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EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => CCP Public Library => Topic started by: lallara zhuul on 02 Apr 2011, 11:11

Title: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: lallara zhuul on 02 Apr 2011, 11:11
When I started playing EVE, there was just the pod, your body died with the pod, you woke up in a clone.

There was always just one of you around.

In one of the chronicles there was mentioned that a person used jumping from clone to clone as way of traveling and someone had jumped into his clone and was posing as him.
There was another chronicle where a former Holder slave paid a third party to retrieve DNA information of a dead person and was planning to jump into that clone so that he could become the master of his current master, or something as convoluted as that.

Even with Broker running about, there was always just one of each person running around, no matter what kind of meat they were wearing. Even in Theodicy the Jove followed the same rule.

Then came Jump clones and the 'soft scan' (which I still do not believe exists) which basically gave PF credibility to the notion that there could be several copies of one person running around the cluster at all times.

Amarrian COSMOS missions show that the Blood Raiders have the technology of creating millions of clones in their human farms, with the marriage of these two technologies, you can have unlimited copies of a personality in unlimited incarnations. The incarnations themselves can be modified to any shape and form imaginable by man.

Then we have the DUST coming in, where you probably have this marriage of these two technologies to create unlimited army of highly trained soldiers, if you want the soldiers to keep learning, just put the fluid routers in their battle armor and as they die their mind is moved to a new body.

No trauma of death, war turns into your basic FPS gaming experience.

Okay, lets look at the implications that mass cloning and mass mind storage/transference has for the cluster.

Amarr vs Minmatar war becomes meaningless.

Amarrians embrace cloning technology because of their miraculous clone zombie psychic Empress, they just clone the slaves and let the originals run back to minnieland.

Caldari.

Earlier in their history they had the tube child program to have an artificial baby boom to boost their numbers. Now they can cheaply produce labour via mass cloning and even have clone drones that are controlled by transcranial microcontrollers.

Gallente

They see the Caldari development, they do the same thing to stay competitive.

The implications to the whole cluster are quite staggering.

It will change EVE.

Of course there will be other repercussions as well, but I will not spend the rest of the day going 'DOOM!'
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Casiella on 02 Apr 2011, 13:37
I assume that any sort of soft cloning / infomorphing is highly expensive and, much like the capsule itself, does not work with anyone. This avoids the total destruction of human society that would otherwise result.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: lallara zhuul on 02 Apr 2011, 14:32
The cheapest clones are made out of plant biomass.

There are no limitations to who can be cloned or scanned.

Blood Raiders have human farms with millions of clones and they have the tech for that from the Takhmahl.

So it can't be expensive.

It is just a matter of time before the mass production of clones (war industry in all of the Empires starting to churn out DUST soldiers) becomes mainstream.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Saede Riordan on 02 Apr 2011, 14:54
The cheapest clones are made out of plant biomass.

There are no limitations to who can be cloned or scanned.

Blood Raiders have human farms with millions of clones and they have the tech for that from the Takhmahl.

So it can't be expensive.

It is just a matter of time before the mass production of clones (war industry in all of the Empires starting to churn out DUST soldiers) becomes mainstream.

The Blood Raiders have Bhaalgorns; those can't be that expensive either, right?

Also, a lot of these issues won't exist due to the morals and cultures of the civilizations in EVE.

I find your logic flawed. We don't even know how DUST soldiers work yet, so lets hold off on the inevitable destruction of the eve universe likely to result from it.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Louella Dougans on 03 Apr 2011, 02:39
Quote
The technology to download the consciousnesses of pilots into multiple clones, the Capsuleers, has finally delivered the dream of immortal soldiers. Train a soldier just once and then however many times he dies he will keep on getting more experienced, more battle toughened, as his brain is downloaded into a ready supply of cloned bodies. But no-one anticpated the effects of the multiple traumas, the multiple stresses of multiple lives and deaths on the battle field. War is hell. And now it can last forever for everyone. A fast-moving action-packed novel of interstellar war and high-tech combat, backed by massive cross promotion.

That's the blurb from the "Templar One" novel that is upcoming.

It means that the brain scanner technology is now accurate and portable enough to be used in situations where it was previously impractical, i.e. outside of space/controlled medical establishments.

It means that the cloning process is cheap enough that it costs less to make a clone than to turn a civilian into a soldier. As a comparison, the British Army infantry training from civilian to infantryman is 26 weeks, more for specialists, NCOs, officers. That's a large investment now.

