Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

[Markdoc]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

/rant

 

This was true in technology as well. You have to update your skills every 1.5-2 years or you're out of date. And since 50+ hour weeks not including staying current is the industry norm - you're basically getting your paychecks printed in your own blood. The question becomes: at what point does a culture/society start to see negatives, rather than positives, created by constant advance?

 

I've snipped the rest of the rant, but that doesn't mean I disagree with it. As I see it, there is no alternative to the idea that tech people are going to have to accept either finding another job, or retraining on a regular basis (more accurately, retraining as a way of life). There are, and always will be (for the foreseeable future), jobs that don't require this, but more and more of them will.

 

There is, however, an alternative to making it an intolerable extra pressure. That alternative, though, is cultural, not technological: it means making retraining/uptraining an explicit part of the work contract. Both the institute where I am working now in the US and my home institute in Denmark do this. In Denmark, the process is institutionalized: every year, workers meet with their boss one on one, to discuss (and write down, to make formal) their mutual goals for the coming year, and rate how they did on meeting last year's goals. This can include identifying training needs and arranging the necessary training - that's considered part of your normal work week (and making it happen becomes your boss' job, so he can't fob it off into your spare time). For me, it's even more extreme. I have the contractual right to take 1 year in 5 off work for retraining, if I want. In practice, I never have: I just couldn't afford the time - but this year I am taking 3 months off my regular work (I'm still paid) for training. Making retraining an integral part of the job makes a huge difference.

 

Oddly enough, this seems to be the summer of the sabbatical: 4 of my senior colleagues - from Holland and the UK are also doing it.

 

So the problem you describe is not with retraining, per se, but with the idea that tech workers are disposable and it's cheaper to burn them out and hire a new guy with updated skills than retrain the old guy. That idea's accurate, which is why it's so popular: it'll take a major effort to change that, but it can be done.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

And just a couple of peripheral comments:

 

And since 50+ hour weeks not including staying current is the industry norm

 

They let you off with 50 hours? Slackers At the NIH, there was a T shirt some labs used to give noobies, with the lab name on the back and the slogan "You know, 60 hours a week just isn't going to cut it here" - and it was funny, because there was a large element of truth in it.

 

Just to cite one example. As you get a higher and higher paid technical elite who live in an economic bublle and pretty much have to be slaves' date=' albeit highly paid ones, to keep their jobs - where does that leave humanity as a whole? [/quote']

 

Doing our laundry and vacuuming our floors

 

Again, that's only funny from a certain perspective: because there's also some truth in it. I've lived in the situation where I had two mamitas (women who cooked and cleaned for me) plus a shared driver and gardener for outside the house tasks. I got up in the morning, coffee and breakfast was waiting. I ate - and went to work. Come home at lunchtime, lunch is ready. Eat, coffee on the terrace - back to work. In the evening, I'd come home - dinner would be ready - and after eating and a couple of drinks on the terrace, often I'd go back to work. There was nothing to do in the house, the garden was done, my clothes were washed and ironed, I didn't do the dishes, if I had errands to run, the driver would usually do them, etc. If I needed bookings, the secretary would make them. But there's always more work to do. It is already quite possible to live like that and it's a rather odd (and for me, sterile) existence.

 

And' date=' without free professional, vocational, or technical education and a more open, flexible work environment, how can you get more people into the game. [/quote']

 

This is the kernel of the problem: and the key to it is setting up a system whereby the desired behavior is encouraged. That means subsidizing entry and promoting (via legislation and public opinion) the desired work environment. Again - it can be done. It simply needs a critical mass within the public who wish to see it done.

 

cheers, Mark

[Clonus]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

 

Now you've got me thinking on all sorts of tangents...political micromanagement of the war would be disastrous (moreso than in our little earthbound wars)...the home star advantage would be nigh insurmountable, given all the extra research time the enemy would get after your bleeding edge fleet left your forward base...interstellar war in a hard sci-fi universe would be a nasty mess.

.

 

That of course was the idea. It was a pretext for a war which was impossible to make progress in. Roleplaying-wise I can't see any advantage to it in a military context. JAFAL merchants on the other hand, would have the interesting experience of working a circuit of world where every time they return to a port of call, it's a fresh and alien world.

[Maur]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

And since this does occur in space, their is no frontier for the war to be conducted in. Either side can send a fleet at any star in the others "Empire". And not all ideas or innovations will spread out from the home world to the "frontier". Some will ripple from the various frontier or middle worlds outward. So it might be possible for the enemy to improve their technology before the defenses of the other sides homeworld are updated.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

So it might be possible for the enemy to improve their technology before the defenses of the other sides homeworld are updated.

 

That's still a crapshoot, from the invasion planning point-of-view. Messy...messy.

[Maur]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

It may be, but the point is that one doesn't have to take every star system between here and there due to just how empty most of space is. Think similar to the Pacific Campaign of WWII where they would take some islands and skip around others and even hit Japan itself (Dolittle Raid) just to show them they were vulnerable.

 

Heck, if you're already able to conduct an interstellar war (even with relativistic effects) then the easiest way to win if you don't care about taking a planet with its resources (people, buildings, etc...) intact would just to be to launch ships that release nice chunks of mass without slowing down as they go from star system to star system. If they could detect the masses, they would have only hours to react to defeat them at 50% of Lightspeed (11 hours from Pluto orbit to the Sun). Just keep sending ships to do that from various directions. Only have to get lucky a few times to decimate a planetary body.

[Roy_The_Ruthles]

Re: Relativistic Effects of Interstellar War

 

I once put together a relativistic Military Sci-Fi game. It eventually died off, due to my inexperience as a GM, but one thing that we figured out while working on how the world would work is...

 

There are no distress calls, or emergency beacons, there are vengeance beacons. Basically if you are in the same star system as a ship or a colony under attack, you'll probably get there on an order of hours (which means in some cases, you might be able to participate in the combat), If you aren't orbiting the same star, you'll get a vengeance beacon though. It will say something like this..

 

"This is base alpha omega three eight eight, year 2187 (or whatever you want), we are under attack by (derogatory name of alien), please avenge us" as by the time you get it, it will be years old.