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

[dragoongfa]

That seems like far too much effort for a longterm data storage that appears to be inherently inferior than a more simpler storage form. A biological race as data storage has to contend with the limitations of flesh, such as succession of generations and the need for food. That means the design will need a lot of extra capabilities to deal with those. It also requires a near constant exchange of information to keep the species wide memory up to date and whole. The more often your archive needs to be copied for maintenance, the more chances for mistakes there are.

Considering the limitations and needs of constant maintenance of more traditional media the biological limitations pale in comparison. It's one thing to rely on a machine with moving parts and decaying hardware and an other to rely on a self healing and self propagating organism.

A sapient or semi-sapient species also has the chance to develop agency of its own. Which increases any possible security concerns. It is more difficult to steal a physical hard copy of data than it is to find a defector or operator who gets lazy with security. The high amount of information exchange for simple maintenance also offers more opportunity for data theft of third parties.

Without fine motor appendages and other means of passing on complex data then a biological data vault would only be of use to an other telepath even if said vault wanted to spill the beans.

Lastly, an archive needs to be accessible. Having the knowledge spread over an entire species, that doesn't even breathe the same medium as yours, seems really impractical. How would a specific search work? If you have telepaths that can remotely search and shift through this many minds, then warding a physical archive is also easily in your power.

It all depends on how stuff is organized; the Loroi version of their telepathic networking as it has been laid down doesn't allow for the same level of access as our internet but it does allow for a ships 'medical officer A' to ask 'Listel archive B' a question about an obscure biochemical problem anywhere on the ship without having to wade through an electronic search function like our own.

A more mature and powerful telepathic network with the aid of technological means could translate to something that would make the internet look like a mors code communicator in comparison.

[Werra]

Considering the limitations and needs of constant maintenance of more traditional media the biological limitations pale in comparison. It's one thing to rely on a machine with moving parts and decaying hardware and an other to rely on a self healing and self propagating organism.

Microfilm is a commonly available mass storage medium that we are currently using, with an expected life expectancy of 500 years. With the tech level needed to manufacture an entire species, I'd expect some truly lasting physical media to be available. The maintenance of a physical archive must at worst be considered equal to the effort it takes to supervise and control a living species.
The issue with biological storage is precisely that it needs to self propagate. It also dies to pretty much the same causes that would destroy a physical archive in addition to being vulnerable to other causes of mortality.

Without fine motor appendages and other means of passing on complex data then a biological data vault would only be of use to an other telepath even if said vault wanted to spill the beans.

If the species is able to self propagate and deal with threats to the degree needed to be a viable storage, it has that motor control and thus means to pass complex data. Even if they're incapable of producing the sounds terrestial whales use to communicate over hundreds of miles, they need some form of highly detailed communication to pass on the knowledge from adult to offspring.

It all depends on how stuff is organized; the Loroi version of their telepathic networking as it has been laid down doesn't allow for the same level of access as our internet but it does allow for a ships 'medical officer A' to ask 'Listel archive B' a question about an obscure biochemical problem anywhere on the ship without having to wade through an electronic search function like our own.

A more mature and powerful telepathic network with the aid of technological means could translate to something that would make the internet look like a mors code communicator in comparison.

This hinges on the assumption that the Soia were more powerful telepaths than the Loroi are. Which might be correct, but so could be the reverse.

[dragoongfa]

Microfilm is a commonly available mass storage medium that we are currently using, with an expected life expectancy of 500 years. With the tech level needed to manufacture an entire species, I'd expect some truly lasting physical media to be available. The maintenance of a physical archive must at worst be considered equal to the effort it takes to supervise and control a living species.
The issue with biological storage is precisely that it needs to self propagate. It also dies to pretty much the same causes that would destroy a physical archive in addition to being vulnerable to other causes of mortality.

If telepathy was a species wide trait like the Loroi have then it makes sense to have a telepathic 'tool' that would be easy enough to field and produce. In such a case it would be ideal to make storing mediums far more efficient and long lasting than trying to create a 'tool' that doesn't work at all with telepathy and would require a wholly different means of accessing the date. Furthermore self-propagation and a natural life-cycle should be considered a plus, not a malus, since the whole process of maintaining the 'live stock' becomes automated and streamlined without much need of outside controle.

