Every time I brainstorm story ideas on my personal Facebook wall, and someone chimes in with "From a technical perspective ..." (usually followed by words like impossible, or nightmare), I think "I am so lucky to have experts in technology that won't exist until 50-80 years in the future on my friends list. They really saved my ass." Seriously... Imagine pitching World of Warcraft to someone in 1924. "From a technical perspective...." WE DON'T HAVE @#$% COMPUTERS. Seriously though, why do some people feel so compelled to limit some stories to the capabilities of modern technology? I for one will be very disappointed if computing is anything like what we have now so many years in the future.
I think it’s a matter of extrapolating from what we have currently, since technology is pretty difficult to predict.
Dunno... isn't that the other way around, actually? If anything can happen, that's pretty much Fantasy; methinks that if it's going to be sci-fi (even if light), then surely it should be possible to do some extrapolations of what can and cannot realistically happen in 20, 50 or 100 years?
I suppose. Extrapolation has its place. But some things we may not even be able to conceive of yet. 200 years ago, we would have had no idea some of the things that are possible today. Now, we're more scientifically advanced, for sure, but there's probably a few things yet to be discovered.
There actually isn’t much today that we couldn’t have conceived of 200 years ago. Today, for a small sample, we’re working on quantum computing, nanoscale assemblers, 3D food printers, DNA memory storage*, lasers, VASIMR space drives, and a bunch of other things. So when I say it’s a failure to extrapolate from currently existing tech and near-futuretech, I mean something more along the lines of analysis paralysis. It’s fairly easy to extrapolate one step forward from any given technology. What becomes harder, then, is extrapolating multiple steps forward. Take the leap from the abacus to the computer, as an example - we went from the abacus (~500 BC), to Pascal’s Calculator (early 1600s), to the Arithmometer, to punch card computing, to ENIAC, etc. I’m skipping a lot of steps there, but as each step in the chain progresses, it becomes harder to figure from the steps prior to it, and the rate of advance increases. So imagine you’re sitting there with an abacus. It’s pretty easy to conceive of a machine that does basic arithmetic automatically. That would come up with Pascal’s Calculator. But if you had that same abacus, could you then imagine ENIAC? Probably not. It uses the same binary principle as an abacus, but it’s so wildly advanced by comparison, that nobody in their right minds would be able to conceive of it, given the technology they had to hand. So what the “stagnant growth” authors are doing is imagining technology that’s one or two steps ahead of what we have today, since beyond that it gets into the realm of science fantasy. Their failure is in setting the timeline of their works far into the future. *One strand of DNA can encode about 1.5GB of information, and one gram of DNA can hold about 455 exabytes of information. The internet, by comparison, contains about a million exabytes of data, generously estimated. So the entire internet could be downloaded and stored on a single DNA storage drive weighing just shy of five pounds. That is something I just think is Really Bloody Cool.
Not trying to be a nitpicking smart-ass here, but that would be exactly my point: 200 years from now (and even 20 years from now) there are probably gonna be lots of things we cannot even conceive nowadays... ... but, but that very same logic, since we cannot conceive them today, they are not gonna show up in any book (because in that case we CAN conceive it). As long as I'm following Jun's OP correctly, the problem they describe is sort of the opposite: something we can conceive (hence put in a book), and somebody else saying "nope, mate, that cannot possibly happen in the timeframe you are discussing". (IMHO, "timeframe" being key here). I guess that type of criticism may be, in a way (and I'm crudely generalizing here, no doubt!) about pointing out the author may be trying to have their cake and eat it, by on the one hand employing some super-advanced bit of tech, but not doing the work of thinking everything else that would be needed in order to get there (and how that would change the world), which is methinks part of what sci-fi tries to do. Following Jun's example (about thinking about WoW in 1923) and CheshireFenix (about from abacus to computers), my point is that the hard part is not about imagining computers back in 1923; the hard part is rather to imagine the things those computers will allow, like twitter, facebook, and fake news (in short: all the OTHER things, besides WoW, that makes 2018 different from 1924! =) And, on top of that, there are still things that are (by current knowledge, which is what sci-fi is about) highly unlikely to happen.
To give an example of something I heard while brainstorming my first LitRPG.... Re: "One major MMO company buys another, and decides to merge two MMOs together under one banner. There are portals within the game world to cross over into alternate dimensions/realities/planes of existence (ie game worlds)." Person on my friends list: "From a technical perspective this would be a nightmare if not impossible. You can't just import one game into another like that." I did it anyway, and rationalized it as AI have become so advanced that humans do very little programming as we think of it today. The main challenge is articulating to the machine what you want. The means of bringing two games together like this can be achieved by having an advanced AI that is able to understand the language of both games, and translate either one or both into a common computer language that humans rarely interact with because AIs are able to do the coding about a billion times faster than we could ever accomplish ourselves. AIs now have human (or dare I say super human) intelligence, so it's not like you have to open up development software and begin hammering out code to start the process. It's more like having a sit down conversation with someone in the office and saying "This is what we want to have done. Do you think you're super AI brain of yours can make that happen with whatever you do under the hood?" Personally, I don't think it's such a stretch. People already do this on a smaller scale by extracting WoW items for use in other games (I'm most familiar with The Sims and Neverwinter Nights 2 - I saw it more in NWN for obvious reasons). Completely different platforms, but people are able to extract the 3D models from WoW's source files, skin them, and then compile them into whatever file type is used by NWN.
