Jessica of Dune Predictions!


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Post by Freakzilla »

DuneFishUK wrote:
Ampoliros wrote:By the way there is an excerpt of Chapterhouse that discusses the Caladanian Primatives. I'm pretty sure its in OM.

Which to the hacks means wherever we damn well please.
Can't say I remember that one :( - Which makes me look forward to re-reading the last 2 books even more :D It's been yonks since I last read them.
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ChaniLuv, can't help with the lost pix or any unrevealed drafts, but I'm sure we can rustle up copies of all the Trannies stuff you've posted. :)


As for the CalPrims... :P

ONE reference, one SINGLE, SOLITARY reference:
FH in Heretics wrote:Lucilla slowed her pace to watch a passerby step into the alleyway and pass a coin to the proprietor, then lean into a concave basin made brilliant by the lights. The proprietor stared back at Lucilla. She saw a man with a narrow dark face, the face of a Caladanian primitive on a body only slightly taller than that of a Tleilaxu Master. There had been a look of contempt on his brooding face as he took the customer's money.
The trip taken by Jessica and Leto (that Alia brings up in the first "chapter") is from this:
FH in Dune wrote: She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan—she and the Duke Leto, before Paul's birth. They'd flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery—man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor-buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there'd been the white petals of trimaran dhows.
No mention of sighting any Prims there.

By the way, I'm wondering if the Two Brain Trusts haven't confused Ecazi fogwood with Lost Ones "frame bushes":
FH in Heretics wrote:"Stupid of me!" Muzzafar produced a small case from a side pocket of his jacket and extracted a thin folder. Teg recognized a holostat similar to one he had carried himself during his long service—pictures of home and family. Muzzafar placed the holostat on the table between them and tapped the control button.

The full-color image of a bushy green expanse of jungle came alive in miniature above the tabletop.

"Home," Muzzafar said. "Frame bush in the center there." A finger indicated a place in the projection. "First one that ever obeyed me. People laughed at me for choosing the first one that way and sticking with it."

Teg stared at the projection, aware of a deep sadness in Muzzafar's voice. The indicated bush was a spindly grouping of thin limbs with bright blue bulbs dangling from the tips.

Frame bush?

"Rather thin thing, I know," Muzzafar said, removing his pointing finger from the projection. "Not secure at all. Had to defend myself a few times in the first months with it. Grew rather fond of it, though. They respond to that, you know. It's the best home in all the deep valleys now, by the Eternal Rock of Dur!"

Muzzafar stared at Teg's puzzled expression. "Damn! You don't have frame bushes, of course. You must forgive my crashing ignorance. We've a great deal to teach each other, I think."

"You called that home," Teg said.

"Oh, yes. With proper direction, once they learn to obey, of course, a frame bush will grow itself into a magnificent residence. It only takes four or five standards."
I'm not at all convinced that their Myra-the-Metamorph trees (and that Elaccan guy's mansion) is what FH had in mind for fogwood. :roll:
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The Bene Gesserit forces seemed quite suprized when the bushes on Gammu screamed at them. I assumed those were frame bushes and that they had never seen them before.
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Post by chanilover »

SandChigger wrote:ChaniLuv, can't help with the lost pix or any unrevealed drafts, but I'm sure we can rustle up copies of all the Trannies stuff you've posted. :)


As for the CalPrims... :P

ONE reference, one SINGLE, SOLITARY reference:
FH in Heretics wrote:Lucilla slowed her pace to watch a passerby step into the alleyway and pass a coin to the proprietor, then lean into a concave basin made brilliant by the lights. The proprietor stared back at Lucilla. She saw a man with a narrow dark face, the face of a Caladanian primitive on a body only slightly taller than that of a Tleilaxu Master. There had been a look of contempt on his brooding face as he took the customer's money.
The trip taken by Jessica and Leto (that Alia brings up in the first "chapter") is from this:
FH in Dune wrote: She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan—she and the Duke Leto, before Paul's birth. They'd flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery—man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor-buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there'd been the white petals of trimaran dhows.
No mention of sighting any Prims there.

