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Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

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Hoyr said:
It's more that individual parts are inferior to compatible examples on the "market". Having to manually fix the appendix is a classic example of poor design.
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IIRC appendix also works as storage of bacteria fauna and flora for repopulating the digestive tract after a major infection.
Hoyr said:
The human eye is also meh. What nut thought it was a good idea for the nerves to grow into the eye? Plenty of eye designs work better than that!
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yeah cephalopod eyes are inherently better due to the the nerves being attached on the other side, but that's an example of adpated legacy code, as it's impossible for the eye to naturally be fixed without disabling it for millennia.
 
Though, we ended up one of the few endurance beasts in the world, capable for walking after something for days, until it gets tired enough for us to club over the head with a rock.
 
this train of though made me think of two things i'm pretty sure are under extremis.

biologicial arc reactor and electrical system.
 
DakkaMania said:
Sometimes, Liara wondered.
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Just to note: Liara doesn't know who her father is yet, just that she's also an Asari, which counts against her because of anti-pureblood prejudices. She doesn't find out who it is until after ME2, and it takes Shadow Broker resources to do so because Matriarch Aethyta happens to be a closet badass on Omega.
Alanek said:
It may have some... design flaws, but the reasons for a number of design flaws let us excel in other areas.
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Even that's not true.

Consider the human eye, held up by many as a marvel of the animal world. The photoreceptors for the eye are on the back of the rear wall of the eyeball, behind a layer of blood vessels and the optic nerve itself. This is a totally ass-backwards way to design an eye, and it leads to significant problems, most notably the blind spot in your eye that your brain literally forces you to ignore. The thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, octopi have photoreceptors on the inside of the rear wall of the eyeball: no blindspot, and fundamentally better vision as a result.

There's cruft like this everywhere in the human body. Vestigial bones, muscles put in the wrong places, exposed nerves in your elbows (aka the "funny bone"), etc, none of which are things that "let us excel in other areas" but are just things that aren't disadvantageous enough to kill off the humans who have them, and are too hard for evolution to fix without leading through disadvantageous intermediate steps that are bad enough to kill you. Don't get me wrong, the human body is a remarkable feat of evolutionary engineering, but there is a lot of crap in the code.

Anyway, this is getting off on a tangent. The main point is that legs and feet really aren't the best possible ground travel configuration for mechanical vehicles; they're just the best that biological evolution can come up with, subject to the constraints of biology. Evolution has done a great job with the human form, but biology has never invented a differential gearbox or all-terrain tires, so it'll always be a step behind.
 
Discussing the eye, does the octopus comparison account for humans optomising for viewing things at great distances in high light, high glare environments (when not defective), while octopi mostly hang out in darker places? Because only certain predetory birds actually get better performance in terms of distance and high light levels than a human (baring defects and allowing that the human eye does addapt over time in ways that are detrimental to this if you spend most of your time looking at things up close in low light environments).

I suspect the two are at least somewhat related, if only tangentally.
 
Chargone said:
Discussing the eye, does the octopus comparison account for humans optomising for viewing things at great distances in high light, high glare environments (when not defective), while octopi mostly hang out in darker places? Because only certain predetory birds actually get better performance in terms of distance and high light levels than a human (baring defects and allowing that the human eye does addapt over time in ways that are detrimental to this if you spend most of your time looking at things up close in low light environments).
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Wikipedia's article is decent.
Evolutionary baggage[edit]


Vertebrate
Octopus

Vertebrates and octopuses developed the camera eyeindependently. In the vertebrate version the nerve fibers pass in frontof the retina, and there is a blind spot where the nerves pass through the retina. In the vertebrate example, 4 represents the blind spot, which is notably absent from the octopus eye. In vertebrates, 1represents the retina and 2 is the nerve fibers, including the optic nerve (3), whereas in the octopus eye, 1 and 2 represent the nerve fibers and retina respectively.
Main article: Evolutionary baggage
The eyes of many taxa record their evolutionary history in their contemporary anatomy. The vertebrate eye, for instance, is built "backwards and upside down", requiring "photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses, which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns."[40]​ While such a construct has some drawbacks, it also allows the outer retina of the vertebrates to sustain higher metabolic activities as compared to the non-inverted design.[41]​ It also allowed for the evolution of the choroid layer, including the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells, which play an important role in protecting the photoreceptive cells from photo-oxidative damage.[42]​[43]​
The camera eyes of cephalopods, in contrast, are constructed the "right way out", with the nerves attached to the rear of the retina. This means that they do not have a blind spot. This difference may be accounted for by the origins of eyes; in cephalopods they develop as an invagination of the head surface whereas in vertebrates they originate as an extension of the brain.[44]​
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Evolution of the eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
TheEyes said:
Just to note: Liara doesn't know who her father is yet, just that she's also an Asari, which counts against her because of anti-pureblood prejudices. She doesn't find out who it is until after ME2, and it takes Shadow Broker resources to do so because Matriarch Aethyta happens to be a closet badass on Omega.

