Development levels rather than tech levels (segué into soft-tech robofac factories)

For what it’s worth, a lot of questions I ask are not intended to be recommendations for things you should discuss, but test cases. In effect, I’m asking, “Does this occur at DLN or not, and does your description lead the player to reach the right conclusion most of the time?” I’m trying to help make sure that no one hands you a plucked chicken and tells you “This is your man!”

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Thank you, it is very helpful.

It try to answer the substantive questions without coming across as defensive, but sometimes err on the side of brevity. I’m sorry if that leaves you feeling that you have grasped a nettle.

Wait a minute. You’re supposing that in a future where the typical level of economic development is just a bit ahead of the current American or Australian level, raising and butchering animals to get meat (and leather, I suppose?) is so rare as to be nearly unheard of? I think I would need to see the economic analysis that supports this. Or is it a matter not of economic necessity but of cultural assumptions?

Important point. The level of economic development is only a little ahead of the current USA, but the level of technology is far in advance. They do it that way because they have a legacy¹ of designer crops and designer livestock that provide better products cheaper from perennial para-plants and para-animals that can be harvested without killing them. Para-cows gestate a large rib-eye and deliver it three times per year. Para-geese lay daily eggs of fatty liver tissue. Para-bucks show up for a half-annual muster at which a layer of ready-tanned fine leather can be peeled off without hurting them, and without requiring that their replacements be bred.

Gourmets on Tau Ceti still eat seeds, animal flesh, and whole live radishes. Tau Cetians are gross.


¹ From DL8 Old Earth, from their TL8 pioneering ancestors, or from Simanta.

Ugh! Comparing this text with the table in my original post and the sources, I see that my description of DL5 matches TL4.5, DL6 reads like TL5, and I need to give more thought to DL6 and DL7.

Later.

Down to 966 words!

Level of economic development

Development level 1

On the ten poorest colonies (Dirawong, Rebirth, Surikate, Leviathan, Goodhope, Bohemia, Serengeti, Luoyang, Haudenosaunee, and Oberon) the local manufacturing struggles to produce anything more sophisticated than Iron Age tech. There is no infrastructure to speak of, no permanent settlements larger than a few thousand occupants, almost no workshops larger or more specialised than a village smithy. Agriculture is primitive, often depending on annual crops and livestock that have to be killed to produce meat and hides.

These worlds can’t practically export anything at any price. Their few critical high-tech imports, reserved to the powerful, are brought in by foreign visitors and interstellar aid programs or paid for with their cash.

Development level 2

About 125 worlds, with a combined total of about 73 billion population, use the production methods of the classical empires and of mediaeval times. They have high-biotech crops, either as a legacy from Old Earth or introduced recently, but there are no power networks or reticulated water supplies. Cellular communications are confined to the cities and busy travel routes; between them satellite communications are reserved to the privileged.

These worlds have enough bridges, roads, and ports, and sufficiently robust institutions, that they can export precious minerals and premium agricultural products—but development aid is still a critical source of foreign exchange. Imports are precious and used sparingly, even mid-tech ones from neighbours with middling development, such as smart phones.

Development level 3

About 100 worlds, home to 72 billion people, use pre-industrial production methods like those of Renaissance and Enlightenment workshops. Reticulated sewers, water supplies, power supplies, and communications are confined to wealthy areas. Cellular comms are widespread but have regional gaps.

These worlds usually export enough minerals and high-biotech agricultural products, some of them improved by handicrafts, that imported gadgets and equipment are not rarities, though few firms or households can afford to use imports in more than limited key applications. Ordinary people use a makeshift-looking combination of high tech imports and local basics, such as an electric impeller on a wooden boat, or an autophysician in an adobe clinic.

Development level 4

About 100 primary colonies, home to 88 billion people, are at least partly industrialised. They use production methods of the Industrial Revolution (DL4.0) and assembly lines (DL4.5) to assemble cast, stamped, machined, and imported parts. Some factories process agricultural and mineral products for domestic consumption and as value-added exports. Others assemble imported subassemblies from multiple specialised sources for sale and re-export as high-tech products. These economies also produce mechanical and electrical components.

Cities here have reticulated water supplies, energy grids, and sewers. At DL4.5 towns do. Cellular communications cover all but remote rural areas. There may be a global information network, but not universal access.

Over 200 new worlds in the fringe (home to a total of 37 billion) are at a roughly similar level of development, though their economies are oriented to clearing land to establish plantations. Immigrants and investors supply most of their foreign exchange.

Development level 5

About 330 primary colonies, home to 65 billion people, use methods based on printing (such as photolithography) to mass-produce such things as microchips and printed microcircuits. They are the primary source of electronic components in the interstellar economy. These worlds have data networks and grid power supplies reaching every home, ubiquitous high-speed cellular data. Many combine materials from lower-tech worlds and components from higher-tech ones to produce typical consumer products and traded subassemblies of the interstellar economy.