By the way, I'm wondering if the Two Brain Trusts haven't confused Ecazi fogwood with Lost Ones "frame bushes":
FH in Heretics wrote:"Stupid of me!" Muzzafar produced a small case from a side pocket of his jacket and extracted a thin folder. Teg recognized a holostat similar to one he had carried himself during his long service—pictures of home and family. Muzzafar placed the holostat on the table between them and tapped the control button.

The full-color image of a bushy green expanse of jungle came alive in miniature above the tabletop.

"Home," Muzzafar said. "Frame bush in the center there." A finger indicated a place in the projection. "First one that ever obeyed me. People laughed at me for choosing the first one that way and sticking with it."

Teg stared at the projection, aware of a deep sadness in Muzzafar's voice. The indicated bush was a spindly grouping of thin limbs with bright blue bulbs dangling from the tips.

Frame bush?

"Rather thin thing, I know," Muzzafar said, removing his pointing finger from the projection. "Not secure at all. Had to defend myself a few times in the first months with it. Grew rather fond of it, though. They respond to that, you know. It's the best home in all the deep valleys now, by the Eternal Rock of Dur!"

Muzzafar stared at Teg's puzzled expression. "Damn! You don't have frame bushes, of course. You must forgive my crashing ignorance. We've a great deal to teach each other, I think."

"You called that home," Teg said.

"Oh, yes. With proper direction, once they learn to obey, of course, a frame bush will grow itself into a magnificent residence. It only takes four or five standards."
I'm not at all convinced that their Myra-the-Metamorph trees (and that Elaccan guy's mansion) is what FH had in mind for fogwood. :roll:
The stuff I was working on has gone. Oh well, it's the pictures that I lost that really pissed me off.

I can get the other stories from that dump Dunenovels, whenever I feel the urge to look at that steaming pile of horseshit again.

What do you all think these primitives were?
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Post by SandChigger »

chanilover wrote:What do you all think these primitives were?
Who knows what FH had in mind.

One thing is certain: they can't be aborigines. ;)

A generation ship travelling at 0.1 c could theoretically reach Caladan (Delta Pavonis III) in a little over 167 years. (It's about 20 LY from Earth.) If we assume colonization sometime around the 30th century, that leaves around 170 centuries until the time of Dune. That's time for a LOT of history. ;)

I could see a planet becoming isolated and the population regressing to a more "primitive" state, especially before the advent of space-folding. (Remember, I assume NO FTL in the Duniverse.) Or maybe some portion of a population opting for a more "green" lifestyle and things getting a bit out of hand. But that's about it. And the only way I could see them surviving afterward would be for the rest of the planetary population to agree not to interfere with them. Doesn't exactly fit in too well with the Imperium and the faufreluches.

The "natives" in PoD are so clichéd: noble savages who immediately recognize that Duncan and Paul are the "good guys" (or who automatically sympathize with underdogs?) and who are willing to defend to the death those they have welcomed into their circle. And Paul just happens to know a few words of their language! Wow, he's amazing!

Feh. :roll:
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Post by SimonH »

SandChigger wrote:
The "natives" in PoD are so clichéd: noble savages who immediately recognize that Duncan and Paul are the "good guys" (or who automatically sympathize with underdogs?) and who are willing to defend to the death those they have welcomed into their circle. And Paul just happens to know a few words of their language! Wow, he's amazing!

Feh. :roll:
this sounds like C3PO and the Ewoks!
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Post by Freakzilla »

SandChigger wrote:(Remember, I assume NO FTL in the Duniverse.)
If we haven't formally had this argument here we should...

Anyway, I'd rather not rule out FTL as one of the "hodge podge" of methods used. It seems to me that safety and navigation were the limiting factors more than propulsion. Folding space is probably safer since you aren't moving through nearly as much space.
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Post by GamePlayer »

I agree. Accepting Faster-Than-Light travel in the Dune universe before the Guild navigators and Holtzman effects is not necessarily a bad thing. The only thing bad about it would be the way a certain hack had to take over the franchise and make FTL something dumb (big surprise). I'd rather not "ignore" the possibility but in staying with the themes of Frank Herbert, I'd assume any FTL method he'd made would have been well thought out with it's own flaws and disadvantages, much like everything else he created with his amazing talent for inventing technologies that felt real.
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Post by SandChigger »

Mankind's movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad. To begin with, early space travel, although widespread, was largely unregulated, slow, and uncertain, and, before the Guild monopoly, was accomplished by a hodgepodge of methods.
Well...FH neither explicitly admitted FTL (except in the Byron-Merritt-level argument that space-folding gets you somewhere faster than light can travel the same distance) nor explicitly excluded it, so it will forever remain an issue open to debate.