I'm going to play the Devil's advocate here. The limits of technology are directly imposed by us on physics. We can't make transistors much smaller (even if we can find workarounds), Moore's law isn't a law like the law of thermodynamics and the rate of technological increase may not continue forever (in fact Moore's law was broken years ago). AI is as nebulous a concept as it ever was, we'll never make a teleporter without bending spacetime itself, the EM drive is probably bullshit, advanced aliens don't exist in the nearest 10,000 light years, and we'll likely never achieve immortality while we inhabit a single fleshy body. There are, however, interesting things on the horizon. Largescale fusion will be with us in 20 years (commercial by 40 at the latest) and at that point we might as well treat it as infinite energy (it's not, but it makes space travel and exploration extremely viable to the point where you can cannibalize Mercury to make a Dyson swarm and expand energy gains that way - and if you want to be crazy, you can make even more energy by creating a kugelblitz from that harvested light)... However, the shared factor of all of these, are that they are limited by the fundamental laws of physics (and no, "quantum" anything doesn't let you get around that, it only lets you mess with things on an extremely small and limited scale - you can't just have a quantum submachine gun that exists in two places at once)... Not everything's all that disappointing though (even if I always wanted a quantum submachine gun), we began last century not knowing how to fly, we were on the moon half-way through, and we were able to effortlessly flame people on the other side of the world via the internet by the end of it... and look at computers even in this century... sit back and enjoy the ride, I suspect this century is going to be the one where humanity either goes extinct, or stops being able to go extinct until the last blackhole flickers out... either way, it's a privilege.
Well, I guess that is a good example to illustrate the previous exchange: merging two MMOs that way, today, (assuming they are completely independent MMOs, developed by different companies with different engines) would probably be a nightmare, with "nightmare" in this case meaning something along "of course it's possible, but would be an amount of effort roughly equivalent to just developing everything again from scratch"... ... not to mention the amount of bitching from both playerbases (that will without fail find cause for bitchin' mighty loudly, something that will continue to be true in the future, near and far, of that I'm certain! ) If you throw in a super-AI that is capable of doing such a task, methinks that for at least some of the more hard-Sci-Fi oriented players (full disclosure: a faction that I'm member of), the question is not so much "how do you get to those super-AIs", but rather, "if such super-AIs are possible, then sure A, B, C... should also be possible, why doesn't that feature in your book"? For example, as somebody noted on reddit a few days: time compression in LitRPG. If such thing were possible, the changes to our whole world would be massive, but authors don't seem to consider that. In the particular case of Awaken: Online, the main character finds out that, since in-game time goes 4x times faster than normal time, he can log into the game, access his College webpage from the in-game browers, and (since his mind is working 4x times faster) he can complete in 1 in-game day all the homework of a real-life week, which is specifically about programming (he has enrolled several Coding courses)... ... but, in the book, the game programmers are always shown working in rea-life, never taking advantage themselves of the tech they have inventeed. I mean, there's this tech that allows you to code 4 times fasters while logged in the game, why da heck are the devs of said game not using it themselves to code 4 times faster? And, in the world at large, this tech would have massive implications: basically ANYTHING that can be done online (from coding to writing to reading to shitposting) can now be done 4x faster; I mean, it would pretty much become mandatory for all those jobs to use the tech, else your competitors are gonna steamroll you. At that point, "accelerating our brains by a factor of 4" becomes so huge in its implications, that the game itself is just a small, tiny detail. Yet, as noted above... even the programmers that made the game seem unaware of the fact, and keep working offline. That, I guess, is sometimes the underlying criticism when "that's impossible/a nightmare" is mentioned: sometimes it's not so much "it will never, ever, happen, not in a million years and even if a super-advanced alien race shows up bearing gifts", as much as it is something along "hey, if A is possible, then B, C and D should also be possible, and since C would have an impact orders of magnitude bigger than A, why are you telling a story about A and not C?" By the way: just my 0.02 gold coins, mate; just rambling here and imagining what folks may be trying to say when they say something, which is a proven way to build some really, really nice Straw Person Arguments!! =) -
That’s probably true. The way I have it set up now people have to work their asses off to get from one side of the game the to the other, and players can choose where they start. The main reason is to keep the populations of each side of the game relatively native according to lore. In the first few months of the expansion most players won’t even encounter a player from the other half of the game. Kinda like... playing a D&D surface race and making it down to Menzoberranzan. Technically possible but not something you do in a day and when you get there it’ll be like a whole new world.