About 110 new worlds in the fringe, home to 44 billion people, have reached a comparable level of development. They are industrialising, and starting to replace sources in the Core and Periphery as suppliers of consumer products to the Fringe. They are also starting to attract migrants less inclined to rural pioneering.

Development level 6

About 120 primary colonies and forty new worlds, home to 180 billion people, use industrial methods based on sophisticated microscale extrusion (“3D printing”, “tissue printing”), etching and so forth to produce photonic devices and microstructured materials, including tissues and organs.

Development level six is the median by population. Colonies more developed than this are seen as rich, those less so than this as poor. The full range of consumer products is in ordinary use, but poor and frugal people do prefer some cheaper mid-tech alternatives.

Development level 7

Fifty-odd primary colonies and the five most successful new colonies use industrial methods based on nanomachining and molecular biology to assemble cells, organelles, nanocomposites and smart materials. The involvement of human workers in such economies is abstruse, as IT replaces much cognitive work and the specialisation of capital rather than that of skilled labour becomes critical. Many jobs on these worlds seem abstract and frivolous to the materially deprived denizens of less developed economies.

Development level 8

Fewer than twenty worlds—none of them in the Fringe, perhaps three in the Periphery—use industrial processes under exotic conditions, atomic epitaxy etc. to make such things as optical phased array emitters, quantum computers, long fullerene strands, small amounts of antimatter…. These worlds export the critical components of high-tech devices for the wider economy, and import lower-tech products and fully assembled devices for consumption.

DL8.0 is what Earth achieved before its destruction. Six worlds in the Core (Aeneas, Iter, Seeonee, Simanta, Tau Ceti, and Todos Santos) have taken advantage of interstellar trade to achieve economies of scale and specialisation allowing DL8.5. They manufacture commercially products that were seen on Earth only as experimental demonstrations, if at all. Pundits call this group “the Suite”, and analyse its members as sectors of a single more highly-developed economy. Some analyse the Empire as the transport sector of the Suite.

Here’s that table from the first post with the gaps filled in.

Development level things are made by GURPS TL GURPS description
0 Palaeolithic generalists TL 0 (early) Stone Age
0.5 Neolithic experts TL 0 (mature) Stone Age
1 Bronze Age village tradesmen TL 1 Bronze Age
1.5 Iron Age municipal craftsmen TL 2 (early) Iron Age
2 Classical urban workshops TL 2 (advanced) Iron Age
2.5 Mediaeval craft guilds & putting-out TL 3 Medieval
3 Renaissance manual factories TL 4 (early) Age of Sail
3.5 Enlightenment factories with jigs and hand machines TL 4 (advanced) Age of Sail
4 Industrial Revolution mills TL 5 Industrial Revolution
4.5 Industrial Age assembly lines TL 6 Mechanized Age
5 Electronics Age circuit printing TL 7 Nuclear Age
5.5 Communications Age chip fabs TL 8 Digital Age
6 Photonic Age photolithographic layering TL 9 (early) Microtech Age
6.5 Biofab Age tissue printing TL 9 (mature) Microtech Age
7 Micromachining stereotype jigs TL 9 (advanced) Microtech Age
7.5 Biomolecular autofacs TL 10 (delayed) Robotic Age
8 Manufacture under exotic conditions TL 10 (standard) Robotic Age
8.5 The Suite TL 10 (advanced) Robotic Age

I’m pleased with my work on this section. I suppose the British will be horrified.

I may be harping on the same thing and not getting the point. I can see that DL1 has very little Stuff. But why don’t they have cities? “Because they’d all die of the terrible hygiene” didn’t stop London.

At the very least this seems to imply a world desperately poor in resources that can’t manage to get itself going by autarky, as Earth after all did. Or at least it’s like that for some reason: it’s been recently settled; it doesn’t have enough people; it has a government that wants its people unproductive and poor (which seems irrational enough that I tend to think that it’s run by fanatics, whether nominally religious or otherwise).

I guess each might have its own reason: extremely low maximum population density in relation to transport technology on this world, oases too small on that world, society divided into mutually hostile tribes on that one.

But if you look at it backwards it comes down to one thing. If they did have cities—if they could assemble the food and water supplies, if they could pacify a large enough group to settle something the size of, say, Alesia—then they would quickly become DL3. Cities create opportunities for specialisation and exchange, populous markets of consumers allow economies of scale. In this setting you don’t have to wait on invention or even R&D. It is scale and not technology that determines DL.

In that case I think my quibbles would be satisfied with a note along the lines of “this isn’t a state that human populations stay in, given a choice; some consideration, environmental or human, is keeping them there”.

What about this?

On the ten poorest colonies (Dirawong, Rebirth, Surikate, Leviathan, Goodhope, Bohemia, Serengeti, Luoyang, Haudenosaunee, and Oberon) various social and ecological lacks and failings make settlements larger than a few thousand occupants impractical. Agriculture is primitive, usually depending on annual crops and livestock that has to be killed to produce meat and hides, or on nomadism. There are no workshops larger or more specialised than a village smithy, no infrastructure to speak of. The local manufacturing struggles to produce anything more sophisticated than Iron Age tech.

