Finally home. Catching up.
GMO organisms are. Stuff like advanced alloys, carbon nanofibers, and better batteries aren't. Because they don't interact with humans, not noticeably. They are not put into human bodies, they are not something a person on the street interacts with (that they notice, at least).
Stuff is only background until it isnt.
Vaccines were a largely uncontroversial aspect of modern life in the West until they suddenly stopped being so in the middle of a bloody global pandemic. EVs literally get harassed on the roads in some parts of the US by chuds rolling coal or deliberately blocking charging spots, and in Jan 2023 the Wyoming state legislature introduced a bill(didnt pass) to ban EVs in order to protect the oil and gas industry.
Material science is no exception either.
Carbon nanotube toxicity is already an incipient environmental health issue that has been demonstrated to cause pathological changes in rodent studies.
The evidence suggests that, no, you cant sidestep issues by changing where you focus on.
Human society is not predictable that way.
Yes it is. And one that goes directly against the text and spirit of what "advanced technology" is. Until we actually make a hell, it's a baseless assumption.
No its not.
You brought up Autochtonia, and its a great example. Autochtonia's techbase bore significant differences from that of the rest of Creation because they lived in the worldbody of a Primordial.
In the AU's where the Locust Crusade happened?You couldnt get a hoe, let alone a tractor from Autochtonia, because they didnt practice agriculture. No antibiotics because infectious diseases didnt exist, and their medical establishment had no experience with the concept. You couldnt get an umbrella, because they didnt have weather. Mining bore no resemblance across societies.
I could go on.
Exalted very much has "reclaim the glories of the past" theme in it.
Reclaim the glories of the past isnt technological progression.
And the primary themes of Exalted 2E was more along the lines of saving the world than reclaiming the glories of the past anyway.
Aint nobody rebuilding the glories of the First Age with the Deathlords and their Neverborn masters trying to destroy Creation.
It should also be noted you do not have to spend all your energies on an uplift. You could just throw a few techs into the mix and see what happens, you could trade them to factions interested in such things, which would presumably have some way to make use of them. It's not all or nothing.
1)Like BronzeTongue said, you dont make money from an uplift.
You spend money, time, resources, AP.
Its not, or at least shouldnt be, considered as a moneymaking venture.
2)That doesnt make it any less a political issue.
To use Yog's fusion example, tossing commercial fusion(assuming we have it) to the Chinese administration, say, will have the fastest and most substantial impact on the world, because they are the one major govt both committed to major industrial investments and with the will and regulatory structure to implement new technologies fast, and a pressing need to reduce pollution levels. And given how much global manufacturing capacity is offshored in China, it matters.
Even now per-capita GDP in China IIRC is still a quarter that of Europe, let alone the US ; improving the standard of living of a billion plus people is undisputably a moral good.But it also strengthens a non-democratic regime thats involved in internal repression, potentially enough to incentivize foreign adventures, including Taiwan.
Not to mention the global economic shocks from an abrupt drop in fossil fuel requirements from one of the world's three biggest economies, and how it affects the more than five hundred million people who live in oil-producing countries.
Or how it affects Russia, which is both a petro-economy and holder of one of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world.
There are good reasons why I would rather not go near this at all in an urban fantasy quest.
In fairness, Molly's world soul isn't in the nevernever in the conventional sense. It's connected somehow, but it isn't a horizon realm:
Explicit in the charm text; the thing is inside Molly and has a gauntlet equivalent independent of the actual gauntlet around her.
So it's not unreasonable to say that the physics, whatever they are, would be of the more stable variety and conform to what Molly thinks they should on launch, because we're talking the contents of a budding world-titan's soul and not the Wylde Marches or whatever.
Not that it's necessarily true, but it's not inherently unreasonable to assert.
True.
But none of that suggests a one to one correspondence of technology trees.
Especially if its a society with widescale use of magic side by side with conventional/advanced technology providing alternative options for societal development; the Hell options literally mention stuff like teleportation as options for mass transit.
For example, stuff like life support systems in an arcology are just as likely to be at least in part the provenance of a bunch of elementals just like it was in Autochtonia, instead of a plain tech setup. Same with large scale food preservation.
I dont think its reasonable to assume, like Yog is doing, that you can expect that technologies that work on Earth, under the conditions of Earth, with access to mundane technology only, will have superior technological versions in our Hell, where both magic and tech are a thing.
Im actually expecting any exchange to be two way.
COMMENTARY
-10th November 2006 is a Friday.
So we have 3 days to keep people under guard until the vampire party, which are largely over a weekend, so school and work is not really an impediment.
-Just talk to Lydia and take it in shifts.
Either Lydia or Molly is on site around the clock over the weekend in Last Station, whether or not Harry is there.
Then on the day of the party, have Harry babysit them, and ask Michael to give him backup while Molly and Lydia go to the party and....resolve the issue. Permanently.
-Going to note that for future iterations of this sort of issue?
Chicago is an old city with lots of older residential buildings that a real estate investor with ten or twenty million to spare and unconventional renovation options could look into. Googling turns up at least three hotels cum apartment buildings that were available for acquisition and renovation as of January 2007:
- The Guyon Hotel (10-storey, 169-unit residential hotel, listed for sale at $500,000 in 2016)
- The Purple Hotel(8.5 acre, 225 rooms, 2x restaurants, outdoor swimming pool, parking lot, closed in 2007 for health and safety violations, demolished in 2013)
- The Strand Hotel(5-story building, 5x stores on 1st floor, 140 guest rooms, concrete basement, adjacent separate property with paved parking lot, vacant for 10 years until 2014, converted into ~60 apartment building with commercial stores)
Once we do the lottery thing in January and have a couple hundred million to spare, dropping 10-40 million should allow us to buy one or two, have it renovated, hit it with Blessing of the Wood Dragon to eliminate maintenance costs, then drop some wards on it, summon/create a place god and reserve some rooms/a floor as a safehouse for people under threat.
Run a connection to Undertown/Last Station from the basement if its in the right place.