If the species is able to self propagate and deal with threats to the degree needed to be a viable storage, it has that motor control and thus means to pass complex data. Even if they're incapable of producing the sounds terrestial whales use to communicate over hundreds of miles, they need some form of highly detailed communication to pass on the knowledge from adult to offspring.

Herd animals don't require extensive means of communications to become successful; even the smart and successful dolphins in our extremely dangerous biosphere don't require appendages or a complex communications method to pass along the base message that their life cycle requires of them to pass. Trying to pass complex and often abstract patterns of thought with flippers and squeaky sounds, means that are nominally used for basic messaging with ones kin who is instinctually aware of the meaning; to an other species poses extreme problems. They may not even realize that the 'dolphin' equivalent is even sapient, how much that it tries to communicate and pass along extremely complex thought and theorems.

Passing along the information to the offspring should be done in vitro, by connecting the central nervous systems while still in the womb for the most accurate transmission. A mother to 'offspring' transmission; this would require either extreme sexual dimorphism between male and females or would be a monosexual species like the Barsam where an individual can easily fill both roles at the same time.

This hinges on the assumption that the Soia were more powerful telepaths than the Loroi are. Which might be correct, but so could be the reverse.

It mostly hinges on the Soians being able to technologically master the telepathic phenomenon. If they are able to fully control it then they can get away with a lot from it.

[Werra]

In such a case it would be ideal to make storing mediums far more efficient and long lasting than trying to create a 'tool' that doesn't work at all with telepathy and would require a wholly different means of accessing the date. Furthermore self-propagation and a natural life-cycle should be considered a plus, not a malus, since the whole process of maintaining the 'live stock' becomes automated and streamlined without much need of outside controle.

But a living archive is neither more efficient nor is it more lasting than a physical medium. Inherent to life is that the speed of thought is limited. If your archive is spread out over a population, then this limitation will quickly add up as will the time required to find and search the correct individuals. It's not realistic to handwave this with assumed capabilities of Soia telepathy that we haven't seen them to posess. Just the simple act of keeping an index of where what information can be found is very challenging if the where can be anybody from a species.
For the purposes of archivation, a life-cycle can not be considered an advantage, as every time information is copied, is a possibility for mistakes. No biological system is perfect and living has a tendency to wear down bodies, so further maintenance is required just to counter aging or head traumata.

Herd animals don't require extensive means of communications to become successful; even the smart and successful dolphins in our extremely dangerous biosphere don't require appendages or a complex communications method to pass along the base message that their life cycle requires of them to pass. Trying to pass complex and often abstract patterns of thought with flippers and squeaky sounds, means that are nominally used for basic messaging with ones kin who is instinctually aware of the meaning; to an other species poses extreme problems. They may not even realize that the 'dolphin' equivalent is even sapient, how much that it tries to communicate and pass along extremely complex thought and theorems.

Herd animals die quite often and are not very well equipped to deal with natural causes that can lead to information being lost or altered in some way.
If your species is as intelligent as a human, they will be quickly able to establish communication with other sapient species. Nobody reading this forum would have any trouble doing so if they woke up as a dolphin. All one needed to do was get some attention and then perform something rhytmical that shows even just a bit of mathematical understanding.

It mostly hinges on the Soians being able to technologically master the telepathic phenomenon. If they are able to fully control it then they can get away with a lot from it.

Assuming that the limitations of the telepathic phenomenon are much removed from what the Loroi have managed. The Loroi need touch to connect to most aliens and animals. We have no indication that the Soia didn't, for example. For all we know, the Loroi could be the Soias solution to limitations of their telepathy.

[Arioch]

Well, any mechanism that you want to last an extremely long time should probably have some kind of self-maintenance, and if you want to increase the likelihood of survival, it would probably be ideal if it could make copies of itself. At what point this mechanism changes from being called a mechanism to being called "alive" is, I suppose, a matter of semantics.