Even that's not true.

Consider the human eye, held up by many as a marvel of the animal world. The photoreceptors for the eye are on the back of the rear wall of the eyeball, behind a layer of blood vessels and the optic nerve itself. This is a totally ass-backwards way to design an eye, and it leads to significant problems, most notably the blind spot in your eye that your brain literally forces you to ignore. The thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, octopi have photoreceptors on the inside of the rear wall of the eyeball: no blindspot, and fundamentally better vision as a result.

There's cruft like this everywhere in the human body. Vestigial bones, muscles put in the wrong places, exposed nerves in your elbows (aka the "funny bone"), etc, none of which are things that "let us excel in other areas" but are just things that aren't disadvantageous enough to kill off the humans who have them, and are too hard for evolution to fix without leading through disadvantageous intermediate steps that are bad enough to kill you. Don't get me wrong, the human body is a remarkable feat of evolutionary engineering, but there is a lot of crap in the code.

Anyway, this is getting off on a tangent. The main point is that legs and feet really aren't the best possible ground travel configuration for mechanical vehicles; they're just the best that biological evolution can come up with, subject to the constraints of biology. Evolution has done a great job with the human form, but biology has never invented a differential gearbox or all-terrain tires, so it'll always be a step behind.
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So...why don't we design a Human Mark 2? Fix the eye problem, delete the appendix, anything else we know of design-wise.

Might make a good project, especially with Uploading tech. Could just download the old, ill/dying into new Uploaded, literally give them a second chance on life. Do wonders to keep those with experience around. Make a good alternative to Eternal Youth, is all I'm saying.
 
Stroth said:
The important thing to remember about last resort tactics is that they work. They might be unpleasant to use, but they're effective as hell.
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Your going to have to sell me on that definition. Effective means maximum out put with minimum input. They are called last resorts because we don't want to use them because reasons. If it was as efficient as your claiming we would use it all the time.
 
Daniel14541 said:
Your going to have to sell me on that definition. Effective means maximum out put with minimum input. They are called last resorts because we don't want to use them because reasons. If it was as efficient as your claiming we would use it all the time.
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"Effective" means "Successful in producing a desired or intended result". You basically described efficiency, which is a totally different concept. No claim was made about efficiency.
 
Daniel14541 said:
Your going to have to sell me on that definition. Effective means maximum out put with minimum input. They are called last resorts because we don't want to use them because reasons. If it was as efficient as your claiming we would use it all the time.
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We kind of do. Or, at least, African and Australian tribes in some of the hottest places in the world. Exhaustion hunting is actually pretty low intensity for the humans, and doesn't take longer than most of a day, which isn't too bad really.

TheEyes said:
Evolution has done a great job with the human form, but biology has never invented a differential gearbox or all-terrain tires, so it'll always be a step behind.
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How many wheeled vehicles do you know of that can negotiate a bog, climb a mountain, scale a tree, wade a river, cross soft sand, and do the foxtrot?

Specialized mechanical devices may be magnitudes superior in their given feild, but they are no where near as capable in a general way. Taken as a whole, biological organisms are, hands down, the orders of magnitude more capable, and complicated , than any machine deviced by man.

1098
 
Though, there is a reason we left the wheels on the tiger. When something goes wrong, it is food to have those landing points, instead of being a box with emitters on bottom. Say a nearby explosion above them forces them down from where they are hovering. ( assuming they hover close to the ground, otherwise they give up a chunk of the profile bonus.) No wheels, and you risk damaging something.


Now, the question is if there are any environments that being forced to touch down in are worse for wheels than feet.
 
Hoyr said:
They're giant robots? News at 11.

More seriously they're a legacy item on the tree. It would cover any design that used either a giant robot arm or giant robot leg (tentacle, limb, etc). I can't think of a particular reason to take them. Thus my earlier comment about how I would never get to make a mechwarrior reference.

The only upside is that looking at things I think the Mech techs gets you bigger vehicles for less RP past the first.
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Honestly, the primary reason I put mechs on the tech tree was synergy with biotics and neural interface research; the idea was that once the foundational techs were researched, there would be options to combine them, building a mech of X size with a system of eezo nodules mimicing that of it's pilot, and said pilot would be able to pilot the mech via neural interface and produce large scale biotic analogues of effects. Such a platform would be ruinously expensive, would likely require heavy customization for each of it's users, but would have some degree of battlefield utility, I think. Yes, a 5 meter tall mech is a high profile target compared to a tank, but if it can biotic charge across the killing field, wipe out your infantry with a nova before grabing your tank in a lift field, flipping it over and slamming it to the ground, it might be useful in a niche capacity.
 
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