Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thread

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Hālian
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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Hālian »

What medium was that?
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Absalom
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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Absalom »

Arioch wrote:
Carl Miller wrote:Were the mozeret sapient? If so, what kind of civilization might they have had before getting (presumably) roflstomped by the loroi?
It certainly appears so, as the ruins on Deinar were inhabited by Mozeret rather than Loroi. The pre-cataclysm Soia-Liron ruins all share similar characteristics, so it seems that unlike the non-Soia-Liron civilizations of the period (which appear to have been mostly quarantined), they shared some kind of interstellar society. Unfortunately, when a post-print modern culture collapses, there can be very little remaining of their writings, aside from the odd signs or monumental inscriptions, labels on devices, or the rare hardcopy of a document. Even TL13+ devices aren't usually designed for 100,000+ year data integrity.
I wonder about that... I suspect that the Schlock-Mercenary living-media idea seems a little more realistic for archival purposes, possibly something coral-ish so that only the surface layers actually need to be living. If you have the technology, and you have low enough recording volumes (which seems likely, since you can always just use a non-volatile growing-tree "rope" system), then after a while everything trends towards references to previously written data, or damage-triggered rewrites of that data, greatly reducing actual data storage needs.

Which is not to say that the archives wouldn't have a massive data inflow, they would, just not as bad as might be expected. Once you've got the data set, you only need to record changes, and recover from data corruption before it exceeds redundancy support, so combined with caches, data throughputs will be much lower than we're used to.

All of this is very different from saying that the archives wouldn't have been known, and bombed out of existence, nor does it mean that they would be readable to the Loroi, nor even necessarily identifiable if you didn't already know what they were, but still, don't write off the possibility that sufficiently-enduring technologies were used.
Arioch wrote:It's interesting to wonder what record would be left of our own future society if it were suddenly to collapse, once printed material becomes fully obsolete. There was a brief period when we were recording things on optimal media which could theoretically survive a very long time, but I don't think most of our current magnetic and static RAM storage would last very long in the event of a massive collapse. Human history would go up to about ~2000 and then more or less stop.
The conventional memory I agree with, even flash supposedly losses it's charge after a while, but disk and tape will depend on the details of the media. If the magnetic material is a coating on the outside of the media then it won't last any longer than audio tape does (if you go looking, you can find audio tape that loses the coating as it plays), but if it's somehow encased in the media then it can have a much longer lifespan: some of the old wire recordings are actually still playable, so if you used that and encased the reels in an inert atmosphere then it would last as long as it took the magnetic domains to shift, which should take quite some time (I'm actually not sure the domains will shift without external stimuli, so this might be eon-scale storage with the right materials).
Carl Miller wrote:What medium was that?
Optical I assume. CDs and DVDs aren't predicted to last very long, but some of them (depends on brand, environment, data-layer composition, etc.) actually have archival-level storage lives. CD and DVD ROMs, for example, could probably last as long as the encapsulating material IF said material successfully kept the data layer isolated for it's entire lifetime (which it actually doesn't, since the data layer is aluminum, and oxygen does slowly seep through; a gold layer would work better, but you'd need a laser cutter doing the writing on the production line if you actually wanted to get into the thousand-year range for anything other than the most popular album, and that sort of per-disk-custom writing isn't done with ROMs...)... but if there was a gradual exposure to the environment from outside then the life expectancy would be much lower, and if you made some sort of mistake in your choice of encapsulating material (e.g. choosing aluminum oxide to encapsulate aluminum) then you'd be at risk of discovering that the "environment" you needed to protect the data layer from was the encapsulating material itself (you want something clear, yet which the data layer won't interact with: aluminum on aluminum oxide might be subject to oxygen drift).

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Mr.Tucker »

Absalom wrote:
Arioch wrote:
Carl Miller wrote:Were the mozeret sapient? If so, what kind of civilization might they have had before getting (presumably) roflstomped by the loroi?
It certainly appears so, as the ruins on Deinar were inhabited by Mozeret rather than Loroi. The pre-cataclysm Soia-Liron ruins all share similar characteristics, so it seems that unlike the non-Soia-Liron civilizations of the period (which appear to have been mostly quarantined), they shared some kind of interstellar society. Unfortunately, when a post-print modern culture collapses, there can be very little remaining of their writings, aside from the odd signs or monumental inscriptions, labels on devices, or the rare hardcopy of a document. Even TL13+ devices aren't usually designed for 100,000+ year data integrity.
I wonder about that... I suspect that the Schlock-Mercenary living-media idea seems a little more realistic for archival purposes, possibly something coral-ish so that only the surface layers actually need to be living. If you have the technology, and you have low enough recording volumes (which seems likely, since you can always just use a non-volatile growing-tree "rope" system), then after a while everything trends towards references to previously written data, or damage-triggered rewrites of that data, greatly reducing actual data storage needs.

