Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, December 3, 2021.
You do know it will only be a matter of time before I give Leb and Pally little outfits, right?
Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, December 3, 2021.
Mouse count: 4-4-2-4-2-4
I *LOVE* the little shrine hats on the two near the shrine … uh … food synth.
Man! Little hats … shrine … they’re Shriners!
Are they going to get little cars? Wee little cars?
For anyone still grappling with the morality of Ruddock eating them – this is the same universe that has (had) Furryite burgers, so…
Oh also, recall things as mundane as an ammo box seem to as well. Some form of consciousness/intelligence would seem to be dime-a-dozen in the spacetrawler world, which is a strange thought.
“Of course I learned about brevity! I wasn’t born yest– Oh wait, I was.”
Love the hats.
Make one outfit a kilt/tartan. And call the mouse BB, for Robert Burns.
And call the mouse BB, for Robert Burns.
BB? Don’t you mean Bobbie Browning?
And I have to ask: What ARE those things they’re using as hats? Hopefully nothing essential, like insulators.
The hats indicate religious order, a basis of belief around the food synthesizer. They also indicate organization and a hierarchy. Leadership, which can direct the population to greater ends than what individuals might attain.
Nova is right to find a universe that can create consciousness so cheaply is strange. From this comes an even stranger concept: Civilization is equally as cheap and as replaceable. Furryites? Eebs? Aztecs? Meh. Poof! The replacements are already here, readying their own spectacular auto da fe.
We’re left to wonder an ancient, indeed corny old question: Is nothing sacred? The robot mice have ascribed divinity to the food replicator that spits them out as readily as coney islands. What else? To what end will the robot mice dedicate their nascent civilization?
I fear we’re going to find out. Excuse me while I get another lemonade. My throat keeps going dry and I can’t stop it.
The way I see our universe, life is common whereas intelligent life is rare. Expanding the Goldilocks Zone to include extreme life expands it.
Intelligence gives life a whole new set of problems that dog it every step of the way. Hurdles that must be jumped and creating disasters that are of the next tier of complexity like us a Type 0 creating a Type 1 disaster in AGW.
And then we have this that shows a plethora of intelligences some as small and appear as mice. That adds a whole new wrinkle to existence.
In a universe where a kitchen can construct organic (edible) creatures with intelligence, the bar of miracles must be pretty high for their religious deities.
If their kitchens can create intelligent life and civilizations, why wouldn’t the owners of such already possess as much divinity as they could want?
What would they need any god for? To clean the food synth?
The question you raise directly opposes the question of sapient capability and its limits. Religions stem from urbanized societies that determine they need deities to spy on them in order to keep them moral, since they know too many strangers with no interest in keeping them in line with what the village would have expected of them. When you can create intelligence and even other societies, the question shifts from: How should I behave? to: What else can I get away with?
Being able to leap the bar of miracles in a single bound erases questions of morality and instead calls upon the greater and more amorphous substance of justice. Your only limits are what you yourself wouldn’t do, or have somebody else do to you. But since everybody else has the ability to do whatever they want… how do you establish and maintain justice?
In the Spacetrawler world, much like our own, this question is typically answered by force. The major issue there, as Emily has learned, is: What kind of force, against which capability of a people, and will the lesson stick? The Baltivaak situation shows that even this solution has its limits. When you have the power of God, who but Gods would dare to try and thwart you? Even if they were willing to pay the awful price.