I choose not to admit it because

(1) Real world considerations:

FTL violated our understanding of the universe when FH wrote Dune and that fact remains unchanged more than forty years later. (But feel free to join Byron and argue for a revolutionary change in our understanding and technology.) Admitting FTL would remove one factor which for me distinguishes Dune from a lot of lesser science fiction. (Like the wonderful Legends books!) I prefer to think that FH came up with space-folding as a way of having his galactic Imperium while avoiding using more usual space-opera FTL devices.

(2) Duniverse-internal considerations:

The core of the Imperium occupies a very small volume of space. To me that implies a very slow expansion before the advent of space-folding. If FTL travel were available, wouldn't humans have probably spread out over a much larger area in those 110 centuries before the Jihad?

If FTL is possible in the Duniverse, why didn't the Ixians or someone else secretly develop alternatives to escape the Guild monopoly in the ten thousand years following the Jihad? That's a lot of time for R&D. Sure, even the fastest FTL is always going to be "slower" than space-folding, but for non-time-critical matters, why not use it?
Freakzilla wrote:It seems to me that safety and navigation were the limiting factors more than propulsion. Folding space is probably safer since you aren't moving through nearly as much space.
I don't think navigation is an issue. Why would it be, when they had computers or AI doing the navigating? It's safety that is the problem.

At any fraction of c you're moving through (normal) space and any collision with anything is most likely going to be catastrophic. Hence deflector shields and the like.

Supposedly you can't move through normal space at speeds greater than c, which is why we get hyperspace or subspace and similar ideas. Depends on the fictional universe as to whether you can run into things there.

Unless you have a prescient navigator, folding-space is probably the most dangerous method of travel, even with hyper-accurate navigational models of your destination: you can't account for variables like unknown or aberrant astronomical bodies and other ships.

-----

I recognize that there are some problems with my interpretation. We're told that during the disturbances following the Jihad the Landsraad continued its two-thousand-year tradition of meeting. Such an organization could not exist or really function without some form of fast transportation. (To get the members together to meet, and to relay and implement their decisions.) So I assume that Holtzman lived long before the Jihad and that space-folding was discovered and used before it as well.

(This also explains how the Jihad could be waged across thousands of star systems in just 93 years.)

"But...but...Norma Cenva designed the first Guild ship, so she must have lived around and after the Jihad!"

True. So I interpret "the first Guild ship" to mean "the first foldship designed specifically with the Guild's needs in mind" or "the first foldship widely used by the Guild" for passenger/cargo transport. (I also assume that does not mean a Heighliner. People didn't figure out how to built ships of iron and immediately undertake something like the Titanic or QE2.)


Please make no mistake here:

I am not proposing this is the only possible interpretation. I am not proposing this as the right interpretation. (I'm most certainly not claiming that this is what FH necessarily had in mind.) I'm not trying to convince anyone to agree with me. (I really don't care one way or the other. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that there may be flaws in my assumptions or conclusions, if someone would care to point them out.) I'm just explaining the view I have come to after thinking about it (a lot) and which allows me to continue to enjoy the series, all things considered.
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Post by GamePlayer »

Just my opinion, but I think that's splitting hairs mighty thin.

To me, there is no difference between a FTL drive and the navigators. The guild navigators and holtzman drives might as well be fairy dust powered steam engines for all I care, they still perform a function which is patently absurd. One might even label Frank's interpretation of space travel as among the most magically ridiculous concepts that violates the most laws of physics than almost any other method of FTL in science fiction.