And to do that on a scale where it makes a huge difference. This is not having an immortal team of special forces. This is having immortal infantry divisions. Thousands of divisions.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: DrizzCat on 04 Apr 2011, 11:06
I suspect that the Dust Soldiers will still be a small % of the general over all forces.  When you have Literally Hundreds of planets to get able bodies men and woman from for the military it's still cheaper to have a basic Boot camp and run people through as fast as possible.  I suspect that the kaimera (spelling?) will be the first to be turned into the dust soldiers becasue they will be the type of unit that would benifit from it.  They are expensive to produce.

You can't use the scale we have on earth to make any cost guesses because there is tech avilable in the Eve universe that we don't have here.  Hypno-indoctrination (again spelling?) and training is going to cut costs and still produce the same result. 
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Shae Tiann on 04 Apr 2011, 12:11
I'm with Loulou on this one. You can take an average civilian and put a gun in their hands and they'll be at best an adequate soldier (shut up, gun nuts: I wouldn't know where to look for the safety). But you spend a small fortune training and equipping a soldier, that training stays with them from clone to clone. Instant reduced maintenance costs for an army, instant replacement of a lost man by the same man in a new body.

Look at it another way: technology changes and improves over time. Consider how great the difference is between the PC you bought/built in 2003 and the one you have now in 2011. Now consider the exponential improvement in that technology since the creation of the PC. Apply that to Eve tech. Do you seriously think that, once cloning tech was available for capsuleers, the technology developers would simply stop there? Like hell they would, they'd try to find every market niche they could and fill it while improving their technology. The first step was soft-scanning and jumpclones. Once they had that figured out, they could apply it to the next-wealthiest field: the military.

But there's still only one of any individual running around. I think it will remain that way unless CCP really want to go the way of the Star Wars Clone Wars bollocks.

Quote
Amarrian COSMOS missions show that the Blood Raiders have the technology of creating millions of clones in their human farms, with the marriage of these two technologies, you can have unlimited copies of a personality in unlimited incarnations. The incarnations themselves can be modified to any shape and form imaginable by man.
This wouldn't have anything to do with their belief that the blood of clones is more pure than organic human blood, would it? The body doesn't even need to have a mind in it, as long as it's alive. They're still a threat, though: they'd always need a supply of fresh genetic mixes. I've been under the impression that cloning from cloned samples leads to degradation (somebody correct me if I'm wrong!)

Quote
Then we have the DUST coming in, where you probably have this marriage of these two technologies to create unlimited army of highly trained soldiers, if you want the soldiers to keep learning, just put the fluid routers in their battle armor and as they die their mind is moved to a new body.

No trauma of death, war turns into your basic FPS gaming experience.
I disagree. While capsuleer hotscans start at the instant of pod hull-breach, the delay between a fatal blow and the imminence of death on the battlefield would produce a certain amount of trauma. Additionally, a non-fatal yet traumatic wound would not trigger a recloning sequence.

Quote
Okay, lets look at the implications that mass cloning and mass mind storage/transference has for the cluster.

Amarr vs Minmatar war becomes meaningless.

Amarrians embrace cloning technology because of their miraculous clone zombie psychic Empress, they just clone the slaves and let the originals run back to minnieland.
Have you read the PF? At all? Amarrian enslavement of the Minmatar (AND OTHER RACES come on, it's not just the Minmatar) has little to do with the maintenance a servant class and everything to do with their religion: the enslavement of 'lower' races is about saving their souls.

Quote
Caldari.

Earlier in their history they had the tube child program to have an artificial baby boom to boost their numbers. Now they can cheaply produce labour via mass cloning and even have clone drones that are controlled by transcranial microcontrollers.
A TCMC-controlled zombie meatbag is never going to be as good as a self-aware, adaptive, conscious human mind. I imagine the tube child program persists primarily because it's disruptive to a worker's productivity to have to raise and care for a child, not to mention having to personally incubate one and then recover from it (on the women's part, at least). Caldari society is a hard-lined meritocracy, after all. A couple would be more likely to provide samples to the tube child program and then accept responsibility for raising/training the resulting child, if they REALLY were that keen on it.

The Gallente, as a (so-called) freedom-loving people would no more sink to the level of zombie slaves than the Caldari would.

What we're seeing in the development of EVE cloning is an organic and natural evolution in technology. They're actually handling it quite well. Obviously there would be individuals or small factions who would abuse it -- raise your hands, those of you who have never even considered jailbreaking an iPhone or PlayStation? -- but there are undoubtably several negative consequences.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Vieve on 04 Apr 2011, 13:51
I've been under the impression that cloning from cloned samples leads to degradation (somebody correct me if I'm wrong!)

