technological absurdities


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georgiedenbro
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by georgiedenbro »

Freakzilla wrote: I imagine that they were captured as slaves and deposited on Arrakis as a work force. Once there, they were essentially free, but without means or opportunity to leave. They either worked enough to buy water or went into the desert to be "wild".
I just had a cynical thought, which may be something Frank would have had in mind. If you deposit slaves on a planet but tell them they're "free men", while knowing that in order to survive they'll have to work for you to earn a living, what you basically have is where modern capitalism went. This involves people who are 'free' to decline to work, even though the alternative is death since they have nowhere else to go. In modern society it isn't strictly impossible, but in general it's very difficult to go 'off the grid' and have nothing to do with society in general and the system of economics in place there. The only way to avoid the rat race is to become a survivalist or something and live in the woods and hunt for food, or maybe run a self-sufficient farm. And I guess maybe that's exactly what the desert Fremen effectively did, assuming they were given the choice to work in the city or not. A slaver might well have thought "We'll tell those fools they're free in order to fool them, except when they get hungry they'll come crawling and begging for a job. So our workforce situation is solved and we don't need to enforce anything or watch anybody." It's an efficient slavery system where the workers can tell themselves they're free men, even though they have no control of their lives and are subject to their 'employers' in all things. I guess the joke would be on them if the 'free men' actually said fuck it and just went into the desert never to return. It kind of turns the history of Dune into a funny story if you think of it that way, that those 'slaves' would come back and conquer the entire Imperium.
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georgiedenbro
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by georgiedenbro »

distrans wrote:it was more a point that struck me given my background in climbing
as for farming I can assure you we need sprawl. indoor growing cannot come close to the production that is capable under natural sunlight. I forget that precise number but outdoors sunlight is something like 9000k per sq inch irregardless to the height of the plant. artificial lightings intensity decreases exponentially as distance from the bulb increases. there are many ways of stacking growth closer to the bulb in order to take best advantage of it and thus minimizing the square footage needed to produce but none of these techniques come anywhere close to halfing the acreage it takes to feed a population
https://apnews.com/bb14d1bf3a6143118ba9910b11adb5d8

This will become more efficient.
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distrans
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by distrans »

"if we can get three precent of the green plant elements on
arrakis involved in forming carbon compounds as foodstuff
weve started the cyclic system"

kynes; pg 139 dune
at that first and last formal dinner with the duke

if the fremen were growing most of their own food, what percentage of dunes plants would such as he describes in public as a hypothetical?
distrans
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by distrans »

the mechanism for reclaiming humidity in the sietches is never mentioned

and apparently its was cheap and adaptable for very small places as on the march from where Jessica and paul first met the fremen and tabr they stopped at a small cave where after sealing the doors and windows they could take off their stillsuits

hard to imagine any method not taking days and days so when they left they had to leave it running and the doors and windows still sealed
georgiedenbro
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by georgiedenbro »

It's 20,000 years in the future!
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distrans
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by distrans »

ok,
so it works pretty instantly. that would mean caves had catchpockets and before you cracked the door you had to decide how to divi up all the moisture that had been pulled out of the air

they would be doing this constantly

more work for the watermaster
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Freakzilla
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Re: technological absurdities

Post by Freakzilla »

I think georgie may have been refering to progress made an agriculture. In reality we've made so much progress in the last few thousand years that the plants we started with, and animals, are nothing like their original form.
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