But like I said, the strength of Frank Herbert's fiction is not that he creates less absurd technologies or phenomenon for his fictional stories. The strength of Frank Herbert's imagination is the manner in which he builds upon the absurd base of his technologies with a form and function that is so utterly believable. Yes, he invents FTL using a psychic way to travel rather than a mechanical one, but it's all the other details that define the characteristics of space travel in Dune. The spice, the navigators, the dangers of space travel, the monopoly of it, the effect upon the Dune world, the way the character must work in and around space travel, etc. Frank takes the absurd and decorates it with so much detail, so many "realistic factors" that this magical technology suddenly feels real. Space travel relies on the spice in the same way our mechanical engines rely on fuels. Hence, we relate and believe.

In the end, we don't care about how cool Guild space travel is (though it is cool), what we care about is how all the window dressing affects the beautifully detailed plot of Frank's masterfully told Dune story :)

I often like to use the contrast of Star Trek, both because I hate most of it and because it is the anti-thesis of realistic technology. Practically every technology in Star Trek is limitless and without disadvantage. It functions perfectly and without error, without fuel or input, without dirt, grime or wear. Only until the plot requires it does a Trek technology actually suffer from some failing. Such writing leads to an incredibly dull and lifeless fictional construct that feels as fake as it sounds, much like the fiction books of Kevin J. Anderson.

I'm sure that whatever method for space travel Frank would have made had he reason to do so, I wouldn't have cared if it was Ixian pig flatulence powering the technology. Frank would have decorated his non-Guild space travel technology with so many political, social, financial and thematic dressings that beautifully weaved into the story he was telling that I wouldn't have given a shit about my suspension of disbelief :)
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Post by SandChigger »

Ixian pig farts...or clam-powered ornithopters?! :P
he invents FTL using a psychic way to travel rather than a mechanical one
I don't think that's strictly true, is it? The "FTL" (space-folding) is a purely mechanical/physical phenomenon (not in the least bit plausible, btw), the navigation is the psychic part (also WAY out there).

No real argument on the rest.

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Post by GamePlayer »

I was just speaking about the process in general, not really getting into specifics. What little I did specifically mention was "guild navigators and holtzman drives" at the beginning of my post.
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Baraka Bryan wrote:therefore, space travel doesn't absolutely rely on the spice, the ability to travel safely depends on the spice.
Well, at least to travel absolutely safely, it does. ;)

Paul's threat at the end of Dune ("The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever," Paul said. "The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite...or out of ennui.") is an empty one in a sense.

The Guild would be crippled. The BG would have to rely on less effective poisons. Billions would die from withdrawal across the Imperium. But eventually the Ixians or someone else would rebuild the computers (or develop their navigation devices earlier?) and fly the foldships again. Never again as safely maybe, but they would fly.
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Post by loremaster »

So just to clarify one thing (Chig?)

Space travel any massive distance requires Folding technology - which can be developed on earth..

And spice, which is a MASSIVE distance from earth. (I cant think of a passage which tells us but we're talking thousands of light years, probably.)

Ergo - how did we get spice to travel safely across the stars if we need spice to travel to arrakis in the first place?

Either humans did they're usual Columbus-esque trick and sailed into something they couldnt be sure was safe...

OR there was another way to travel to the stars which we used.... to find a better way to travel (folding and guild).

Also - there is a massive difference between FTL and near instantaneous. Mach is the speed of sound. call Cesh the speed of light. Cesh 7 would only be 7 times faster than light. A distance which is 3500 light years would still take 500 years to reach.


And, FWIW - It's not picking holes in deliberate changes to the universe Frank created, the issue is whether, assuming those changes are true, the world he builds is consistent with the new rules of the universe.

Take Prescience (or Truthsense):

We have to assume our current perception of the universe is wrong, otherwise there can be no book. (ALL fantasy and Sci-Fi requires this to some extent- The Time Machine, classic example).

BUT

Given that it is possible to see the future, does the character then behave consistently with that? (Is it an absolute, or dependant on other factors, are those factors always there, or does that affect strength/accuracy of vision etc etc).
Given that truthsense does exist, do characters occasionally "Forget" they have truthsense?

