New Stats & Old Sentience

Re: Additional UWP/Mainworld Stats

[email removed] (Derek Wildstar) writes:
>Life (dependent on atmosphere and hydrosphere)
>
>For figuring out a world in the context of a long-standing interstellar
>community, you can use Resources to represent the attractiveness of the
>world to the "outside" starfaring cultures, while the Life score can be
>used as a basis for determining if there is a "native" culture to interact
>with.

I *really* like these two stats you've proposed. My only concern is
where to put them in the subsector listings such that the current
subsector viewers won't get fouled-up by them. But that shouldn't
be too hard. Anyway, we should definitely add them to the scheme of
things (of course, this'll mean changing the requirements on some
of the trade classifications... Rich worlds can now be rich for a
good reason :-)

Re: The Spontaneous Evolution of Life & Sentience

>That all depends on how prevalent this "life" stuff is.  If life manages
>to evolve on nearly any world capable of supporting it to any degree,
>worlds with native sentient or semi-sentient races should be fairly
>common, and worlds with some form of life should be pretty common.
>
>On the other hand, some well-known writers have written a good chunk of
>science-fiction having postulated that the only planet to achieve
>sentient life was Earth.  This is, of course, an extreme viewpoint, but
>it illustrates the wide variation possible.

Yeah, I'll admit to being one of those not-so-well-known writers who
(at least up until now) has stuck to this extreme viewpoint, that the
only sentience out there has either evolved on Earth or already
destroyed itself. But I should clarify how this extreme supposition
came about, because it is not one to which I hold dearly. On the
contrary, I think it's ludicrous to make such a statement. I think
that with the probabilities being what they are, that it is *extremely*
likely (even a certainty) that extra-terrestrial sentience has evolved.

However, I've always been conscious of Fermi's old question: "Where
are they?" This, combined with the Travelleresque genre of science
fiction, where a vast region of space is human-dominated and where
exploration is still a serious undertaking, has created a
situation where it becomes extremely difficult to justify the
setting unless we make some very strong (and very unreasonable)
suppositions.

What I mean is that if there are sentient races out there, it stands
to reason that many of them would have taken to the stars *long*
before humans had ever stood upright. Thus, is stands to reason that
any of them that survived would be so far ahead of us in technology
(unless there is a technology ceiling fairly close ahead) that they
would probably appear to us more as gods than as living beings. Since
such "creatures" do not exist in the traveller setting, we have to
go back and reverse our initial supposition, effectively nuking all
non-earth-evolved sentience, making the natural advent of sentience a
rarity of the utmost magnitude. However, Traveller is only a game, and
whether such "creatures" exist in our "real-life" setting has been
left (for whatever reason) as a puzzling exercise for the earth-bound
reader. :-)


           _   /|       Jim Vassilakos
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