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[Katrina Oniseki]

Let's think about how nanites are so often referenced in PF, and realize that instead of considering them a tired cliche or something that we can immediately associate with 'bad'... they might actually be an omnipresent aspect of NEw Eden daily life.

I brought this up IC in the Summit, and got some interesting conversations going, but let me repeat what Kat essentially said IC:

We all have nanites of some format in our system ... most of them we don't really know what they do, because most of them are spent.

Like, spent food processing nanites left over in our meals. Most food production regulations allow for a certain level of spent nanite contamination in the end product. Or station water. Sewage is treated with nanites, and despite the extremely thorough filtering and treatment that follows to make it potable again, we still end up drinking some.
 
Smart pesticides and herbicides, most over-the-counter first-aid appliques, even air fresheners and cleaning agents. All contain nanites. We breath, eat, and drink nanites on a daily basis in quantities we'd probably rather not think about.


You can sort of see where I was going with this, I figure, but that pretty much covers it. I imagine most residents of New Eden come into near constant contact with nanites on a daily basis. There's probably a whole host of new issues regarding that. Regulations on nanite production and use are probably the norm now.

Every now and then you might see a new story about gross contamination or negligence, or a self-replicating nanite accident that consumed half a factory before the police could EMP the blob, or a religious nutcase who declares nanites are a sin and must be purged, or get-thin-quick pill schemes that are nothing more than poorly designed fat-hunting nanites which end up causing all sorts of damage only to be banned from markets weeks later.

There's probably a whole wave of "nanite-free" products just like gluten-free is a thing today, or fat-free was back in the 90s. Everything is sold at a premium price nanite free, even the water! Soccer moms worry about how the nanites affect their precious babies, liberals demand stricter environmental controls over nanite disposal and control, the big industry giants of nanite-manufacturing continue to flood the market with propaganda or misinformation, political parties fight over it.

Nanites are probably found all over New Eden in almost every facet of daily life, and the funny thing is that Capsuleers are enamored by the concept of evil Sansha nanites. Like evil Nazi glutens that's going to turn you into a cyborg Hitler if you eat a granola bar with too many dead ones in it.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

[V. Gesakaarin]

Most people probably aren't aware that nanotechnology doesn't always equate to, "nanites" as it's used in science-fiction as a cliche/trope. Current nanotechnology advances have already started coming about in things like fullerenes, graphene sheets, DNA computing, polymer industries etc., that given the technological level of New Eden I don't think the ideas of say, having your meat products created to specification in an home appliance that's essentially a nanoscale protein fabricator similar to a 3D printer as anything really out of the ordinary.

The thing for me is that roleplayers are players living in today's world, so many of the things the characters/people in New Eden would take for granted as regards their personal technology is seen differently by a player. It's like someone from the middle ages trying to roleplay someone from today and being told people can fly in jets and then having their character decry the ability to fly as some kind of devilish sorcery.

As for Sansha mind-control nanites, it's probably as overdone as self-replicating nanites that never seem to explain how they get the energy for said replication without violating laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

To be fair, Eve technology is written so wildly inconsistantly in terms of advancement, it's hard to get a feel for what's acceptable to find weird and what isn't IC. We can build self-sustaining cities in every horrible environment you can imagine, but still need tons of people to run factory floors and drive forklifts? We can break the speed of light over our knees in about 10 different ways, but still can't figure out how to stop people from aging?

Never mind the players minds being stuck in present-day ideas, it's the writers that's the problem.

[V. Gesakaarin]

To be fair, Eve technology is written so wildly inconsistantly in terms of advancement, it's hard to get a feel for what's acceptable to find weird and what isn't IC. We can build self-sustaining cities in every horrible environment you can imagine, but still need tons of people to run factory floors and drive forklifts? We can break the speed of light over our knees in about 10 different ways, but still can't figure out how to stop people from aging?

Never mind the players minds being stuck in present-day ideas, it's the writers that's the problem.

I think the example of still needing to drive forklifts in New Eden isn't an example of a regression in technology but rather an acknowledgement that technological unemployment is a very real threat to the social order of human society. Yes, those forklift drivers probably aren't needed given AI technology but they're put there because they need to be employed - and the same probably goes for many other fields.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

To be fair, Eve technology is written so wildly inconsistantly in terms of advancement, it's hard to get a feel for what's acceptable to find weird and what isn't IC. We can build self-sustaining cities in every horrible environment you can imagine, but still need tons of people to run factory floors and drive forklifts? We can break the speed of light over our knees in about 10 different ways, but still can't figure out how to stop people from aging?

Never mind the players minds being stuck in present-day ideas, it's the writers that's the problem.

I think the example of still needing to drive forklifts in New Eden isn't an example of a regression in technology but rather an acknowledgement that technological unemployment is a very real threat to the social order of human society. Yes, those forklift drivers probably aren't needed given AI technology but they're put there because they need to be employed - and the same probably goes for many other fields.

Hmm, I'm not sure I can totally see it. We've been killing massive swaths of jobs to save the people on top money since the 1800s in the modern day, without much concern for the social order. Hell, industrial labour has been on the slow way out for 30 years. What makes you think society would just suddenly stop and stagnate for hundreds of years suddenly, or even that it'd be capable of stopping?

And what about the medical example? We basically know how to end aging already; It's only our somewhat limited understanding of genetic subtleties that stop us from having achieved it outright. You could use the social order example for that as well, but you'd think it would be atleast an option for the elite, instead of needing to literally kill ourselves and build entirely new bodies to avert a pretty (by the EVE universes standards) simple problem.

The only real explanation is that the writers only know how to/only want to tell stories about a world that still obeys our basic rules, as most non-hard sci-fi falls into. Where people still deal with today's issues, and society hasn't been really radically transformed repeatedly as it likely would've been, to the equivalent of several industrial revolutions.

I'd say most players are the same way, for better or worse.

[V. Gesakaarin]

Hmm, I'm not sure I can totally see it. We've been killing massive swaths of jobs to save the people on top money since the 1800s in the modern day, without much concern for the social order. Hell, industrial labour has been on the slow way out for 30 years. What makes you think society would just suddenly stop and stagnate for hundreds of years suddenly, or even that it'd be capable of stopping?

And what about the medical example? We basically know how to end aging already; It's only our somewhat limited understanding of genetic subtleties that stop us from having achieved it outright. You could use the social order example for that as well, but you'd think it would be atleast an option for the elite, instead of needing to literally kill ourselves and build entirely new bodies to avert a pretty (by the EVE universes standards) simple problem.

The only real explanation is that the writers only know how to/only want to tell stories about a world that still obeys our basic rules, as most non-hard sci-fi falls into. Where people still deal with today's issues, and society hasn't been really radically transformed repeatedly as it likely would've been, to the equivalent of several industrial revolutions.

I'd say most players are the same way, for better or worse.

I was giving a simple explanation of technological unemployment as one easy explanation to justify forklift drivers in the State and Federation.

Anachronistic social mores justify forklift drivers in the Amarr Empire and Minmatar Republic.

Now I'd agree completely with your last paragraph -- that's why these days I just consider much of what is written regarding the factions as almost completely irrelevant to me as a player and fortunately that even has a great deal of in-character syncretion in that I roleplay capsuleers that themselves can also consider the vast swathes of humanity and their concerns as almost completely irrelevant.

As such, I do what I want when it concerns technological applications in Eve as it affects my own characters.

[Synthia]

Life is cheap, but nanites are expensive.