However, if you're going to engineer some kind of elaborate information storage system that borders on the biological, I'm not sure I see the advantage of making it external. If you can make an information storage system that can fit inside a living organism, why not just put it inside yourself?

[Ithekro]

It is also possible that the Soia were themselves immune or resistant to telepathy (similar to Humans) and the like, but designed some of their creations as telepaths, perhaps has weapons, or as a method of allowing a control method we don't know of.

[gaerzi]

Depends on how the nervous system would work; we are talking about ultra high tech genetic and molecular manipulation here, we have no way of knowing how information is stored in such a brain, how dense it is or how it is overwritten/deleted.

Unless the density is literally "infinite", there's a point where saturation is reached. Remember that if we want perfect memory storage, we can't use lossy compression schemes. And we don't need just to store information, but we also have to make sure it doesn't get corrupted over time, which means we need to have massive redundancies in the storage so that corruptions can be detected and repaired.

However, if you're going to engineer some kind of elaborate information storage system that borders on the biological, I'm not sure I see the advantage of making it external. If you can make an information storage system that can fit inside a living organism, why not just put it inside yourself?

Information density, again. If you don't want to give your own species a brain a thousand times more massive than what it had naturally evolved to be, it could be preferable to create an artificial lifeform that can be mostly brain. And if you actually are telepathic, then it can be likened to accessing cloud storage on a computer: the information is not stored locally, but it makes no meaningful difference as long as you have your connection up.

It's kind of the origins of the title character in a recently-concluded webcomic. Of course in the case of the carbosilicate amorphs, they started evolving once left to their own, and the "perfect information storage medium" aspect started going by the wayside.

[Werra]

Well, any mechanism that you want to last an extremely long time should probably have some kind of self-maintenance, and if you want to increase the likelihood of survival, it would probably be ideal if it could make copies of itself. At what point this mechanism changes from being called a mechanism to being called "alive" is, I suppose, a matter of semantics.

You actually don't want your archive to be able to make copies of itself. At least not unsupervised. Any time a copy is made is a time mistakes can happen. If your archive is alive, some of these mistakes might make the new copies more adapt at propagating themselves. Evolution would naturally destroy the archive of your species over time, as individuals without the energy requirements of maintaining this memory will do better than those with. If you make their life cycle ultra long to counter this, you open up your archive to the wear and tear of organic life instead.
Inscribed inorganic materials kept indoors can easily last tens of thousands of years with minimal supervision. If you begin to worry about tectonic plate shifts in planning your archive, maybe you're overdoing it.

[Arioch]

Information density, again. If you don't want to give your own species a brain a thousand times more massive than what it had naturally evolved to be, it could be preferable to create an artificial lifeform that can be mostly brain. And if you actually are telepathic, then it can be likened to accessing cloud storage on a computer: the information is not stored locally, but it makes no meaningful difference as long as you have your connection up.

I'm not arguing for using Space Dolphins as your backup database, I'm just wondering why if you are going to engineer an immortal biological data backup, why you wouldn't want said immortal biological data backup to be YOU.

You actually don't want your archive to be able to make copies of itself. At least not unsupervised. Any time a copy is made is a time= mistakes can happen. If your archive is alive, some of these mistakes might make the new copies more adapt at propagating themselves.

This is akin to saying, "I shouldn't back up my hard drive, because any time a copy is made, mistakes can happen."

True in a sense, but errors can happen even in systems that are static, with or without constant parity-checking, whether the systems are biological or not, regardless of whether copies are being made. And >0 backups is demonstrably better than 0 backups.

At some ultra-tech level of science, there's literally no meaningful difference between "biological" and "mechanical" systems. An engineered "biological" solution can be exactly as effective as a "non-biological" solution. In such a case, "evolution" has got exactly nothing to do with it. Engineered "biological" solutions don't "evolve" any more than "mechanical" solutions do, unless they are specifically designed to do so. At a fundamental level, we're still talking about matter, energy, and information.

