“Eight-hundred years ago humans worked out star-gate technology. By focussing the energy release of a supernova into paired, trans-matter rings, it’s possible to create a wormhole that circumvents space-time. A point to point FTL transit from the opening in one ring to the opening in the other.”
“But how?”
“If I was that smart, I’d be at the Hawking Institute for Advanced Studies. Does this look like the Hawking Institute for Advanced Studies?” Ryan gestured around him comically.
In Cloning Freedom Rowan was a Doctoral Candidate in Physics in the set region. The set region’s technology was set at approximately 2010 CE. This was for a verity of reasons that are addressed in the text. As such when she is jerked forward through thousands of years of technical development she is more than a little awed and intimidated by it. The above scene is all about that but more importantly about how little it matters in a practical sense.
I must ask, do you know how electricity works? You probably use it every day but the real nitty gritty of it is outside the realm of most folks. I know that cells in my pancreas create insulin but I would be at a loss to explain how.
The simple truth is the full body of human knowledge far outstrips the capacity of any one person to be fully knowledgeable. The concept of the resonance man is a thing of the past. This does not excuse ignorance. I do hold that it is possible to have what I call a children’s book understanding of many topics. This is general knowledge. I can understand the basic principals of how a nuclear reactor works without being able to build or design one. I can understand Bernoulli’s principle without building a plane. We all specialize.
Another thing that I revisit several times in the book is that despite the high tech human needs remain the same. A mag lev train allows Ryan to commute between contents but shorten the distance and lower the speed the reality is the same as taking a train in to a city core from the suburbs. I’m sure there were ancient Egyptians who had to catch the fairy across the Nile to get to work and cursed if they missed it. Humans haven’t changed so the applied technologies remain similar. As for Rowan, she learns what she can and focuses on what is useful like us all.
"The truth is, humans aren’t the smartest creatures in the Republic, in fact we’re on the low end of average. We aren’t the strongest creatures, though we are in the upper 20 percentile for creatures from small, rocky worlds. We aren’t the fastest, or best coordinated, though we can hold our own there too. What we are is the most vicious, violent, destructive creatures ever to join the Republic. When hardened criminals learn that we’ve been hired to hunt them down, they surrender on mass to whatever other species is at hand.”
This is an excerpt from Freedom’s Law, the sequel to Cloning Freedom. I wanted to spell out humans’ position in the interstellar republic. The idea that we might destroy ourselves before we get much more advanced than we presently are is not a new one. Also the thought that various species would compare with various levels of physical prowess dependent on the environment they developed in is nothing new.
What I wanted to touch on was how factors like these would affect our position in a multi species society. In most science fiction little more than lip service is paid to beings having differing physical capacities. Think of the fights between humans and Vulcans in Star Trek. If Vulcans were truly as strong as they say the humans shouldn’t stand a chance.
As is stated above, humans don’t have much going for us except aggression. I’ve seen cat fights where the smaller cat won simply because it was more aggressive. This happens throughout creatures that combat each other. A word of advice is never attack a young creature if its mother is around. If the mother is of a protective bent anything short of lethal force and you will not stop her. Humans are much like this in the Switch Board universe. We may not have much going for us, but we’re nuts with what we do have.