THIS is one of the key differences between FH and KJA. Much as GP said.
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Post by loremaster »

And to give some more examples:

Frank sold us "pug eyed little grey men" who meddle in genetics.

A man super-turning into a worm which was nigh invulnerable.

Probable-aliens (Worms).

Seeing the future.

Neo (read: Teg)



Aren't all of these ideas FAR more absurd (that is, require the rewriting of more laws than space travel) than Space-folding?

The REASON we still love them is the detail and the skill with which Frank executed them. With believable strengths, weaknesses, limitations and grounding with existing knowledge (you as a teacher yourself must realise that new information is more readily accepted when it relates to previous knowledge.)


Any idiot can say "Ooh, i invented a teleporting device, it's based on a technology called the "Byron-Field".

It works whenever i want, without internal consistency, without being factored into the fabric and living of the universes inhabitants. It's just there so i can visit a lot of planets quickly. It takes no skill, no energy and the machine which does it is the size of a mobile phone.

Examples from other literature include:

When Dracula turns into a bat and back he still has his clothes with him (perfectly ordinary clothes?).

When you shoot superman or hit him with a car his fabric suit doesnt rip. NO-one ever recognises him with his glasses off. (which never ever get knocked off).
The HLP hasnt released Frank's notes yet, Brian hasn't got the handwriting quite right!
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Post by SandChigger »

I'll swallow the sandworm but strain on the 'trout. ;)
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Post by GamePlayer »

loremaster wrote: And spice, which is a MASSIVE distance from earth. (I cant think of a passage which tells us but we're talking thousands of light years, probably.)

Ergo - how did we get spice to travel safely across the stars if we need spice to travel to arrakis in the first place?

THIS is one of the key differences between FH and KJA. Much as GP said.
There's actually an easy explanation for that: time dilation. Even without FTL travel, a human could actually traverse the breadth of the universe in one lifetime. The problem is when that human returned to Earth, it would be billions of years in the future. Talk about late to the party :)

So despite the vast distances between Earth and Arrakis (actually, Canopus, the Arrakis star, is only 310 light years away), Dune could have been reached in only a few months with a sufficiently powerful conventionally propelled space craft traveling under constant acceleration thanks to time dilation. From there, two things might have happened:

1) The travelers landed upon Arrakis, discovered fold drives and prescient navigation and eventually they, or their descendants (depending upon the time it took humanity to develop fold drives and evolve prescience) returned to Earth instantaneously with fold travel.

2) The spice was brought back to Earth the hard way, but by then decades or more had passed on Earth. Exploration of the spice and it's properties then happened over time and fold travel/navigators only came about much later.

Regardless, since Dune takes place in 10,191, there's plenty of time in between early interstellar flights (via the "hodge podge of methods") and the events of Dune to have reached Arrakis, explored it and brought spice back to other parts of the early empire to begin it's eventual rise to prominence as the commerce of the empire.

The reason FTL is needed in fiction is because of the need to avoid the effects of relativity. Obviously you can't have a story where the protagonists leave on a 10 million year return trip to Arrakis. So you need an instantaneous method of travel to get around those problems.
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Post by Lisan Al-Gaib »

SandChigger wrote:
Baraka Bryan wrote:therefore, space travel doesn't absolutely rely on the spice, the ability to travel safely depends on the spice.
Well, at least to travel absolutely safely, it does. ;)

Paul's threat at the end of Dune ("The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever," Paul said. "The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite...or out of ennui.") is an empty one in a sense.

The Guild would be crippled. The BG would have to rely on less effective poisons. Billions would die from withdrawal across the Imperium. But eventually the Ixians or someone else would rebuild the computers (or develop their navigation devices earlier?) and fly the foldships again. Never again as safely maybe, but they would fly.
I completely agree with Chig (I think I said and discussed that before).

I think is possible to create a explanation for Space travel before Navigators without using another FTL technologies. And again, we have to remember that Frank never stated before any other technology to travel between stars than Holtzmann generators. So, I believe he hadn't planned something like FTL propulsors.

Once more,
What Frank said to us is that Navigators became the travel secure again after the Butlerian Jihad. Before of that, Computers were used to do this job. period. The questions is: How good the computers were?