[Werra]

@Arioch
Of course your archive should contain back-ups. Making your storage medium autonomously self replicating however is the wrong way to go about that. Any entity that is capable of copying itself is subject to evolution. Unless the data you want to keep is vital in the self replication, the data will be optimized out of the process over time. The entity that can replicate free from the energy and resource needs of data storage, will do better than those who keep a process running that does not benefit their reproduction. Self replication and longterm data storage simply have a target conflict.

[dragoongfa]

Information density, again. If you don't want to give your own species a brain a thousand times more massive than what it had naturally evolved to be, it could be preferable to create an artificial lifeform that can be mostly brain. And if you actually are telepathic, then it can be likened to accessing cloud storage on a computer: the information is not stored locally, but it makes no meaningful difference as long as you have your connection up.

I'm not arguing for using Space Dolphins as your backup database, I'm just wondering why if you are going to engineer an immortal biological data backup, why you wouldn't want said immortal biological data backup to be YOU.

Data accessibility; if a person is the data repository then they are bound to not want to be 'accessible' 24/7 for every smuck to get the data they need; since aspects of telepathy have been observed to be FTL, who knows how many individuals would be querying for certain information at the same time if 'sending and receiving' were also FTL for the Soians. One solution would be for 'everyone' to have the data uploaded to them but that opens a whole lot of cans of worms. All societies are bound to have their dissidents and untrustworthy; certain parts of the whole who look out to harm it for their own reasons; and there are bound to be widespread fields of science that should be left 'off limits' to everyone who doesn't need to know.

An other solution would be to organize a data repository and accessibility with an other 'container' in mind. A 'slave' race that would have to choice to be mentally available at all times and who, with some oversight, be able to ensure that only those who need to know will know.

@Arioch
Of course your archive should contain back-ups. Making your storage medium autonomously self replicating however is the wrong way to go about that. Any entity that is capable of copying itself is subject to evolution. Unless the data you want to keep is vital in the self replication, the data will be optimized out of the process over time. The entity that can replicate free from the energy and resource needs of data storage, will do better than those who keep a process running that does not benefit their reproduction. Self replication and longterm data storage simply have a target conflict.

That depends on how the reproductive cycle can be manipulated to ensure both adequate data storage but also security. We are not talking about an animal here but rather a (somewhat) sapient engineered race whose whole purpose was to secure the data and then allow access to said data. From the top of my head there could be a 'hardwired' limitation on how many such 'storage devices' can be alive at the same time.
From Loroi observations we can infer that there aren't many Pol around; is this a rational choice by them to 'limit' their own numbers or is it a limitation put in place that would stop the reproductive instincts once a certain population threshold has been reached?

[Mk_C]

Kinda counterintuitive - creating an autonomous race of breathing USB sticks with the sole purpose of being inaccessible to your client civilizations due to the access means being telepathic and then engineering an entirely telepathic client race, no?

Even if they went that way, and for some reason did not employ themselves as said breathing USB sticks (as everyone's favorite blu babes do) - why whales? Why not brains in jars or some brainy trichoplax, or literally anything more convenient than a damn whale? Free-ranging whales are not a good medium to keep your .flac collection around - they can get hurt, or eaten by wholesome marine life, or die without reproducing, or make you chase them to Challenger Deep on the other side of the planet when you just want to retrieve your favorite Golim folk bass trance album. Lots of pain to go through just to make said Golim folk bass trance album inaccessible to everyone, except specifically those you want to access it the least - your muscle thralls with the greatest capacity to mess you up if they so choose. And if they were not meant to be free ranging, and were supposed to live in controlled fish tank environment - then why not just make said tank hermetically sealed and sterile, and remove every redundant part not involved in the USB stick functionality, i.e. - make brains in jars, possibly budding ones if we need autonomous backup capabilities os badly? Or at least damn jellyfish with inheritable memories, like them Floters? Anything better than whales.

