Cars, Chips and Rings

Part One -  A reality without Microchips

Microchips won't work in the Star Wars Galaxy

(I can't be the first person to have this idea)

But basically, digital technology can't exist in Star Wars. It seems like most of the things digital tech can do are still possible, but without the 'anything machine' of microchip-based computing, every single solution to each and every problem has to be artisanal, mechanical, analogue, making use of unique and particular properties of particular materials, distinct relationships between materials and systems etc.

It makes, honestly, a surprising amount of sense. Without the massive scaling abilities of microchips, and especially without the abilities of re-programmable computers and the information revolution that results, everything happens much, much slower.

This would be a world where there are still things like hand-screens, but without email as we understand it. Instead text messages would be more like.. analogue code transmissions of great complexity, decoded by receivers built only for that purpose.

Every single piece of tech in the Star Wars Galaxy has been worked out individually, specifically by individual people or small groups, maybe guilds or artisanal experts, who have spent maybe centuries working out how to assemble or build say, a particular kind of transmitter that works mechanically and with analogue transmissions. I suppose this is true for our world but what I mean is that every machine is, inside, working on potentially quite different mechanical and material principals.

Once you design it, industry still works and you can mass-produce them, but without widespread computer-aided design, computer-aided information recall, and the possibility of an infinitely re-programmable base tech, everything is artisanal in design, and designed for that purpose only.

So instead of a massive surge in design with the information revolution, we get something much more like the 19th century, with particular creators bevering away in particular groups or corporations, spending years and years working on something, maybe needing particular and rare materials in its construction and once it is made, perhaps needing very particular skilled work in its manufacture and the Guild or whoever wants their (huge) development costs back and so its going to cost you a bomb to buy one. Until maybe 100 or 200 year later when experience, economies of scale and widespread availability have finally made the thingy relatively cheap to produce.

This must be why the Star Wars Galaxy has such a long, slow tech development arc. Everything simply costs more, is harder to make and the resulting tech more expensive.

And without the internet, even more than our world, a realm of experts, of somewhat Renaissance-Men, those with expertise across the field of science, engineering and materials based on their own experience and contained more within their own minds. It’s harder to just reach out and grab the info you want, and even harder to work out what tool, technique or artisanal trick to use to achieve your desired goal for whatever widget you are working on.

Once you get interstellar travel, you get access to new, strange materials, which again creates something of a Victorian foreign policy. You might not be able to synthesise whatever-it-is you need for your thing, or if you can, it may be prohibitively difficult. But probably more important with a Galactic civilisation, you get access to alien minds. In a reality with only artisanal single-use semi-mechanical or analogue computers used probably only for specific hyper-difficult tasks, gaining access to alien experts and thinkers, and being able to share knowledge and expertise with them (via transmitted analogue "air-letter", or just by actual letter) would be indescribably valuable.

Its interesting to think about what our world might be like if microchips just.. didn't work. 

It would in some ways be a lot like the world of the late 60s/early 70s. No internet, no smartphones, no texting. But the technology and methods they did have then would have been improved on. So instead of the internet we might have something like a super-Ceefax. Instead of texting maybe some kind of pager/ticker tape machine. More wires, more cables, keep a notepad by the phone. Mechanical watches. Fewer small devices. Dials on things, less digital displays (as there is less for them to display). Electric typewriters. For scientists, instead of putting in a request for time on the super-computer, they would need to put together a joint request to build a calculation engine for certain major projects. 

Sliderules. Those space ships in Star Wars would probably have been put together by people with slide rules, very possibly drawing out the blueprints on actual paper.

 

Part Two - Rings in Arda

(I have not watched 'Rings of Power' nor do I intend to)

Is the 'invisibility' caused by the One Ring (and I think by some lesser rings) in fact a strange consequence of mixing the immortal spirit of a Rings creator with the mortal flesh of its wearer?