I believe that's likely still under discussion in the scientific community at large, but I haven't been keeping up with the literature, so I won't swear to it.

For game purposes, I've been assuming so.

And this:

Quote from: From [i]Hitomi Point[/i]
Benn shook his head. The holoimage of the child looked worried.

He didn't dare look relieved, even though he was. Very much so. "Doesn't look like it. We got a full burn in on the Hitomi Point, so it'll just be a matter of reloading the buffer."

"One hundred percent burn?"

"Yeah." The necessity of the Hitomi Point, the notional instant where emotion began to be associated with memories, was hotly debated by some segments within the infomorph engineering community. Its absence didn't impede resentience, and its error checking and integrity validation consumed a great deal of time, so many felt it valid to do a neural upload without doing those error or integrity checks. Most capsuleers didn't complain: they wanted to get back into space as soon as possible.

It was hotly debated within the same segments of the infomorph engineering community if the accumulation of glitchy Hitomi Points was an instigator of the host of psychological oddities that seemed to plague capsuleers.

Since the boss was so interested in this project, Benn'd been damn sure to build in the full set of error checks and integrity validations. Hardly added any more time to the already drawn-out process.

"Don't think we'll lose more than a few hours off the original schedule," he added.




Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Saede Riordan on 04 Apr 2011, 14:33
Fear my zombie meatbag army, muhahahahahahaha!
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Casiella on 04 Apr 2011, 14:36
And here I've been comparing capsuleers (or at least our clone docs/techs) to necromancers anyway.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Z.Sinraali on 04 Apr 2011, 18:02
....I imagine the tube child program persists primarily because....

Hmm. I was under the impression that it no longer persisted, at least in an official sense. Can anyone tell me why this is with appropriate linkies, or do I have to get out of my comfy chair and look for it myself?
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Reyd Karris on 28 Sep 2013, 09:19
Hmm. I was under the impression that it no longer persisted, at least in an official sense.
Hehehe...

Quote
Can anyone tell me why this is with appropriate linkies, or do I have to get out of my comfy chair and look for it myself?
2007 or 2008 Fanfest IIRC, Tony G discussing the errors he made during (I believe) the Fiction presentation, including a statement about how Tony didn't realize there was a "tube child" program, but he didn't see how it would continue to the present setting with the Caldari population stable and growing on it's own. Long story short, "no one can keep up with all the fiction, it's unfair to blame me, the people doing research dropped the ball, it's been a long time since I rolled a character, I thought it had been removed."

I don't have the link but others with higher proficiency in Google-Fu might be able to find it. I *think* there was a big thread on Chatsubo way back when discussing various revelations in that fanfest video as well, though that might have been on the EVE fiction forums.

EDIT:

How the heck did this pop up as a "new" thread, and why did all the replies say "today"?

Holy hell I"m blind today. :/
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Pieter Tuulinen on 28 Sep 2013, 11:41
I understand that the lore is that the Tubechild program is being phased out for growing mass numbers of Caldari  simply  to buff the population - but that it still persists within individual megas, where it is a neat way of growing small series of people tweaked to perform certain jobs where there might be a predicted shortfall of candidates.

Since there's a roughly 15 year turn-around on Tubekids, I imagine you have to do some pretty serious forward planning for the technology to be useful in that way.

Also, I can't imagine the wealthy NOT making use of the tech to ensure that their children get a good headstart in life.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Esna Pitoojee on 28 Sep 2013, 18:22
Unsure of why it appeared new to you, Reyd, but here's some updates on stuff that was mentioned earlier on in this thread:

- DUST-style cloning is still entirely separate from capsuleer cloning, as in you cannot CANNOT CANNOT be a DUSTie and a capsuleer at the same time. In some ways, DUST cloning seems to be even more limited than the capsule variety (though since they've cleared up the whole angry-sleeper-living-in-your-head thing, cost and short range seem to be the only limiters).

- Softscan cloning still exists in a PF grey zone. Lots of 'we will neither confirm nor deny' comments from CCP on this topic.

- Neither Amarr nor Caldari appear to have adopted widespread cloning.

- IIRC, CCP Falcon made some noise along the lines of 'the blood raider mass cloning thingies are not accurate to our current view on PF'. They're still ingame, though, because the only thing harder than getting CCP to remove stuff from the game is getting them to remove stuff from the game for RP reasons.
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Vieve on 28 Sep 2013, 19:45
How the heck did this pop up as a "new" thread, and why did all the replies say "today"?

