SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 3

Hello all!

Never thought these posts would get so big, but it is a big, complex game that tackles complex issues. Know what else is complex? Science!...Mad Science! Mwah ha hah hah!

Last post, I covered the aggressive factions—the Human Hive, the Spartan Federation and the Lord’s Believers. Here, I’ll cover the ‘builder’ factions, the ones that aren’t necessarily rewarded by conquest, but instead succeed by having a strong economy in their cities. To recap, the builder factions of SMAC are the University of Planet, Morgan Industries, Gaia’s Stepdaughters, and the Peacekeeping Forces.

Academician Prokhor Zakharov and the University of Planet: Zakharov is a space genius with a super autistic personality the smartest man alive on Planet who lives to discover all knowledge that can be known about the universe, damn the consequences! You can say that, on the spectrum between Albert Einstein and Joeseph Mengele*, Zakharov is somewhere in the middle.

[*National Socialist scientist at Auschwitz II, Birkenau, who operated experiments and gas chambers without restraint…]

That is to say, that Zakharov and his University have no time for morals and ethics. They are the morally ambiguous pursuit of knowledge. Zakharov had no patience for philosophy or metaphysics, and certainly not theology. All formal speech—for he does know the difference between chit-chat and business talk—must be backed by logic, clear facts, and lucid argumentation. Now, Zakharov and the University don’t have clear analogues in real-life history. But wait! What’s that I hear? It’s the buzzing of a ‘What about?’ storm!

‘What about the Golden Age of Islam?’

‘What about the European Enlightenment?’

‘What about Plato’s Republic as a technocracy?’

There has been no technocracy (‘rule by those who control technology’), nor a political rulership by scientists and/or a ruling class of scientists, or ‘rational inquirers’. The pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, on a societal level, did not exist. None of these did. If a technology was pursued, it was because it was practical in application. It is true, that in the Islamic Golden Age—when the Abbasid caliphate was centered in Baghdad—they did have advancement and consolidation of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy. And travelogues. I’ve never heard of great feats of engineering, though, from that era, nor of any mechanical wonders for the time. (As opposed to people yakking on about the Greeks and Greek Byzantines, who did have clockwork birds and were renowned for being engineers and architects.) Nor did that era advance philosophy; for it is true that the Baghdad caliphate did have Aristotle and wrote treatises about him, but they did not advance past Aristotle, as opposed to the Christians, who did adapt Aristotle but also rejected parts of him. So, advancements in the hard sciences, yes, but not all of them; philosophy was a mixed bag. Their literature was…eh?? The 1001 Nights is a Victorian-era compilation. I am aware of a great poetic tradition in next-door Persia, but no literature came from the Abbasids as far as I’m aware.

Well, okay, there has been no rule by scientists/experts/technocrats not until lately, circa 2023 A.D., but that’s because the technology was never there. And it is true, that there have been oddball cults of knowledge (e.g., Pythagoras of Greece), but they have always been fringe movements in their host culture. I admit, I am more uncomfortable talking about SMAC’s builder factions than I am the aggressive factions. The aggressive factions have always existed in human history, while the builder factions hit much closer to home, because none of them have historical equivalents*. They are only possible in the modern day and beyond.

[*Save, perhaps, Morgan Industries, but that’s because the technology wasn’t there, the technology was not there to give a viable ‘body’ to the philosophy.]

To be a scientist, you need to have free time. That is more important than being intelligent.

…Yes you heard me right! To be a scientist you need free time, not genius! The geniuses make science look good, sure, but the majority of the process of science is boring, boring, boring, trial-and-error. Science, as practiced by the West, is algorithmic; it tries every possibility available, with every appropriate tool available. Zakharov understands this (“Address to the Faculty”, Nonlinear Mathematics technology quote). It is not fun work. It is putting your nose to the grindstone, everyday. It is, also, maintaining a discipline to prevent human error from messing around with the results. But you want a discovery! But it could be wrong, it could all be wasted effort—and no one wants to do wasteful things, hmm? It, is, wasteful! Do you know how many bunny rabbits and lab mice are killed, mutilated, and harmed, so that you can wear the next brand of make-up? You don’t want to know the number, it’s depressing! The process of science is time-consuming, and worse, it eats more money than it produces, as CEO Morgan points out (“The Ethics of Greed”, Applied Relativity tech quote).

