[IN THE NEWS] Digital Doomsday

Ever wonder why everyone seems to be down in the dirt in post-apocalyptic settings, even several decades after? Even though we are so brilliant now and would probably be even more some time down the road? Why don't the survivors just use that knowledge to pick themselves up by the boot straps and get back to it?

Because everything we are is built on a house of cards.

Read this Article: Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page write:

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

[snip]

Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity's knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?

[snip]

In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responsible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme.

Something to keep in mind next time your AtB players/characters try booting up an old computer that's been gathering dust in the ruins on the Crash, or wonder why the few surviving humans didn't just rebuild the nuclear power plants and fast food joints.

Of course, since AtB is science fiction, anything is possible.

Embodied Cognition

One of the areas I'd like to explore in the AtB-verse setting is the idea that, before the Crash, people were able to "grow" themselves a spare body for recreational or medical reasons. In addition, these bodies could be customized in whatever way the owner wanted.

Not only could you completely change your appearance, these bodies could be hybridized with any transgenic feature you could think of. You could have a centaur body, a winged body, an amphibious body, etc. Just about anything you could think of would be possible.

One aspect I had not thought of until after watching Avatar recently was how swapping bodies would impact the human psyche. Thankfully, John Pavlus recently posted an article that takes a look at the idea of "Embodied Cognition":

...your mind-your "I"-is a function of a cephalized, bipedal, plantigrade, bilaterally symmetrical body between 1.5 and 2 meters tall with two arms terminating in five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, two lungs, a warm-blooded vascular system, mostly hairless skin, two front-focused eyes, etc. etc. Change any aspects of that physical configuration-in subtle or radical ways-and the mind will inevitably change too.

You can read the whole article on io9.com or an earlier version on his blog.

Iz goin to do science!

Rise my army!

[IN THE NEWS] Plant-Animal Hybrid

Ever wish you didn't need to eat? Well, there is a Sea Slug that can do just that thanks to its ancestors stealing plant DNA allowing them to create genes necessary to make green chlorophyll pigment. They then steal chloroplasts from algae they eat to conduct photosynthesis.

LiveScience.com wrote: [link]

"The sea slugs live in salt marshes in New England and Canada. In addition to burglarizing the genes needed to make the green pigment chlorophyll, the slugs also steal tiny cell parts called chloroplasts, which they use to conduct photosynthesis. The chloroplasts use the chlorophyl to convert sunlight into energy, just as plants do, eliminating the need to eat food to gain energy.

"We collect them and we keep them in aquaria for months," Pierce said. "As long as we shine a light on them for 12 hours a day, they can survive [without food]."

Something like this has to have been toyed around with at some point in the AtB setting. A few years ago I did write up an adventure called "The Green Death" which involved a symbiotic plant that dominated it's human and animal hosts, but this concept opens up a whole new dimension of possibilities.

Here's a little mutation package you could add to your game:

Animal Photosynthesis Package

BIO-E Cost: 25
Appearance: This mutant's skin and hair/fur/feathers/scales now have a dark green pigment from the natural chlorophyll.
Power: With exposure to light, the character's natural chlorophyll and chloroplasts needed to convert sunlight into energy and reducing, or alleviating, the character's need to eat depending on the character's level of activity.
NOTE: A majority of the character's body must be exposed to sunlight for this power to be affective. Clothing reduces the effecivness of this power dramitically.