[TML] Lower-tech colonies

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 7/15/08 12:59 PM, "Hans Henrik Rancke-Madsen" <rancke at diku.dk> wrote:

> Ewan Quibell writes:
> 
>> Would you have your TL14 industry set-up to make TL8 stuff? unlikely
>> IMHO. Why bother having you TL14 industry set-up to produce a TL8 coal
>> fired power plant or a TL8 gas fired power plant when you can just knock
>> out TL14 fusion ones? Why have you industry set-up to knock out TL8
>> computers when they can produce them at TL14.
> 
> Based on the assumption that it's cheaper, it seems eminently reasonable
> that they would retain the capability to build stuff at lower TLs. The big
> IF lies in the assumption itself.

Exactly.  And as vacuum tubes and other things show, the assumption isn't so
good.

>> For an example, would you want to set-out to create a company to
>> manufacture, market and sell say the Commodore 16 in today's market
>> place of Wiis, DS's and Playstation 3s? Not saying that you couldn't,
>> just that it wouldn't be feasible in today's economy.
> 
> But if you can build Commodore 16s cheaper than you can build Pentiums and
> you don't need anything more complicated than C16s for your purpose, why
> wouldn't you?

For the investment in manufacturing plant, you're better off making/selling
current machines than old ones.  So any such manufacturing would have to be
wholly subsidized and probably run by the government.  To convince a
manufacturer to make that stuff for you, you'll have to pay him as if he
were making modern stuff, ergo the cost is the same.

>> Also why would you want to go to all the cost of set-up a TL8
>> manufacturing plant in an TL14 economy, when for just a little bit more
>> you can set it up in the TL8 colony?
> 
> The assumption is that a TL 14 plant can build TL 8 computers, not that
> you would build a TL 8 plant to build the computers.

But a TL 14 plant dedicated to making TL 8 machines would be very wasteful.
You could still build a TL 8 plant in the colony cheaper than the TL 14
plant at home.  And if the colony has full TL 8 capabilities, they don't
need that plant it anyway, they can make their own stuff.

>> As to why someone might be setting up a colony at TL8 instead of TL14?
>> Self sustaining population size? I'd guess that in order to self sustain
>> at TL8 you might need in the order of say 500 million sophants of
>> similar capabilities to Humans,
> 
> That would make sense if the Official Traveller Universe wasn't littered
> with low-population worlds with TL 8+. But it is. So if TL really is
> max sustainable TL, then you can sustain TL 14 with a few dozen people.
> Or a few hundred. I can't remember the lowest population of any canonical
> TL 14 world, but I do recall that Uakye has a TL of 13 with a pop level of
> 5.

Either those few people are importing nearly everything, or by TL 13
manufacturing is basically a magic replicator box.  Feed it raw materials
and a specification of an object, and it makes it.

Of course, that would make a lot of TL arguments irrelevant.  Once such a
box exists, it can make any object, and TL is just a matter of what somebody
has researched.

> (This, BTW, is one reason why I favor a different interpretation of what
> TL actually is).
> 
> It's really not possible to reconcile the canonical definition of TL with
> some of the canonical UWPs.
> 
>> So assuming they aren't going to be moving billions of people, and they
>> want to set up the colony to be self sustaining, they pick the
>> appropriate TL to match the projected population size?
> 
> Actually, in this particulate case, the mother world does not want the
> colony to be able to go it alone.

History shows that, ultimately, the colony will be able.  Surely governments
have learned *something* in all those 1000's of years?