There was as time, where a man could be a scientist in his garage, or equivalent laboratory. In the late 1600s, and all through the 1700s and 1800s, a person with enough free time made a discovery every decade, from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1670, who was the first man to see germs under the first microscope, to Fritz Haber, the man who in 1909 invented a way to distill ammonia by the gallon and thus make cheap fertilizer for farmland; he is the same man who invented chlorine gas, just in time for World War I. The horrifying understanding we have today? All the previous discoveries are, compared to what we are working on today, the low-hanging fruit of science. The potential for more ‘scientific discoveries’ becomes more and more expensive, in time, materials, and effort.

Now, don’t get me wrong, geniuses can ‘speed up’ discovery by a bit, but there is a serious problem to discovery—humans always think in dogmatic terms. This applies to scientific theories as well. Yes, humans take science as dogma! You know, that ‘boo-hiss’ buzzword that is used to insult religions? “A new scientific truth does not triumph” says Max Planck (1858-1947)*, “by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” From paleontology (dinosaurs) to geology (plate tectonics) to biology (genetics) to quantum mechanics (Einstein), if you read the history of those branches of knowledge, you will find, again and again, factions of scientists who argue worse than theologians on whether something is true or possible. Worse than theologians, they also form political clubs that sabotage their rivals!

[*Planck himself is an interesting fellow; yes, he met Einstein, too, and even introduced Einstein to the scientist community of the time!]

Humans are ****in’ bad at science, that’s what you need to understand! Too full of pride, and not enough humility; too eager for glory, and not enough humble curiosity. …Anyway, so the University of Planet is an attempt to show what a society ruled by scientists would look like. Not pleasant, I’ll tell you that. A society like the University of Planet, downplays the bureaucracy and politicking of real-life scientists* in order to show what the earnest, no-bull**** pursuit of knowledge looks like. Still not a happy place, as the stratification is ‘those who do research and those who do manual labor.’ For example:

‘Okay, little Timmy, your test scores have come back. What’s this? You’re not a Triple-A rated genius in anything? For shame, boy! Off to the Manual Labor Pits for you. Somebody has to grow the food.’

[*Turns out, the people who run the real-life research institutes and universities aren’t genius scientists, but are genius bureaucrats, who may do some science on the side, for show.]

Now, I gotta say another thing, too, another harsh thing—logical people are gormless fools. I should know! I am friends with a number of them; I went through the whole college thing, and was enough of a social butterfly to meet many people in different departments; and I can tell you, those logical people don’t understand that, people lie. They’re arrogant, yeah, but they have no natural guile, no ‘people-manipulation’ skills, if you will.

You see, for any real science to ‘work’, for logic to happen, there has to be implicit trust between the communicators. In that world, there is no such thing as lying, because lies prevent progress to the truth. There is implicit and explicit trust in ‘the rules’—the rules of logic, the rule of how to communicate, the rules of how to avoid committing an error. This is the rigor that shows through to outsiders, those outside the smart-people club. There is, quite literally, an ‘economy of thought’ to the whole process—do not waste time thinking! Or, rather, ‘don’t waste time on thinking things which cannot be proven or disproven’—like philosophy or metaphysics. A philosopher’s brain is different than a scientist’s brain, though both are high-powered engines that are put under extreme stress, by thinking. What is more, is that there is not a flickering, not a glimmer of suspicion, that a person would ever subvert or break ‘the rules’. That’s counter-productive! Follow the rules, and there will be success—that is a given.

Like with the Lord’s Believers, the University is a pastiche mis-representation. Zakharov is autistic—not that he has that mental illness but rather, is autistic in the sense of the ‘masculine’ brain gone awry*. Only things matter, not people. Abstract things, things of wheels and metal, not growing things**…well all right, Zakharov gets a pass because he was born a weirdo. The University of Planet—and Zakharov in particular—is a misrepresentation, though not an inaccurate one. People, scientists want fame and glory and social status. They are indeed intelligent, but a bad temper, or impatience, and wild desires all cloud the bright light of intellect. An evil genius is one who is indeed supremely brilliant but who lets his darkest, most demented desires to direct his genius, instead of getting a handle on his desires. I suppose that Zakharov, how he is portrayed, is what a scientist is supposed to look like if he was nothing but drive, yet with no unhinged desires to distract him. Though I suppose also that Zakharov’s one desire, to discover everything, is itself unhinged! Yet Zakharov, despite his cool demeanor and skeptical attitude***, Zakharov shows nothing but delight at discovery!