Which is not to say that the archives wouldn't have a massive data inflow, they would, just not as bad as might be expected. Once you've got the data set, you only need to record changes, and recover from data corruption before it exceeds redundancy support, so combined with caches, data throughputs will be much lower than we're used to.

All of this is very different from saying that the archives wouldn't have been known, and bombed out of existence, nor does it mean that they would be readable to the Loroi, nor even necessarily identifiable if you didn't already know what they were, but still, don't write off the possibility that sufficiently-enduring technologies were used.
Arioch wrote:It's interesting to wonder what record would be left of our own future society if it were suddenly to collapse, once printed material becomes fully obsolete. There was a brief period when we were recording things on optimal media which could theoretically survive a very long time, but I don't think most of our current magnetic and static RAM storage would last very long in the event of a massive collapse. Human history would go up to about ~2000 and then more or less stop.
The conventional memory I agree with, even flash supposedly losses it's charge after a while, but disk and tape will depend on the details of the media. If the magnetic material is a coating on the outside of the media then it won't last any longer than audio tape does (if you go looking, you can find audio tape that loses the coating as it plays), but if it's somehow encased in the media then it can have a much longer lifespan: some of the old wire recordings are actually still playable, so if you used that and encased the reels in an inert atmosphere then it would last as long as it took the magnetic domains to shift, which should take quite some time (I'm actually not sure the domains will shift without external stimuli, so this might be eon-scale storage with the right materials).
Carl Miller wrote:What medium was that?
Optical I assume. CDs and DVDs aren't predicted to last very long, but some of them (depends on brand, environment, data-layer composition, etc.) actually have archival-level storage lives. CD and DVD ROMs, for example, could probably last as long as the encapsulating material IF said material successfully kept the data layer isolated for it's entire lifetime (which it actually doesn't, since the data layer is aluminum, and oxygen does slowly seep through; a gold layer would work better, but you'd need a laser cutter doing the writing on the production line if you actually wanted to get into the thousand-year range for anything other than the most popular album, and that sort of per-disk-custom writing isn't done with ROMs...)... but if there was a gradual exposure to the environment from outside then the life expectancy would be much lower, and if you made some sort of mistake in your choice of encapsulating material (e.g. choosing aluminum oxide to encapsulate aluminum) then you'd be at risk of discovering that the "environment" you needed to protect the data layer from was the encapsulating material itself (you want something clear, yet which the data layer won't interact with: aluminum on aluminum oxide might be subject to oxygen drift).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage

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dragoongfa
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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by dragoongfa »

One thing always stroke me as odd about the Umiak past as described from the insider:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/forum_umiak.html

I can understand two related but sapient races coexisting briefly before annihilating each other but three I can't imagine it that they hadn't killed each other long before the Tizik-tik reached the stars.

My question is thus: Is there a possibility of the Tizik-tik being the Soia Liron adaptation of the Hal-tik?

It would explain a LOT.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Arioch »

dragoongfa wrote:My question is thus: Is there a possibility of the Tizik-tik being the Soia Liron adaptation of the Hal-tik?
No, that's not what's going on there. I think that multiple related but distinct intelligent species arising at the same time is probably more the norm than the exception. While there's a popular notion that homo sapiens "wiped out" the other hominids, I think it's probably closer to the truth to say that we "absorbed" them (all non-African human populations still have a significant percentage of Neanderthal genes, for example). If the various hominid offshoots had been just a little bit more different, and less able to interbreed, I think it's possible if not probable that some of them might have survived into the age of civilization.

In the case of the Tizik-tik, they were not a warlike culture, and so didn't have any particular incentive to attempt to wipe out the nomadic Hal-tik.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by dragoongfa »

Petty, would make the Umiak a little more hardcore if they had managed to wipe out their superior Soia-Liron copy that also had superior technology.

