Greetings good citizen, since our civilization is predicated on the division of labor and it's difficult to think of ourselves/species as 'one trick ponies' there is the very real probability that humanity was 'created' for a singular purpose, mining.
The trouble with using autonomous, biological mining units is they need to be able to feed themselves so some remained above ground growing crops and tending animals to feed the miners.
Then there's the 'defense' part of the puzzle. because starship fuel is so valuable it would fall under that most ancient of rubrics where it's easier to take it than to make it and 'piracy' must have been a very real danger.
Developing autonomous, self-directed biological units must have been a formidable undertaking and 'customizing' them to specific tasks probably didn't make sense to the creators who were using the 'one size fits all' approach.
Due to the dangers inherit in mining, expendability was paramount. Then there was the tendency for these self-directed units to make a break for it considering their intended purpose could be hellish even when things were going smoothly. [In this respect, piracy was probably the least of the builder's concerns.] So a 'class' of operators were trained to capture runaways and return them to the mines. [Again, one size fits all.]
Probably doesn't help that the builders used their own DNA to craft these 'servants' but if they were going to 'conquer' space they had to use every resource available to them. [So it's likely a vast human empire exists out there and they lost interest in this place once the fuel was mined out. We, the miners, were abandoned in place...sadly, the 'overseers' were abandoned in place too and they took it into their heads to 'keep a lid on things' until the 'creator' returned...knowing full well there was no reason for them to return.
Just saying...and I haven't heard a more 'plausible' explanation coming from anywhere else...and nobody has found the 'missing link' so this ISN'T the planet of origin that the overseers want you to think it is. [Now I'm skating on 'heresy' and it is ideas like this that endanger the freakishly selfish.]
Um, what's this have to do with 'civilization'? Yesterday I touched upon one of the fragile threads that keep our species living 'communally' and that's healthcare...but truth be told, food production and habitation are also responsible for our unique situation. We couldn't return to the 'hunter gatherer' model the overseers preach we 'evolved' from, too many moving parts and not enough 'wildlife'.
We need only look at the starving Alaskans on reality TV for proof of theorem.
We were created to live in support of one another...even if it wasn't for our personal 'enrichment', it is how we were designed to SURVIVE but the overseers are stuck on the concept of expendability and their original 'mandate' of 'comply or die'.
This is why we lack sympathy for the 'unemployed', for millenia we witnessed tools that didn't 'preform to expectations' being...eliminated.
Again, in yesterday's reading I hit upon an article concerning a 'master algorithm' for bringing AI to, er, 'self-awareness' but in this article the author went a step further and posited that once we had created 'self-aware' robots, deactivating them without the robot's express permission would be considered murder.
Now think about that one for a minute. We murder with abandon all day every day but some nitwit is going to press charges if you turn their machine off? WTF?
Nor did that (apparently) ever occur to our creators [who considered us tools.] (Zero irony that the overseer class retains this disturbing point of view.)
Since this is the plot of my 'work in progress' I'd be interested in feed back regarding whether such a theme would be of interest to my readers.
Spoiler alert: I am taking an unusual twist with my 'aliens in the backfield' approach you will hopefully find captivating...but if you're blinded by the legend of 'Spirit in the Sky' you won't be amused.
So yeah, life is more than a little 'pointless' and that's a damn good thing! [Now all we have to do is get that darn monkey (overseers) off our back!]
Thanks once again for stopping by and opening your mind...
Gegner
The trouble with using autonomous, biological mining units is they need to be able to feed themselves so some remained above ground growing crops and tending animals to feed the miners.
Then there's the 'defense' part of the puzzle. because starship fuel is so valuable it would fall under that most ancient of rubrics where it's easier to take it than to make it and 'piracy' must have been a very real danger.
Developing autonomous, self-directed biological units must have been a formidable undertaking and 'customizing' them to specific tasks probably didn't make sense to the creators who were using the 'one size fits all' approach.
Due to the dangers inherit in mining, expendability was paramount. Then there was the tendency for these self-directed units to make a break for it considering their intended purpose could be hellish even when things were going smoothly. [In this respect, piracy was probably the least of the builder's concerns.] So a 'class' of operators were trained to capture runaways and return them to the mines. [Again, one size fits all.]
Probably doesn't help that the builders used their own DNA to craft these 'servants' but if they were going to 'conquer' space they had to use every resource available to them. [So it's likely a vast human empire exists out there and they lost interest in this place once the fuel was mined out. We, the miners, were abandoned in place...sadly, the 'overseers' were abandoned in place too and they took it into their heads to 'keep a lid on things' until the 'creator' returned...knowing full well there was no reason for them to return.
Just saying...and I haven't heard a more 'plausible' explanation coming from anywhere else...and nobody has found the 'missing link' so this ISN'T the planet of origin that the overseers want you to think it is. [Now I'm skating on 'heresy' and it is ideas like this that endanger the freakishly selfish.]
Um, what's this have to do with 'civilization'? Yesterday I touched upon one of the fragile threads that keep our species living 'communally' and that's healthcare...but truth be told, food production and habitation are also responsible for our unique situation. We couldn't return to the 'hunter gatherer' model the overseers preach we 'evolved' from, too many moving parts and not enough 'wildlife'.
We need only look at the starving Alaskans on reality TV for proof of theorem.
We were created to live in support of one another...even if it wasn't for our personal 'enrichment', it is how we were designed to SURVIVE but the overseers are stuck on the concept of expendability and their original 'mandate' of 'comply or die'.
This is why we lack sympathy for the 'unemployed', for millenia we witnessed tools that didn't 'preform to expectations' being...eliminated.
Again, in yesterday's reading I hit upon an article concerning a 'master algorithm' for bringing AI to, er, 'self-awareness' but in this article the author went a step further and posited that once we had created 'self-aware' robots, deactivating them without the robot's express permission would be considered murder.
Now think about that one for a minute. We murder with abandon all day every day but some nitwit is going to press charges if you turn their machine off? WTF?
Nor did that (apparently) ever occur to our creators [who considered us tools.] (Zero irony that the overseer class retains this disturbing point of view.)
Since this is the plot of my 'work in progress' I'd be interested in feed back regarding whether such a theme would be of interest to my readers.
Spoiler alert: I am taking an unusual twist with my 'aliens in the backfield' approach you will hopefully find captivating...but if you're blinded by the legend of 'Spirit in the Sky' you won't be amused.
So yeah, life is more than a little 'pointless' and that's a damn good thing! [Now all we have to do is get that darn monkey (overseers) off our back!]
Thanks once again for stopping by and opening your mind...
Gegner
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