[extropy-chat] Transhuman Space book and role playing game

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <gpmap at runbox.com> wrote:
> Has anyone seen this? This type of material can be
> useful to spread
> transhumanist memes among teenagers.

Not just teenagers, although that would be a large
part of the market.  I've read the books myself (I
tend to collect these kinds of things as inspirations
for stories more than the game value itself), and it
is mostly what it claims to be.

The only significant difference stems from the impact
of long travel times: it does not now take a week to
get anywhere there are humans, but taking only a week
to get to Mars is a pretty decent clip in this
setting.  Imagine spending a week essentially taking a
cruise far from any humanity save what is on the ship
(and fast ships usually have few passengers), doing
whatever you came to do, then spending another week
coming back.  Telecommuting takes the edge off,
perhaps, but this is still in a society being changed
by technology at least as fast as we're experiencing
in 200X.  Space may be open, but it doesn't seem like
it would be as large a part of the day-to-day life of
most people as the setting description implies.

But aside from that, definitely.  How would you like
to be penpals with the super AI who runs Europe's
largest industrial port?  Or running a well-funded
startup with a good chance of finally implementing dry
molecular nanotechnology (what we might call
Drexlerian assemblers)?  Or maybe you'd prefer to work
on what to them is yesteryear's common technology: 3D
printers churning out any of a wide variety of
widgets, where the cheap licensing fees, wired direct
to the patent holders, are the only reason DRM
cracking is usually more bother than it's worth, yet
the sheer volume of transactions means many people can
retire after making just a few useful inventions.  Or
perhaps you'd prefer to design, or be, one of the
staggering variety of genetically engineered beings,
many of which qualify as "human"*.  Or maybe you'd
rather be one of those helping to solve the knotty
social problems that the existance of manufactured
people has introduced?  (No chance of just wishing
them away: they exist, they're people too, and they -
along with many "natural" humans - would like to bring
their brothers and sisters to life without being
hunted down for it.)  And then there are AIs and
robots, with their own degrees of sentience...some of
whom aren't just as good as human, but literally
_were_ human: uploads, many of whom were alive in
200X.  (One of the scenarios: play yourself, either
after surviving through the century thanks to better
medical technology, or having died, maybe
cryo-preserved, and then fairly recently uploaded.
Inhabiting a bioshell clone of your original body,
wired up to be controlled by the AI that just happens
to be you, is optional.)

* Yes, this includes catgirls.  (Catboys, too.)
Someone in the SJ team seems to want to make sure they
get mentioned as examples in all their high-biotech
universes.  Not that I can blame them.