Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 98
October 16, 2014
We don’t need no stinking horses!
Imagine a world without horses.
Of course, a world with more horses would be a lot of fun. What if the Native Americans had them, and all the empire-building, technology-sharing, and disease-creation that (at least according to Jared Diamond) goes with them? Tad Williams gave a shout-out to the idea of American horses in Otherland, and Twovultures is still in the process of his lush and sprawling history of the same concept.
But.
What if there were no horses? What if paleolithic peoples ate all the tarpans? What if wild horses were as untameable as zebras? Cold-adapted tsetse flies? Holocene equid diversity is pretty pathetic anyway, what if they were all just extinct before humans left Africa?
I’m thinking Eurasian civilization would be off to a slow start. With no animals to ride, we’d get no big, sprawling empires. City-states clustered around water might work, maybe even hydraulic empires like Pharaonic Egypt. but they’d have limited success penetrating inland. We might get a sort of Canaanite/Minoan/Egyptian/Celtiberian spectrum of cultures forming in the Mediterranean, but it would be totally cut off from other bodies of water. Triangular plowshares, gunpowder, silk, and wet-field cultivation would be right out, and I don’t think Europe would get pottery, the oar, or rammed-earth walls, either.
Without horses, Eurasia and North Africa is mostly the domain of nomadic herders, circulating through the steppe and desert with their sheep and camels. The forests are home to pig and cow herders. Heavy agriculture around the Nile, Tigris, Indus, Yellow, Mekong rivers supports centers of high population density that are almost entirely unknown to each other. Writing systems have evolved five times and lost three. Although some people have started to ride camels, nobody has bothered to invented the wheel…
In Eurasia! The South America, the Marajoara of the Amazon, with their rubber plantations and desire to trade with their land-bound neighbors to the south and north, finally invent the Wooden Bicycle. Well, they aren’t so much bicycles as big scooters. But when somebody figures out how to hitch a lama to one…
It’s only a matter of time before the Land-catamarans of Kavankina’ulu make landfall in China.
October 15, 2014
Conversations with my wife: the Hobbsian Trap
Sunday night I had the rare opportunity for a conversation with my wife about something other than diapers and baby triceratopses (we have a 2-year-old). This was the result:
On the subject of simon-roy and sandralanz‘s new post-singularity project:
How do we stop radicalization?
We talked about the Hobbsian Trap:
When two adversaries are not equally powerful, the weaker one’s only hope is to attack first and hope the element of surprise will win the day.
Knowing this, the stronger one will attack first, to avoid being surprised.
Knowing that, the weaker one will attack first, and so on. It’s very hard to avoid a situation of all-out war, in which the weaker side is utterly obliterated by the stronger with much loss of life on both sides.
The only solution (that we could think of) is for the stronger power to strengthen the weaker one until both are equal, and the incentive to fight is gone. This is the purpose of the European Union and the MacArthur administration of post-WWII Japan. Where else is equalization succeeding? Where is it failing?
October 14, 2014
Conversations with my wife: programming
Here’s another bombshell from my wife:
If you use a computer and don’t understand it, you make yourself vulnerable.
In the same way you can’t be illiterate and have a full, it’s increasingly becoming true that you must know how to program.
Therefore our children will come to understand that in the same way that literacy is essential to democracy, We can’t have a free society until we are all programmers.
What do you think?
October 12, 2014
77 Telling History with Matt Mitrovich
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/77Matt.mp3
I finish my conversation with Matt Mitrovich, founder of The Alternate History Weekly Update, talking about some of the darker implications of real and alternate history.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
We live in an America-Wank.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies
I strongly believe that the average human being isn’t evil
Let’s have some international alternate history!
October 7, 2014
Bronze Age Antipodes
Look at me look at me! I inspired someone.
Lamnay over at deviantart has made a map based on my Antipodes scenario. He brought some new ideas to the table. Some good ones.
“What if travel between locations on the opposite sides of the earth was simple? How would civilizations have developed when it was easier to get to Chile from Beijing than it is to get to Hong Kong?
Probably not great for the Andeans.
I’ve got a lot of text for this, and intend to add a key. But I want to sit on the text for a little while so any mistakes are more obvious, and so I can trim it a bit better.
I also need to come up with betters names for the rival Chinese dynasties, Proto-Turko-Mongols and the Indo-Aryan Vedic Empire and the Southern Barbarians.
The prevailing thought on where you go when you jump into a antipodal tunnel (like a big, magic well) is that you don’t go to the other side of a spherical planet, but to another plane of existence, often referred to a heaven.
—
Post-Olmec States (Very, very loose confederacy somewhere between the EU and HRE)
Maya (Also a loose Confederacy, but centralizing fast)
Tartessos
Tyre (Brief unification of Phoenician colonies, likely to collapse when the king who united them dies)
Argos Empire (Mycenae successor)
Greek Baronies
Libya
Egypt (Weak and divided, Libyans and Kushites influencing politics, getting read for a takeover)
Kush (A very powerful state, only made stronger from controlling Tahiti.
Troy (Exploited the power vacuum when the Hittites fell)
Israel (Miraculously united)
Kaska (Took over the Hittites)
Lycia
Lydia
Aleppo (Hittite rump state)
Assyrian Empire
Elam
Indo-Aryan Vedic Empire
Indo-Aryan Vedic Vassals
Proto-Turko-Mongol Homeland
Ji Dynasty (Earthly/Old World China)
Xi Dynasty (Heavenly/New World China)
Nanman (Southern “Chinese” civilization)
Olmecs (Java and Sumatra)
Arctic and Antarctic Marine Mammal Hunters”
What do you think? Plausible? And what happens next?