The old theory of Pol being the Soy remnants seems just so much more simpler and organic. How did psi-shittery come around? It naturally evolved in an ancient species without the convenient anatomy for speech or object manipulation. Like massive intelligent whales. Why did they operate out of their HuegStars almost without doing planetfall ever? Because every kind of planetary surface sucks when you're a massive intelligent whale, and most kinds of planetary oceans do so as well - but the giant interstellar fishtank with guns and FTL engines presents almost zero inconveniences - you're floatin' in your most comfortable temperature and composition water solution just as you would do at home. Why engage in intelligent species engineering? Because no legs - can't even go to dry places with no legs, and building every space battleship you have around a giant fish tank tends to impact it's combat performance sorta negatively. Even creating AIs is hella more convenient when you have meat puppets with opposable thumbs and everything instead of doing it through an interface compatible wirh 2 meters long fins and PK shoves. Why no psychic thralls until Loroi? Because when you cannot straight out build a psychic brain from scratch, you are forced to repurpose the working solutions that are presented by nature. Stuffing a whale brain on a roughly 2 meters tall chassis presents some logistical issues, so they needed an independently evolved case of psychic capabilities in a more compact package, which presented itself in humans - whom they proceeded to fine-tune into a proper psychic species. And judging by the sole silhouette we have, the ugly things even seem to have 4 lateral fins to each side, making it 8 total without counting in dorsal and caudal ones, for the ancestral base 8 arithmetic. And the fact that all the naturally-occuring cases of copper-based (and thus blue) oxygen transportation metalloproteins from the real life that we know happened to naturally occur pretty much exclusively in aquatic life forms, just a few of which later moved landside.

Why would Historians keep them around? Hell knows - maybe they are remnants who want to be left the hell alone and (the society that includes Historians) are their servitors, focused on providing them with calm and undisturbed form of existence. Maybe they are held prisoner, deemed to dangerous to be left unchecked, but not deserving extermination. Maybe they are a shadowy clique that never truly lost the grasp of power over the Bubble, and quitely manipulates all sorts of events (like I dunno, the first contact between Loroi and their template species) through their Historian puppets after the more hands on approach has proven to be kinda problematic millenia ago. Lots of possibilities, and we can someday get juicy hints without a need for a huge and unwieldy reveal. In any case - a direct telepathic exchange with contemporary Loroi would likely reveal a bit too much about the deeper history of Soylent Blu civilizations and the true status quo with Historians for comfort. So the latter eagerly pretend that Big Blu Fish is nothing interesting. Neat, clean, and they can play a cute role in worldbuilding and larger overarching plot without the need to get them too involved or even explained directly, as it would be necessary for eating growing breathing swimming pissing mating USB sticks.

At least, that's how it looks to me.

[boldilocks]

Surely data redundancies would be even more necessary for biological storage options than regular ones?

[Ithekro]

An aquatic bioengineered storage species I suppose would make sense if you did not include any predator species on the world. The oceans would be able negate a lot of the radiation and cosmic rays that might come along, and most spacefaring races would likely have had a terrestrial origin, and wouldn't be targeting the oceans generally.

[Jagged]

I would just add that the solution for the long term storage of data is massive redundancy.

Perhaps having the population of a planet remember something for you is a possible solution?

We ourselves are in the early stages of investigating DNA as data storage and the commonly quotes estimate is that you could store 215 petabytes of data in a gram of dna. Which gives ample room for data redundancy as well as DNA inherent built protections against corruption.

[Krulle]

That, and the Pol may really have been a last-fail-safe, not intended to be accessed unless the civilization has to be rebuilt after a catastrophic collapse. Which happened to the Soia.
The Soia may have expected to have still access to space travel, or at least rebuild that quickly enough to access the database before it collapses.

And we're still well in the safe margins apparently.

And the database may not have been made for specific access.
More like complete record you have to comb through, and the rebuild a search-able database with the data you collected yourself.

We don't know, and we likely never will, as I don't presume that the story will go into that direction enough to answer our questions.

And the Soia are meant to be an unsolvable enigma.

[Mk_C]

That, and the Pol may really have been a last-fail-safe, not intended to be accessed unless the civilization has to be rebuilt after a catastrophic collapse. Which happened to the Soia.
The Soia may have expected to have still access to space travel, or at least rebuild that quickly enough to access the database before it collapses.

