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Crowd-Sourced Glowing Trees
#1
Seems we got people working on gengineered light sources. Maybe the glow-orb cactus is on its way.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/24/re...lowing-tre



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#2
Glowing trees crop up in my novel Betrayals; on a trip to Centre Parcs I wondered whether a glowing forest might be a useful form of environmental illumination.
Here's Scott's excellent image of Auguste Gienah with a glowing forest as background.
[Image: gus_final.jpg]

Actually in a glowing forest there might be few shadows, making it difficult to see exactly where the trees and branches are - this could cause a problem when walking through the woods at night. Maybe glowing trees should be interspersed with non-glowing trees to give soime contrast.
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#3
(09-25-2013, 06:17 AM)Ares Johnson Wrote: Seems we got people working on gengineered light sources. Maybe the glow-orb cactus is on its way.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/24/re...lowing-tre

This is such a cool project.

Two thoughts
-i would hope/ assume that even in such a DIY culture as might exist in many sephirotic societies, genegeneering experiments, nanotech hacks, or any other self reproducing organisms/entities, would be regulated and constrained. Firstly, there might be the consequences of releasing organisms into new environments and resulting ecological problems resulting from poorly introduced species.
Secondly, (maybe only early on in the setting, before sufficient simulation technologies are available) what happens to the living design failures when someone tries to create new organisms (particularly during provolution efforts) ?
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#4
The answer, I think, is that in the early part of the scenario there were lots of failures, of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology, and we simply haven't described them in enough detail yet. Even in the latter part of the scenario I tend to find the failures and mistakes more interesting than the successes. A utopian world where everything works might be the norm for systems in the heartland of the Terragen Sphere, but further out towards the fringes interesting mistakes are still made.

A living failure might be euthanised, but if it were at least partly sophont, such an act would almost certainly be considered murder by some, or many factions in society. So one can imagine some sort of support structure for the results of failed experiments; a care home, or hospital, or even the equivalent of a leper colony. Maybe some of the larger asteroids or more obscure moons in the Solar System were convered into refugia for the results of bad genetic engineering or unsuccessful augmentation.

I think that Alan's bAdmod serial may have been an example of a partially successful attempt at augmentation that condemned the protagonist to a life of continual discomfort. There might be whole worlds of bAdmods out there on the fringes.
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