Holy hell I"m blind today. :/


I did link to this thread in another post today.  Not sure why it would mark the thread new, but perhaps it did.



Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Reyd Karris on 28 Sep 2013, 20:59
I did link to this thread in another post today.  Not sure why it would mark the thread new, but perhaps it did.
That might be it. I also had like 20 tabs open too; I might have clicked on that thread, clicked on the link, and somehow thought that was the thread I was reading.

lol, either way this is an interesting thread. :)

Unsure of why it appeared new to you, Reyd, but here's some updates on stuff that was mentioned earlier on in this thread:

- DUST-style cloning is still entirely separate from capsuleer cloning, as in you cannot CANNOT CANNOT be a DUSTie and a capsuleer at the same time. In some ways, DUST cloning seems to be even more limited than the capsule variety (though since they've cleared up the whole angry-sleeper-living-in-your-head thing, cost and short range seem to be the only limiters).

- Softscan cloning still exists in a PF grey zone. Lots of 'we will neither confirm nor deny' comments from CCP on this topic.

- Neither Amarr nor Caldari appear to have adopted widespread cloning.

- IIRC, CCP Falcon made some noise along the lines of 'the blood raider mass cloning thingies are not accurate to our current view on PF'. They're still ingame, though, because the only thing harder than getting CCP to remove stuff from the game is getting them to remove stuff from the game for RP reasons.
Yep, all points I've brought up to some friends in other games when discussing EVE.

Some stuff (specifically the Sleeper tech issue) I don't agree with simply from a biology standpoint and general common sense standpoint. Other aspects don't make sense if you read the books; like Capsuleer compatibility not just being an issue of genetics but more physiology and intellectual capacity. Note, in TEA, it was stated bluntly by Tony that Heth wasn't a capsuleer because he was simply too stupid. Heth even looks at some spreadsheets and earning reports and goes, "what the fuck is this shit?" To me, this makes sense.

The deciding factor with Capsule tech is more mental; dealing with an exocortex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex) without Jovian physiology; physiology that incorporates variations of the Sleeper "fifth lobe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_cortex)".

The other thing; reading between the lines, Jamyl's "Sleeper tech" in her head isn't really Sleeper tech but Jovian tech. The improved versions of the DUST soldier technology is most likely just a combination of that technology being reverse engineered from Jovian tech recovered from Vak'Atioth (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Battle_of_Vak'Atioth).

Long and the short of it, while I'll concede this particular literary conceit, Capsule and DUST tech not being compatible is pseudo-scientific nonsense. DUST tech with Capsule tech would mean the whole flash scanning tech (added later by the Empires, btw) could be taken out of the capsule! Now, is it possible that the DUST has it's own physiological requirements? If so, then we've got whole other issues than the tech not being compatible, but that of the person being compatible. Again, if one tech used by Jove is compatible, why not the other? Wouldn't the combination of the two technologies actually increase compatibility?

I know, stretching, and going into more pseudo-science. Still, it stretches my suspension of disbelief, but I'm willing to let that go.

I just don't think it honestly holds up, unless the Capsule has specific security safety measures to keep the odd Sleeper Super AI from doing... something... with a capsule. Because let's face it, it's not like a Capsule can directly interface with other Capsules and infect other Capsuleers, except in the whole "memetic warfare" sense.

 :bash:

So... I dont' think these advancements are cheapening human life, but more cheapening the accomplishments of humans in EVE (and by extension, those of the players). None of these advances are from "Modern" EVE humans, they're from super advanced races of humans. It's like suggesting that humans didn't develop nuclear technology but it was handed to us by aliens; or that ancient cultures didn't build structures like the pyramids, aliens did.

Literary conceit aside, it's like the movie Prometheus. Awesome origin story, bad science. Really bad science. Like, "Let's throw logic and reason dating back to Plato out the window because gosh darnit, this story is going to be EPIC!"

...while using references to Plato to spice up dialogue.

Sorry, /rant.

 :D
Title: Re: Trivializing Cloning
Post by: Synthia on 29 Sep 2013, 08:17
IIRC, CCP Falcon made some noise along the lines of 'the blood raider mass cloning thingies are not accurate to our current view on PF'. They're still ingame, though, because the only thing harder than getting CCP to remove stuff from the game is getting them to remove stuff from the game for RP reasons.

What ? Do you have a link ? This directly impacts on stuff we do.  :|