Monday - October 22, 2007

Lasers, Spaceships, and Nanotubes:  Part 2 (Unfinished Draft)

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not ever going to get this story finished.  Despite that, I'm going to resume blogging, and this is what is left that was going to partly makeup part 2.  I wrote none of the final piece, the conclusion.

Since only a few civilizations developed lasers, spaceships, and nanotubes independently, these technologies reached others through one of several methods, including generosity, commercial exchange, theft, and forced adoption.  In this part we'll consider how civilizations adopted alien technologies, the consequences of the methods of adoption, and the consequences of adoption.

Since the Gujurpus were the first to explore across space, they naturally had the first encounter with a foreign species, too.  Although the Hotari and Jitnurys are often thought of as the first peoples they encountered, a Gujurpian explorer actually encountered another species first, the Motluks.  The Motluks are often forgotten because they did not spread through the universe, nor did they thrive after meeting the Gujurpus.  Instead, despite the Gujurpus's best efforts to introduce technologies that they believed would improve the Motluks lives, the Motluks generally refused to adopt technologies and preferred to live a primitive life.  Even today only moderate technological progress has been made with the Motluks, who have only recently adopted modern medical techniques.  Why, despite being the first people contacted by a spacefaring civilization, did the Motluks reject the technologies that would have allowed them to participate equally in the politics of the universe?

The answer lies in Motluk culture.  Although still a young species when the Gujurpus encountered them, the Motluks had surprisingly primitive technology.  They had only begun to develop metallurgy, despite easily accessible sources of metal ore, and had no concept of agriculture or husbandry.  The Gujurpus subsisted by grazing on the ample vegetation and built only stone and wood structures, the former for administrative and religious purposes and the latter for housing.  To the Motluks, the Gujurpus were gods, and only when an elderly Gujurpu, Alfred [2] died on the Motluk planet did the Motluks believe otherwise.  Their reaction to that death proved insightful.  The Motluk city where Alfred died went from fearing the Gujurpus as they feared their gods to hating the Gujurpus for bringing heathen knowledge to their planet that would likely incur the gods' wrath.  Despite some brave Motluk subcultures that sought out Gujurpian influence and migrated off-world, the Motluks have remained fearful of outside influence and have only slowly adopted instantaneous communication (used almost exclusively intraplanet), nanotube building materials (only because the planet underwent a geologically unstable period that destroyed most stone structures and forced adoption of nanotubes), and medicine (only because of an accidentally introduced virus that mutated to attack Motluks).

[2]:  The elderly Gujurpu's name is all but unprintable in Human languages, so I've translated the name to the closest equivalent in terms of perception.