I think in Arda, firstly evil cannot actually create anything, only change and warp what is there and any power placed in a ring has to come from somewhere, it can't just be generated ex-tempore. So, like Sauron (literally) putting all of his malice and his 'will to dominate all life' into the One Ring, presumably the 'lesser rings' which were made around the same time all had qualities which came from, or were at least placed there by, particular creators. 

Presumably the power or qualities needed to make all other rings 'work' come in some sense (probably) largely from the soul of the creator, and Elves being immortal (or being recycled as long as Arda lasts) they have a lot of Soul to give, and a lot of qualities they can put in a ring.

But 'invisibility'; this is not a quality most things in Arda have. Yet Frodo wearing the ring is 'invisible' only to the living, to the dead he is very visible, as they are to him. So the invisibility is less pure invisibility and more being shifted somewhat into the world of the dead, or the sense-realm of the dead, and why would this be?

Perhaps because if you take a ring created by an immortal entity, one in which, in some sense, time on Arda cannot fully touch, that immortality probably intentionally becomes part of the 'ring', is made permanent, and that, in some distaff way, will apply to or at least effect the wearer of the ring. 

Which won't be a big deal if they are an elf of Mair as they are functionally immortal anyway, but if a very mortal, temporal, man, or hobbit, wears the ring, then the shadow of the eternal being is cast on them, and they are made a bit more 'eternal'.

Except it cant work as that’s not what they are, so they end up sensorially shifted into the realm of the dead, which is the closest Men can get to eternity on Arda.

Could be an early bug in ring design by Anatar and Celebrinbor.

I can imagine Celebrinbor thinking "ah these things are toxic to mortals, better be careful with that" and Anatar thinking "yesss yes ha ha ha ha you want some immortality buddy? You want to live forever my little mortal pal?"

Its also kinda interesting the differing motivations for Celebrinbor and Anatar in ring creation.

For Anatar/Sauron its pretty simple - install DRM in peoples souls and 'control all life' but he still needs to make the basic idea interesting enough that elves, and especially Celebrinborn, will help him out.

So what was Celebrinbors motivation in ring creation? Maybe an attempt to match his incredible ancestor Feanor. Maybe he just liked having a friend to hang out with (sad face). Maybe a futurist interest in partial soul-swapping - like, wouldn't it be interesting to share talents with your friends, you could give them your smithing for a bit and they could give you their whatever, or handing parts of yourself on to later generations in a more immediately useful way than just being standard elf-reincarnated or waiting for them in the halls of Mandos.

It could be a pure and holy motivation of trying to preserve more of what is good in Arda, which everyone knows is a place that can only slowly decay and dis-enchant, becoming less obviously divine and magical - probably the three Elven Rings are part of this and actually partially fulfil what was Celebrinbors main actual motivation - keeping bits of magic and eleven wonder and culture alive into a later age, so elves can hang out with, and presumably help, those later people and the world will be a bit less shitty.

Part Three - The Fall of 'Cars'

I can't stop thinking about the Cars universe, and specifically about what would happen, (from the Cars perspective) if it was interdimensionaly invaded by humanity.

What an utter nightmarish lovecraftian/Peter Watts horror story that would be.

THE STRANGE NATURE OF 'HUMANS' (they have FACES)

Imagine what it would be like, as a living Car, to encounter a human being for the first time.

Firstly their utterly alien body plan, their manipulator tendrils, their disconcerting, almost unbelievable method of rhythmic locomotion. Incredibly slow yet somehow able to easily access and exploit strange and mixed terrain, finding paths, locations and access totally un-intuitive for a Car.

But the most horrific element would be that the aliens have something like a face, like the natural face all cars have, two eyes, an expressive mouth. And they have these cavities above the mouth, just below the eyes. Tiny tiny pseudo-faces with hair draped across the top.

And they can speak with these mouths, in tiny weak voices, in a language not dissimilar to that of Cars

THE UNDEAD 'ZOMBIE' CARS

An horrific example of the aliens technology is their creation and use of 'Zombie' Cars.