That is, in itself, a questionable concept. You can't dump the entirety of a technology into a database. For a re-emerging fallen civilization it would be incomprehensible without the whole context that created said technology - the culture of their ancestors, academia and all, which are pretty much guaranteed to be drastically different in a post-apocalyptic civilization that would actually stand to gain anything from such a backup. A pile of textbooks and formulae could mean every possible interpretation that could be encoded in them without the scientific history and culture and technological background it originates from, joined in a society of minds to comprehend them. The language, the notation, the axioms, the assumptions and the subtext - the whole meaning of most concepts expressed in the hypothetical cache would be largely lost in a medium that cannot comprehend the limitations of it's readers and work through them. Some parts of the message might be useful, others misunderstood completely, and as such misleading - the recipient would need actual pre-Fall academics for the message to be properly understood. Otherwise, it will be a His Master's Voice scenario - some minor scraps picked up while even the implications of the whole are barely registered. Even if they took a sanzai read of such a cache, Loroi themselves most likely would not understand what they saw even, much less the meaning of the content. Just silent artefacts of technology would explain more than such a database.

Consider intelligent, living Historians who actually understand how their own technology works and could explain it in greatest detail - even they could only provide a different, not much less advanced civilization with a significantly simplified variations of their own technology, the Union could neither manufacture not fit the more advanced stuff into their own scientific framework - they are just not ready yet, it would take some more vital time for Historians to guide their understanding and implementation of technology until they reached the necessary point. How would a cache work to bridge a much larger gap? Would our USB-Pol themselves be actively aware of the knowledge they carry? If they are aware - one would expect them to act upon this knowledge ingrained into them, interact with it, change and use it as far as they can. Who would post-fall Soya even be to demand that Pol divulge something that they now comprehend as a part of themselves, much less teach it to something that is no longer their creators? And if they are not aware - they would only be able to store and provide it, not teach it, unless it comes with some kind of a Mass Effect Thorian Cipher bullshit (which would be cheap and lame and Arioch is better than that).

Plus there's the consideration of trying to make a data cache to survive an event of massive intelligent species extinction in the shape of a species - the one thing most threatened by the event it is supposed to survive. We know for a fact that a plenty of sapient species did not survive the Soyfall - what about our USB-Pol would ensure that they do not join the host of annihilated lifeforms? If we really want such a cache, why don't we create a civilization that would be capable of full range of development, but with their society at least partially focused on preservation and careful propagation of information, that of their own and others? Could call them something simple and obvious - like "Historians", just in case we forget why do we keep them around. Or just pull a Foundation and create a secret colony of your own well away to live through the collapse and emerge in the aftermath as themselves. Or, once again assuming that such a cache would be useful - carve it in 100-meters tall symbols on the surface of some rocky moon on the far orbit of System Nowhere.

We don't know, and we likely never will, as I don't presume that the story will go into that direction enough to answer our questions.
And the Soia are meant to be an unsolvable enigma.

I don't think they were conceived as an unsolvable enigma - their past and present role probably has a sound and straightforward explanation. Though not one that will be ever spoonfed to us, I suspect. WeOur grandchildren will have to piece it together from the material of Outsider, Project Forward and whatever other bits provided. Or someone just manages to get Arioch drunk enough to sing.

[Krulle]

Or someone just manages to get Arioch drunk enough to sing.

We might have to try this.
Alas, I can't try it, as I'm not resistant to alcohol anymore. At all.

[mwightman]

Or someone just manages to get Arioch drunk enough to sing.

We might have to try this.
Alas, I can't try it, as I'm not resistant to alcohol anymore. At all.

Me thinks that singing would be equivalent to Vogon's reciting their poetry

[Ithekro]

Looking over the Umiak ships again, and I noticed something I find unusual. The weapons guide section talks about the Umiak using their Morat type of blasters similar to the Loroi/Delrias verrsions....but none of the Umiak ships listed are armed with blasters. Only Plasma Focuses.