Now as for coexisting sub-species. I think that we will have to agree to disagree on that one, for me any species that has managed to grow sapience has done so by being de-facto absolute predator of the ecosystem (we have only us as an example but we have to admit that we are the absolute predators of Earth). I can't imagine multiple tribes of slightly different Absolute predators not being at each others throat from the day one simply because predators don't tolerate competition.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Arioch »

dragoongfa wrote:Now as for coexisting sub-species. I think that we will have to agree to disagree on that one, for me any species that has managed to grow sapience has done so by being de-facto absolute predator of the ecosystem (we have only us as an example but we have to admit that we are the absolute predators of Earth). I can't imagine multiple tribes of slightly different Absolute predators not being at each others throat from the day one simply because predators don't tolerate competition.
Well, being at each others' throats doesn't necessarily mean one tribe wipes out all the others. The various human subcultures have always been at war with each other, at times with one subculture having a very decisive advantage in technology and power (Europeans vs. stone age native cultures, for example) and yet, the result is not a monoculture, but a variety of widely different cultures. The victor doesn't always exterminate the losers.

Regardless, the "it happened this way on Earth, therefore it must happen this way on all planets" attitude, even when it may be correct, doesn't make for very interesting science fiction.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Absalom »

dragoongfa wrote:Now as for coexisting sub-species. I think that we will have to agree to disagree on that one, for me any species that has managed to grow sapience has done so by being de-facto absolute predator of the ecosystem (we have only us as an example but we have to admit that we are the absolute predators of Earth).
You're putting the cart before the horse. Humanity has this level of sapience (I don't agree that lesser magnitudes are absent from mere animals) in large part because we weren't the apex predators of our ecosystems: needing to make more from less is one of those areas where intelligence sprouts it's fruit.
dragoongfa wrote:I can't imagine multiple tribes of slightly different Absolute predators not being at each others throat from the day one simply because predators don't tolerate competition.
The rulers of empires have often been at each other's throats, but rarely does it result in eradication. An example is India, where defeated tribes became lower castes. In the case of the ancestral Umiak races, one became a lower caste, and one became Bedouins: they aren't competition if they don't exist in the same place as you.

At any rate, if you can't tolerate a cousin race as competition, then there's a very real chance of not being able to tolerate other tribes of the same race as yourself either, because the difference isn't that big.

Incidentally, predators will sometimes work together if they see a benefit. I believe there was an example of a badger & weasel working together, and when my family's cat used to drag in a rabbit he had caught, he learned to take it to the family dog (who was positively elderly) to kill it, since the cat apparently hadn't learned how to do that (yeah, sure, he probably could have gutted it, but that's slightly different from killing it).

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by dragoongfa »

Absalom wrote:
dragoongfa wrote:Now as for coexisting sub-species. I think that we will have to agree to disagree on that one, for me any species that has managed to grow sapience has done so by being de-facto absolute predator of the ecosystem (we have only us as an example but we have to admit that we are the absolute predators of Earth).
You're putting the cart before the horse. Humanity has this level of sapience (I don't agree that lesser magnitudes are absent from mere animals) in large part because we weren't the apex predators of our ecosystems: needing to make more from less is one of those areas where intelligence sprouts it's fruit.
Pre-human hominids and our very early stone age human ancestors competed with predators that were far deadlier than their current descendants. IIRC The eurasian and african lions were at least 10% bigger and had stronger bones and muscles; wolves were in a similar situation as well. In fact one can trace the physical decline of the mammalian super-predators of Earth with the advent of stone age human ancestors and their entry level of sapience.

I admit that I could put it better so let me rephrase it:

Any sapient species became the de-facto absolute predator during its evolution of sapience.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Absalom »

dragoongfa wrote:
Absalom wrote:
dragoongfa wrote:Now as for coexisting sub-species. I think that we will have to agree to disagree on that one, for me any species that has managed to grow sapience has done so by being de-facto absolute predator of the ecosystem (we have only us as an example but we have to admit that we are the absolute predators of Earth).
You're putting the cart before the horse. Humanity has this level of sapience (I don't agree that lesser magnitudes are absent from mere animals) in large part because we weren't the apex predators of our ecosystems: needing to make more from less is one of those areas where intelligence sprouts it's fruit.
Pre-human hominids and our very early stone age human ancestors competed with predators that were far deadlier than their current descendants. IIRC The eurasian and african lions were at least 10% bigger and had stronger bones and muscles; wolves were in a similar situation as well. In fact one can trace the physical decline of the mammalian super-predators of Earth with the advent of stone age human ancestors and their entry level of sapience.