[*Compare to the unpopular counterpoint where hysteria/histrionics is the ‘feminine’ mind gone awry, that of constant, needy attention-seeking and blowing up over problems, not to solve them, but to vent, and only vent, emotions. Men, you have to realize that women vent their emotions to calm themselves down; this can get addicting and/or pathological.]

[**LOTR reference, of Saruman’s fall from grace from leader of wise wizards to a mad scientist full of pride—why shouldn’t he experiment? Why shouldn’t he use the tools he has?]

[***Seriously, Zakharov looks like a sci-fi hipster, who is also a cool old dude and super-scientist. He was a space-atheist before it was cool!]

A delight, at discovery, and the discovery is that the universe is orderly. See his quotes on the discovery of the in-game technologies of ‘Gene Splicing’, ‘Centauri Genetics’, and ‘The Human Genome Project’. Now, don’t get me wrong—Zakharov, and the modernist attitude, still sees the universe as a great big machine of buttons and levers. Not only can you push the buttons, pull the levers, for the exact same results, but you can also discover how the levers and buttons interlock. Zakharov, it seems, is almost compelled to want to explore the mysteries (see ‘Advanced Subatomic Theory’ quote of his). This delight at an orderly universe is nothing new—we see it in the Greeks pre-Socrates/Plato. For further context, it is also a wonder—how? How, when, in the natural world, there is constant chaos and violence? Animals eat animals, people, and hump their sisters—and yet there is still an underlying sense to it all? A recognizable, if not rational order? An orderliness even behind the typhoon?

Though, Zakharov does not see the divine in the orderliness, like the pagans did of old. Rather, he’s astounded that man ‘believe(s) what he prefers to be true’—that the Universe or God does care (see his ‘Intellectual Integrity’ tech quote). Rather, Zakharov is amazed that something like ‘faith’ exists at all, that for whatever reason—which he thinks is immature—that for whatever reason man insists on believing in something higher than himself. Zakharov may not be hostile, but he is dismissive of this reality. For him, the only important thing is the quest for knowledge though not human betterment. Human betterment is a happy accident. Nor does Zakharov work for progress’s sake. Zakharov does not have a political plan—the plan is SCIENCE! At all costs!

And yet, for all his drive to understand, Zakharov does not ask why. It’s a very simple conundrum—what will he do once he understands all knowledge? He now knows everything. Now what? Will he, as Professor Farnsworth did in a later Futurama episode*, discover everything that can be known, become depressed, and then think ‘Eureka! Now I can spend my time understanding why the laws of science are the way they are, instead of being something else!’ Will Zakharov have that Farnsworth moment? …Eh? He’ll probably die of old age or a lab accident before that question ever bothers him.

[*Season 6, Episode 26, ‘Reincarnation’.]

University of Planet Playstyle: In-game, the University has bonuses to raw research, and starts off with a free, randomized other tech, and automatically gets a basic, free research building at every city—put another way, they have all the infrastructure to SCIENCE right out the gate, when the other factions have to build theirs from scratch. The University’s penalties are poor security and drones. The penalty to security means that enemy spy teams have an easy time infiltrating University cities, while the drones penalty means that the disgruntled and/or abused human test subjects are more likely to start riots in the cities. Now couple this with spy teams being able to work with the rioters…

However, despite being the clear powerhouse of unlocking in-game technologies, the University is no better at capitalizing on them than other factions. Sure, they can race ahead in any given branch of technology and unlock late-game buildings or units, but the University won’t have the infrastructure to make them. The knowledge, the blueprints, can far outpace the tools needed to make them. Thus, the University has to plan ahead, and then ‘grow into’ the plan. Similarly, the University has to know what field they want to specialize in, lest they get a jumble of techs that don’t help. Do you build the University as crazed geniuses with death-ray laser armies? Do you have super-engineers invent new economies and drown the world in money? Or do you say ‘screw it’ and rush towards the Science Victory—the one where you download everyone’s brain into an alien hivemind? Which even Zakharov calls ‘an awakening alien god’, when the other factions barely understand what it is? (See his quote on ‘The Voice of Planet’.)

…Well, the other remaining factions are about as complicated if not more so. Tune in next post for Morgan and Morgan Industries!

More to follow!