October 6, 2014
The Ecology War
I’ve been trying to think about post-Singularity space-opera ideas for a while now, and parasky on deviantart may just have given me the push I needed with his planet Porphyrogennetos.
“The purple vegetation is actually photosynthetic fungoids that have intriguing medicinal properties, and that this has led to the planet being legally protected from settlement or otherwise unauthorized visitation.”
Space-faring ecological enforcers to keep planets like this pristine? Star Rangers? That sounds like a pretty cool toy…and I set out to break it.
Boring ideas like corruption and under-handedness aside, I’d like to see a story about rival factions developing with incompatible environmental philosophies. For example Deep Ecologists who believe that every animal (or even object) has inalienable rights versus Aesthetic Ecologists (what will the tourists will think??) versus Theist Ecologists (God made these animals, don’t mess with them), Pragmatic Ecologists (these animals might be useful later), and so on. Then of course there are the selfish interests of their government employers, as well as the captains and crews themselves.
What happens when they come to blows?
October 5, 2014
76 Points of Divergence with Matt Mitrovich
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/76Matt.mp3
I’m talking again with Matt Mitrovich, founder of The Alternate History Weekly Update about…
The smallest person can create an alternate history
Colonialism goes differently
Juan Santamaria and what he might have done
1491 by Charles C. Mann
The size of China’s treasure-ships
A lot of bad people have won
The Merchant Princes by Charles Stross
Why is Alaska full of White Russians?
October 2, 2014
Ship-states
Living on a space-ship needs a different sort of society than living on a planet. All resources must be centrally distributed, all precautions must be enforced. All orders must be followed.
In some ways, the Ship-state looks like a perfect totalitarian dictatorship. But when enough people decide that the Helm isn’t acting in the interests of the Ship, be prepared for a tidy, efficient, and absolutely lethal revolution.
~~~
Or if you don’t like that story, I’ve been watching the Little Mermaid a lot recently. What if we add a Terrestrial lover into that mix? That would be cute, huh?
~~~
Update: I wrote this page two weeks ago and last night I dreamed I was an English teacher on-board one of these ship-states in the first generation. I pointed out Jupiter to my daughter, its night side lit with storms, and then talked with a co-worker about ethnic tension between us English-speakers and the Lithuanians and Pakistanis. “We can’t go on like this. None of us have aywhere to go. We either make friends in this generation, or get murdered in the next.”
So I guess that’s the plot, then?
September 29, 2014
Why Save the Mechanical Rainforest?
So our conversations about Petrolea and the environmental philosophy questions it raises are getting really interesting. This is what I have so far.
Why save the mechanical rainforest?
Because:
1) The mechanical rainforest is more useful alive than dead.(the Pragmatic Argument)
1a) Its life-forms or even communities of life-forms might wind up having useful industrial applications. We should at least study them before destroying them (thanks, Flesh-pocket)
1b) They are also beautiful (some of them), although Titan is not going to work very well as a tourist destination. (thanks, Steve Bein)
1c) But who knows, right? Maybe in the future tourists will be able to visit the moons of Saturn. Maybe we’ll discover some use for the life there only after we destroyed it. Maybe the mechanoids on Titan will evolve intelligence. Are we willing to deny those resources to the future? (thanks, Tex Thompson)
1d) Everything is connected, maybe the destruction of the biosphere on Titan will have some negative impact on Earth. (but come on, how likely is that?)
2) It would be wrong to kill the mechanical rainforest(the Moral Argument)
2a) The life-forms on Titan, even though evolved from von Neumann robots, are sentient. They have feelings, and they can suffer. It is wrong to cause avoidable suffering. (thanks, Steve Bein, for this utilitarian argument)
2b) But, even if you could prove that NOT destroying the robots would cause more suffering, as sentient beings, they have an inherent right to exist. (thanks, Steve Bein, for this Kantian argument)
2c) We would be horrified to contemplate the utter destruction of Earth’s biosphere. We should also be horrified at the destruction of Titan’s, even if that destruction has no negative consequences that we can see. Do we want to be the sort of people that would strip-mine a whole planet?
2d) Petrolean mechanoids are the descendants of von Neumann robots that aliens planted on Titan millions of years ago. As such, they have Derived Value from their original manufacturers. If we believe we might one day meet those manufacturers, we’d better respect their works. Yes, this is a religious argument. (thanks, Writer of Minds!)
2e) What would you think of someone who over-consumed so thoughtlessly? Greed usually has negative physical consequences, not to mention the psychological consequences of pursuing pleasure instead of truth. What are we really losing with the destruction of the Petrolean biosphere? Can we even know? (thanks, Mat Sheean)
…
Any other reasons we should save the mechanical rainforest?
Once again, thanks to everyone who’s participating in this conversation with me.
September 28, 2014
75 Alternate History with Matt Mitrovich
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/75Matt.mp3
This week I’m talking to Matt Mitrovich, founder of The Alternate History Weekly Update about, what else, alternate history, the little brother of genre fiction.
So what if…
It’s alien and the same at the same time
The maps!
Maps that tell stories.
Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, and Eric Flint
George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkein
A fantasy world that looks awfully like Byzantine Rome…
…or Space Lizards
Green Antarctica and the Great White South
For Want of a Nail and When Angels Wept
It’s weird and at the same time I love it
Geeze, this is just an alternate history week, isn’t it?
