Earth: What the hell happened?


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Kojiro
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

Post by Kojiro »

lotek wrote:any quotes to back that up?
If you mean there was uprising and fighting fair enough, but your statement seems to imply some form of advancing army of rebels against the machines, where I see it more as pockets of mass hysteria brought by too much apathy, some kind of epidermic reaction (and I will keep my eyes opened for quotes going either way)
Well, I do recall a particular quote where men were using machines to effectively manipulate everyone else's lives. It's um... this one in fact.
"Why do you test for humans?" he asked.
"To set you free."
"Free?"
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind," Paul quoted.
Also, there are a lot of people today who're so attached to their cell phones and iPads that I doubt they'd give them up willingly without a fight.
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lotek
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

Post by lotek »

Kojiro wrote:
lotek wrote:any quotes to back that up?
If you mean there was uprising and fighting fair enough, but your statement seems to imply some form of advancing army of rebels against the machines, where I see it more as pockets of mass hysteria brought by too much apathy, some kind of epidermic reaction (and I will keep my eyes opened for quotes going either way)
Well, I do recall a particular quote where men were using machines to effectively manipulate everyone else's lives. It's um... this one in fact.
"Why do you test for humans?" he asked.
"To set you free."
"Free?"
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind," Paul quoted.
Also, there are a lot of people today who're so attached to their cell phones and iPads that I doubt they'd give them up willingly without a fight.
yeah I know what the BT is.
What I was asking was do you have any quotes that prove that humans would have needed to march forward in one or several armies working up a front like you suggested. I think there was an uprising but it was a chain reaction of mass hysteria of some sorts.
You could replace machines with prescience in that quote btw... which does prove my point that thinking machines and foretelling are both crutches humanity needs to shake off if it wants to survive(hence the Golden Path)

And there were no cell phones or Ipads when Frank wrote Dune(and no Star Wars either).
Spice is the worm's gonads.
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lotek
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

Post by lotek »

A Thing of Eternity wrote:
Kojiro wrote:
SandChigger wrote:You can always argue that the Navigators would have sensed someone developing (or using?) an alternative form of transportation as a threat and the Guild would have moved against them. (Or coerced the Emperor into doing so.) But it just makes more sense to me to assume that FTL wasn't possible. The books seem ambiguous on the matter to me. :)
I will note, because of the vast distances involved, if there was no FTL, this would have made the Butlerian Jihad a long and protracted effort. Armies would be spending years, decades, or even centuries in ships as they made their way from one star to another.
As an avid fan of STL SF, there is a faster option - spread the religous message via transmission and let local's do the work/fighting (and oh there would be fighting). This would still takes years/decades, but would be much faster than realistic STL.

exactly :)
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

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Kojiro wrote:I will note, because of the vast distances involved, if there was no FTL, this would have made the Butlerian Jihad a long and protracted effort. Armies would be spending years, decades, or even centuries in ships as they made their way from one star to another.
I assume that space-folding was discovered long before the Butlerian Jihad. Sometime between 3000 and 2000 B.G., in fact.

We know that the Landsraad was established around 2,000 years before the Jihad. Why so late? (Humans would have been traveling through space for around 9,000 years by that point.) Why wouldn't humanity have established a body like that in the earliest days of space exploration and colonization? (FH obviously had no problem imagining institutions existing for disbelief-begging millennia.) I assume the answer is because they couldn't (because without FTL they couldn't assemble for meetings in a timely fashion) and they really had no need (there were no issues, events or problems affecting everyone; everything was a local matter). Then someone comes along and applies Holzmann's theories in the right way and BOOM, space-folding creates the possibility of travel and trade between far-flung and formerly isolated systems ... but also enables piracy and military incursions. The Landsraad or its precursors would then have arisen either as a way of regulating trade and organizing common defense against aggression OR as a democratic response to a centralized imperial entity. It would have been a slow, gradual process, and that's why I give it anywhere from several hundred to a thousand years.

The small number of Landsraad-represented worlds just after the Jihad (only just over 13,000 after 11,000 years?) and limited spatial dispersion of the core of the Old Empire (everything within a sphere of maybe 500 LY?) also indicate, to me, a long period of very slow expansion, again arguing against FTL.


Lots of speculation and my rationalization of things in the appendices, for what it's worth. I personally prefer no FTL at all in the Duniverse to any hint of the standard vroom-vroom nonsense of most scifi and especially the pulp bullshit offered up steaming in the McDune books.
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Kojiro
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

Post by Kojiro »

lotek wrote: yeah I know what the BT is.
What I was asking was do you have any quotes that prove that humans would have needed to march forward in one or several armies working up a front like you suggested. I think there was an uprising but it was a chain reaction of mass hysteria of some sorts.
You could replace machines with prescience in that quote btw... which does prove my point that thinking machines and foretelling are both crutches humanity needs to shake off if it wants to survive(hence the Golden Path)

And there were no cell phones or Ipads when Frank wrote Dune(and no Star Wars either).
Then came the Butlerian Jihad -- two generations of chaos. The god of machine-
logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:

"Man may not be replaced."

Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. Men
looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that
most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition
Human nature implies that a war would be fought, by whatever methods. Not everyone is willing to see reason, that's just a fact of the species. I highly doubt that the humans who had enslaved others with their web of computers would willingly give up their power. Tyrants rarely do. There would be fighting and there would be a means of coordinating the struggle. Other posters have thankfully suggested some methods; I find the transmission concept to be intuitive. The Appendice does support that the Jihad only took a couple of generations, something massive sleeper ships full of troops would find difficult to accomplish.
SandChigger wrote:I assume that space-folding was discovered long before the Butlerian Jihad. Sometime between 3000 and 2000 B.G., in fact.
I'm not a hundred percent certain on this... the Appendices are very vague on the status of space travel during the Jihad.
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. The first space experiences, poorly communicated and subject to
extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation.
Has not religion claimed a patent on creation for all of these millennia?
-The Tleilaxu Question,
from Muad'dib Speaks
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Re: Earth: What the hell happened?

Post by SandChigger »

Kojiro wrote:I'm not a hundred percent certain on this... the Appendices are very vague on the status of space travel during the Jihad.
That's why it's called speculation.

There was either FTL or space-folding, because 93 years is not long enough to have any sort of Imperium/humanspace-wide conflict.
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