These at first seem to be just like actual Cars, from a distance their profile seems the same, but their movements, while capable of the same top speeds of a True Car, are staccato and often disjointed.

Horrifically, these 'Cars' have no faces, and no minds, they are in the shape of sentient things but have no sentience, no life at all.

Then the discovery is made as to how the Zombie Cars move.

The aliens burrow inside them, fitting themselves neatly into their brain case, then they control the Zombie cars movements with special arrangements. This is what a 'Zombie Car' is, an undead construct, created purely to allow a human to pilot it, to climb inside it and assume the powers of a True Car. 

You can even see the humans in there, behind the blank, empty 'eyes' of the undead car, a second small face grinning as it moves its spindly limbs and manipulates its undead host

THE CAR VS HUMAN WAR

At first the conflict between Cars and Aliens seems one-sided. The Cars are larger, faster, stronger, tougher. If caught in the open, even in their Zombie Cars, aliens simply can't match them.

The horror of 'killing' Zombie Cars breaks the minds of many Car assault troops, the Zombie must be essentially dismembered and the human spewed out before it can be run over. But as time goes by the very results of the conflict create a world in which the aliens have the advantage. Cities are broken, roads cracked and shattered, the complex network of fuel and oil deliveries Cars need to live starts to fray and break down.

Cars starve, or fall asleep.

In the ruins, in the cracks in the world, in places no-one ever thought to look or could even reach if they did, the humans move. They come in the night, slender, alien, horribly vulnerable if caught in the open, but they cling to the corners and empty spaces of the world, then the first possessions take place.

THE REALITY HORROR - 

What horrifies about the first alien-car possessions is not just the nightmarish fusion of alien and car, but the ease and fluidity with which it takes place, and the ecstasy with which the first 'owned' cars seem to greet it.

All an alien needs to do is creep close enough to a car to 'open' it, using some unknown incomprehensible form of technology and ability, and they can slip inside a Car, moving behind its eyes, there, in the Cars inner self, they take control.

And the Car seems to like this.

At first shocked, outraged and horrified, the 'driven' Car sinks quickly into a kind of ecstatic half-somnolence, they are consumed utterly by the needs of the alien and fulfilling these needs brings deep deep joy. 

'Fulfilment' they call it.

As if, for all of the history of Cars, there was something missing within them, something they had no idea about, something of which they could not even conceive, for their experience had given them no such concepts but here, now, is revealed. They are complete.

Many of the first 'driven' cars are murdered, the Cars Government would say 'released' from the alien possession, by violence. The True Cars have no way to extract the alien inside except through the death of the host. Car families murder their own members, driving into them again and again. Military units kill their squad mates, bashing and smashing into them from every direction until they crack open and the alien inside can be crushed.

The 'driven' Car does not stay silent during this horror. Instead they beg and plead with those trying to destroy them. Though their movements are no longer their own, they can still talk and they beg for mercy, try to persuade their friends and families of the rightness of their cause

this, more than anything, crushes the morale of the Cars Nations;

"NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE WITHOUT THEM! THINK ABOUT IT! OUR WHOLE HISTORY, OUR WHOLE WORLD!!!"

"WE WERE MADE FOR THEM! WE WERE ALWAYS MADE FOR THEM!"

It is the moral, almost spiritual horror of this new reality which ultimately breaks the society of Cars.

at first one city falls.

the mobs now, instead of punishing the Driven Cars, are made up of them. instead of crushing the aliens, they group together to hold down family members, strangers, anyone, surrounding them until their revving engine drains them dry, until the alien can enter. 

And then a new and blissful member of the possession cult is born.

Slowly their numbers grow.

The Cars government is forced to make use of Nuclear Cars missiles (which have faces also I suppose).

Ultimately the Cars President, unable to face the mass extermination of their own population, falls into madness, with the central government in tatters Cars America breaks into a patchwork of isolated survivor states.

Where there are long roads, flat land and ready oil, True Cars can still live, for a while, but the rest of the nation, the rest of the world, belongs to the invaders.

Thus falls the world of Cars.