself. Oh, she may look at a different edition and say "there's something uncanny about this." The amount of information that one needs to store to remember not just the text, but the types, the word flow, the variations on page colours is orders of magnitude. Same as comparing a scan or picture of a page to its original text (or OCR) with some meta data.

Savant is the operative word. My notion draws on the intuition, right or wrong, that a galaxy of genetically enhanced minds narrow the gap between savants. And the frequency of them born.

I don't know. Maybe their savants will just be as far off from them as ours are from us.

Besides, the increased memory capacity and cognition in enhanced minds for non-savants is going to be used for other things than to remember unnecessary detail. They'll instead remember more of the things that do matter to them.

You are overthinking it. Besides, you proved my point. You acknowledged being just like I am in that respect. That makes two data points in which to draw a straight line. That validates the notion. I do not need to prove that there are many who would hang out on the observation deck, but only that there may be one. There only needs to be one. Representing such a small sample of data points as the forum does, there are already two.

You are also making that same "generalization" that you erroneously accuse me of. There only needs to be one who is still smitten by the heavens, in awe of it. Someone for whom the heavens has not yet lost its luster because of so many travels. For instance, someone in his youth who is without any personal entanglements of the heart, like those few people who would drop everything and take a job working on the oil pipeline in the 70's. That person might hail from one of the The Star Empire's poor planets whose travel itinerary is not so extensive or is non-existent. Even amongst Manticore's own citizens might be someone who has failed to stop and smell the roses of the galaxy and has never been off of the planet. Someone barely older than a gangly Harrington whose maturity has not yet overcome her prolong. There only needs to be one.