Sure, that works for me.

Working out what’s wrong with a planet like this, and trying to fix it, seems as though it might be broadly consonant with the planetary romance ethos: maybe engineering a better source of dietary selenium isn’t the sort of thing PCs do, but overthrowing repressive governments certainly is.

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I’m pretty happy with the result too. Thank you for your persistence.

Also, this conversation has given me an idea for how to approach the section on settlement structure.

I take it this means “manufacture of exotic configurations of matter”? I have to say that my first thought on reading it was to puzzle over whether it was the manufacture of exotic political organizations, or manufacture that could only take place under exotic political organizations; it took me a minute to think, “Oh, ‘states of matter’!” Possibly “exotic matter manufacture” might be better.

(I use the basic noun rather than the gerund derived from the use of the noun as a verb, because they mean the same thing and the root form is shorter.)

Is the alternative meant to be economically superior? I have to say that it’s not clear to me that this is so.

Consider, on one hand, a Beast that produces and gives “birth” to a kilo of protein every week; and, on the other hand, a different beast that adds a kilo of protein to its body weight every week. After some interval of time—without loss of generality, let’s say a year—the Beast stops yielding, and the beast stops gaining weight. We slaughter the beast and eat its added protein. But we also eat its original complement of protein. Do we do likewise with the Beast? If we do, it seems that its yield is equal; if we simply humanely terminate it and dispose of its remains, we have obtained much less nutritive yield from it.

Is there reason to suppose that the “retail” approach to protein harvesting is more efficient than the “wholesale” one?

Or is this meant to be a cultural or ethical decision? (For example, would it be considered that butchered lamb was problematic in a way that lamb-flavored tissue was not?) I must confess that my sympathies are with the Tau Cetian gourmets. But subjective value judgments aside, is there an assumed future history that leads to the triumph of this particular ethical stance? Or is it an intentionally alien cultural element included as a distancing device, a “we’re not in Kansas any more,” so to speak?

My vision was that the Beast might live for 30 years, yielding a kilo of 100% prime steak per week, whereas the beast would be slaughtered at about 50 kg live weight and dress down to about 15kg, once per year. The Beast is three times as productive because it grows bones, offal etc. only once per generation instead of once per year.

Similarly, a high-tech crop plant could grow roots and stems only once, and after being established put almost all of its photosynthetic yield into starch, fentanyl, rocket fuel, or whatever else it was being grown for.

Essentially, the perennial crop plant is being viewed as a solar-powered nanotech factory, the grazing Beast as a biotech robot combine harvester. It seems clearly best not to plough your factory into the ground every year, and clearly best not to scrap your robot to get its bin open. It seems to me that technology and economics dictate some outcome like this. This is where I kept ending up when I thought carefully about the limitations of nanotechnology.

I went with “manufacture under exotic conditions”, and have edited my previous post for reference rather than re-post the table.

Grammatically, I want the entries in that column to complete the sentence that the heading begins.

What are you assuming as the mature body weight for the Beast? I will stipulate that in comparison with a cumulative yield of 1500 kg, any likely body weight is going to be of negligible importance. But I’d still like to know how much biomass goes into it.

A minor cost factor seems to be that the beast can be allowed to roam the fields, and only needs to be brought to the slaughterhouse once, after it’s fattened up. The Beast needs someone to be following it around and collecting the steaks. That seems to be an increased cost in labor, or in the robotic equivalent. A planet that doesn’t have labor-saving technologies might rationally prefer to avoid the trouble.

On the other hand, many societies have already had the functional equivalent of what you describe at low TLs: milking and sometimes bleeding herd animals. Milking, at least, has to be done daily, so your milk cattle have to be kept close to the barn.

I grew up on the boundary between a dairying district and a beef-raising district. The cows come in to the bales of their own accord, twice per day, to be milked. Classmates who had to do the milking every morning before school (indeed, before breakfast) told me that each cow had its own accustomed place in the milking queue, and that they waited patiently for their turn at the milking machine. It was beef steers that had to be mustered by stockmen—only twice in their two-year lives, so they never grew habituated. The Beast will have it in firmware to seek its byre periodically for labour.

Shearing sheep is another example of a durable biotech harvesting robot having its bins emptied periodically. So in its way is collecting honey from hives.

A good size for the Beast will, I guess, depend on the climate, the type of feed, and the nature of the material to be harvested. I don’t see anything smaller than a bee being desirable. I can definitely see a Beast the size of a cow delivering a boned rib roast as convenient, perhaps something even larger would economise on handling.

Biotech is going to give us improved food conversion ratios either way. It seems obvious to me that when we have the power to design our own organisms as soft-tech robots, rather than co-opting biological survival machines, it will not be good design to accumulate the robots’ products as hypertrophied structure and components, nor to annually destroy and replace the machine.

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The question in my mind is, do you get better output efficiency with beasts and fodder crops and so on, or with a great lump that’s an entire ecosystem in a single (building/organism), as it might be a multi-hundred-metre dome covered with solar cells which you dump in a water source?

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