Nothing goes against the possibility that folding space wasn't available before BJ. That would end the problem with the Landsraad Meetings.
FH said in Heretics that the Folding technology was instantaneous, but already said that the travels before Guild were erratics, being the possibility the ship to appears inside the star!

So, I think the scenario of the space travel before Guild was: The folding space was available, and Holtzmann had developed many years before BJ. However the computer navigation wasn't so good as a Guild Navigator, and mistakes increases proportionally to the stellar system distance from the start point of travel. This detail would explain why the Imperium's core is small.

Well, these are my suppositions. I have to read more the novels to see what was said about space travels.
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Post by Hunchback Jack »

I always figured that there was more to the Navigators' role than just safety - they also guided the craft. I would think that there was more to flying a Guildship than just pointing the nose in the right direction and turning on the foldspace generators. Prescience would be needed to keep the ship "on course".

No textual evidence, sorry. Just my assumption.

FTL travel could have been possible without navigators, but only (I would assume) before the Butlerian Jihad. I assume computers could have done the navigating. After the Jihad, though, I would think it would be STL only.

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Post by A Thing of Eternity »

GamePlayer wrote:
loremaster wrote: And spice, which is a MASSIVE distance from earth. (I cant think of a passage which tells us but we're talking thousands of light years, probably.)

Ergo - how did we get spice to travel safely across the stars if we need spice to travel to arrakis in the first place?

THIS is one of the key differences between FH and KJA. Much as GP said.
There's actually an easy explanation for that: time dilation. Even without FTL travel, a human could actually traverse the breadth of the universe in one lifetime. The problem is when that human returned to Earth, it would be billions of years in the future. Talk about late to the party :)

So despite the vast distances between Earth and Arrakis (actually, Canopus, the Arrakis star, is only 310 light years away), Dune could have been reached in only a few months with a sufficiently powerful conventionally propelled space craft traveling under constant acceleration thanks to time dilation. From there, two things might have happened:

1) The travelers landed upon Arrakis, discovered fold drives and prescient navigation and eventually they, or their descendants (depending upon the time it took humanity to develop fold drives and evolve prescience) returned to Earth instantaneously with fold travel.

2) The spice was brought back to Earth the hard way, but by then decades or more had passed on Earth. Exploration of the spice and it's properties then happened over time and fold travel/navigators only came about much later.

Regardless, since Dune takes place in 10,191, there's plenty of time in between early interstellar flights (via the "hodge podge of methods") and the events of Dune to have reached Arrakis, explored it and brought spice back to other parts of the early empire to begin it's eventual rise to prominence as the commerce of the empire.

The reason FTL is needed in fiction is because of the need to avoid the effects of relativity. Obviously you can't have a story where the protagonists leave on a 10 million year return trip to Arrakis. So you need an instantaneous method of travel to get around those problems.
Actually there's any easier explanation for that :wink: (to both of you) - there's no reason that the spacefolding drives couldn't have been invented and used thousands of years before the spice was ever found. They had computers, and as such had no need at all for the spice. It was only after the Jihad that the whole prescience to foldspace safely thing would have been introduced.

Everything GP says here is totally right, it just misses that the technology could have been around for millenia before the navaigators became necessary.

Loremaster - between me and GP we got you covered on that question?
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Freakzilla
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Post by Freakzilla »

I've always assumed that space folding technology existed prior to the BJ and that it was the Guild's use of prescient navigators that gave them the edge over companies using computers after the Jihad.

They probably just made shorter folds to be safe and that is why the Imperial core is small.
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Post by GamePlayer »

Oh yeah, nice catch A Thing Of Eternity. I hadn't considered that one. But that's a good theory too. In any case, there seems to be ample time for any of those scenarios. And they may or may not have included FTL.

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Post by Freakzilla »

So she says...
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Post by GamePlayer »

I think she's female. The only one whose gender I question is my chigga, ever since those pictures.

"But he actually has excellent bone structure. I'm kinda having a hard time not looking at him now. Is that weird?"

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Post by Freakzilla »

I've had my doubts since I saw that pink shirt.
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