I admit that I could put it better so let me rephrase it:

Any sapient species became the de-facto absolute predator during its evolution of sapience.
Hmm, I'd revise it a bit to "Any predatory sapient species became a de-facto absolute predator during its evolution of sapience.", due to possibilities that:
1) maybe the grass is hard to sneak up on for some reason, and
2) hard to prevent simultaneity in partitioned biomes.
All in all, I think you got that as refined as it could be without some weird thought-experiments (like sentient-through-pairing-only or whatever other dubious system).

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Mr.Tucker »

Reading the article on precursor empires, I get the feeling that the Dreiman sphere of influence only covered the "Northern" part of the modern day Loroi Union (around the area of the Charred Steppes). Would I be correct in that assumption?

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Arioch »

Mr.Tucker wrote:Reading the article on precursor empires, I get the feeling that the Dreiman sphere of influence only covered the "Northern" part of the modern day Loroi Union (around the area of the Charred Steppes). Would I be correct in that assumption?
Dreiman influence extended well into current Union territory, and as far "south" (anti-spinward) so as to include current Pipolsid and Delrias territory. A variety of different Fenrias offshoots held on to territory in what is now Nissek and Barsam territory, and in pockets coreward and spinward along the edge of the Great Wasteland.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Mr.Tucker »

Does that imply that the modern day Morat are remnants of a population that was within Dreiman territory (unlike, say, the Delrias, who can be assumed to be descended from a Fenrias remnant)?

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Arioch »

Mr.Tucker wrote:Does that imply that the modern day Morat are remnants of a population that was within Dreiman territory (unlike, say, the Delrias, who can be assumed to be descended from a Fenrias remnant)?
Not really, they're each descended from multiple Fenrias offshoots that were isolated in different areas at the periphery of Dreiman territory. It's not entirely clear how the current Morat and Delrias got to be where they are, because the Fenrias pockets were wiped out when the Soia arrived, and the worlds on which the Morat and Delrias survived (Morat and Rubat) were previously inside Dreiman territory.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by raistlin34 »

Couldn´t a prey specie develope sapience in order to better protect itself from its predators?

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

De-facto: In fact, or in reality. Denoting something that exists in reality, but not necessarily legally or technically. "Although it is winter in the Caribbean, it is in a state of de-facto summer all year long."

De-jure: Technically, and/or legally mandated, but not necessarily in effect or reality. "This is a de-jure restaurant, but it's really just a cesspool of filth."

Any sapient species becomes a de-facto absolute predator, because even if they don't prey on anything for food, anything that messes with them is going down in a real big way.

Even things that don't mess with them are going to be brushed aside if they want to expand into new territory. Humans have been extinguishing all kinds of species that we don't eat, just because nothing can compete with us.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by Arioch »

raistlin34 wrote:Couldn´t a prey specie develope sapience in order to better protect itself from its predators?
Elephants are the only example I can think of in which a purely herbivorous animal has developed a high degree of intelligence. Having a complex social structure and needing to migrate often in response to changes in your harsh environment probably helps.

Gorillas are primarily herbivorous, but I don't think they're exclusively so, and they're almost certainly descended from primates who were not (as they still have huge canine teeth).

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by thicket »

raistlin34 wrote:Couldn´t a prey specie develope sapience in order to better protect itself from its predators?
I don't see why not. just look at humans. piss poor predator without tools. no claws, no jaws. probably was preyed upon by other predators

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by dex drako »

raistlin34 wrote:Couldn´t a prey specie develope sapience in order to better protect itself from its predators?
depends on what you call "pary"

intelligence doesn't seem to form for defensive measures, instead all species that have high intelligence "hunt" for energy dense foods. it doesn't matter if that energy dense food is fruits and nuts or a herd of gazelles a intelligent mind needs a lot of energy. energy you can't get by grazing on grass and leaves alone. for animals like that its more efficient to focus on simple instincts, speed and tricks like camo then on a bigger mind.
Last edited by dex drako on Wed Jul 12, 2017 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Miscellaneous Umiak/misc. races question-and-answer thre

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
all species that have high intelligence "hurt" for energy dense foods.
This is demonstrably not true. The African Grey Parrot, for example, is a bird that eats fruits and seeds and is one of the most intelligent animals we know of.

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