12/10/21 – Who’s Being Helped

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, December 10, 2021.

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2021-12-10-spacetrawler3

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Hope you all have a great weekend! 🙂

15 Comments

  1. Efogoto

    Quick! Tell her she has it wrong – it’s not her putting your lives in danger, it’s you running headlong to meet The-Beast-Who-Eats-Us of your own free wills! If necessary, tell her you simply can’t bear to see the Beast go hungry. She might let you go out of sympathy.

    1. Efogoto

      The mice are fabricated and cannot breed, so they have not evolved. The question is then, did the Strib ship’s computer come up with its own version of mice, or did it get the pattern from the computer on Nogg’s ship? Ruddock has been captain of both and may have asked the Strib ship to get the pattern from Nogg’s ship, which surely it would have done to oblige such an engaging coyote, or he could have let each come up with their own mice. It isn’t clear to me which way Ruddock went when he he made the request, so it will no doubt come down to whichever is funniest.

  2. Pete Rogan

    The question of a template exposes another unanswered question: Where did the decision to leave the robot mice genderless come from? The template? A machine rule deep in the food synth’s programming? A logical outcome because the food synth is the source of all robot mice, and they don’t need to reproduce?

    In that case… where did the decision to allow consciousness to go into their matrix come? Is that another accident, a logic error, or is consciousness so cheap it’s given away with every complete synth organism? And the ability to develop language, which requires brains of a particular level of sophistication to even entertain the concepts of manipulation of symbols and concepts and their expression in comprehensible form. Which implies that the entire species has the capability to develop other sophisticated traits and abilities of so-called ‘higher’ animals.

    Why can’t the robot mice build, in time, their own food synth that can produce babies for them to raise? And from that, why can’t they build a food synth capable of replicating their God — Ruddock. Or humans, for that matter.

    I don’t see insurmountable barriers here to any of this. If they have the capability to learn, they’ll develop the skills and scope of other conscious races. In which case, as I stated earlier, their only limits are not ethical, but political. A question of what they are permitted to do, and who has the power to stop them. The insertion of somebody’s idea of justice. And likely not the robot mice concept, either.

    Got to go. Liquor store closes any time!

    1. tlhonmey

      It seems to be a rule of this universe that sapience is automatically granted to any animate creation where the granting of such sapience would be horrifically cruel. It’s probably nothing to do with the food synth specifically and more to do with the divine master of this universe having either a sick, twisted sense of humor or total indifference to the long-term implications of his little practical jokes.

  3. C.B.VINCENT GOUDREAULT

    They do not have to be incapable of reproducing: the mouse on the SpaceTrawler could all be (for instance) MALE. And if the ones on the Strib’s ship happened to be FEMALE, if they do manage to get together, expect a new ruling species to take over the Strib’s planet…

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