Author:
Hi,
First - Naming Genders
I'm planning on a few stories in other societies with other gender systems. I'm trying to figure out how to refer to these genders. If I use contemporary English words, then people will get the wrong idea.
In the first society, men or guman are the ruling class, but they are vastly outnumbered by the other gender categories. (a) "men" (b) "women" (c) "another category they don't consider women" would be misleading, both in terms of personal experience, and in terms of the numbers readers might expect. In the second society, there is no ruling class.
I'm wondering if modern English forms based on old English roots might give a better idea: (a) "menns" and "gumas" (b) "wives" (c) "scrattes" and (d) "cwenes".
Second - Teleportation
I'm thinking that teleportation through prepared stations would be an interesting altenative to ftl travel on ships. I imagine people would go into water or saline tubes, and equal mass would travel in both directions. Anyway, I'm wondering how to get the stations to other worlds. I think it might be possible to accelerate a probe to 0.05c, but it would be hard to decelerate a probe and land it on a suitable icy body.
Third - Estimating the Human Toll of Early 20th-Century Wars
It's going to be a while because I'm bogged down, on another project, trying to estimate the human toll of a few early twentieth-century wars, including massacres during civil wars, and including epidemics. It's depressing, frustrating, and maddening.
Comments
Well, one thing that L. Neil
Well, one thing that L. Neil Smith did was simply add pronouns. 'He, She ,Rhe', 'His, Her, Rher'. (for a tri-gendered species)
Using older words would be best if those words have different meanings from the modern words. It seems like you're not so much discussing genders, but classes, so you'd need to really fit the names to the class, not to the gender.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
The limitations of language.
One of the limitations of the English language is lack of gender neutral singular pronouns.
When is comes to teleportation in stories. Do it anyway you want. It is your story.
There are records on the causality rate of death in wars during the 20th Century. But, it depends on what you consider casualty. Do you consider just the soldiers, or also civilians. Also, what do you consider a war. The Cold War has several small wars, coups, and terrorist attacks that claim several lives.
On the last point, counting
On the last point, counting civilian deaths, whether due to the fighting itself or due to the starvation and disease, is the hard part.
Thee, thou, thine. Singular
Thee, thou, thine. Singular forms. You, Yours, plural forms. They're simply not used anymore except by certain language sub groups, such as the Amish. "It" is also a gender neutral pronoun. (or perhaps, lacking gender completely)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Gender Names and Deceleration
"Anyway, I'm wondering how to get the stations to other worlds. I think it might be possible to accelerate a probe to 0.05c, but it would be hard to decelerate a probe and land it on a suitable icy body."
Decelerate the probe: first reverse the orientation of the engine, and do what you did to accelerate, to get back down to a few (tens of) miles a second near the star system. Then navigate to the desired planet, and either land or orbit and shuttle down to the planet. There are several issues of teleportation -- but in a science-fiction context, the discontinuity leads to the nightmarish possibility that every teleportation is murdering the person and creating a new person with his mind.
Gender names... Well, there are numerous possibilities. (I'm not going to suggest mine, because I plan to use them.) But one novel ("The Tomorrow File" by Lawrence Sanders) had words redefined in a comprehensible way. "A profit!" meant something like "my pleasure". One's "love affairs" referred to one's finances. One could redefine words to make genders.
-- Daphne Xu
I don't know the match, but
I don't know the math, but it would take a lot of reaction mass to decelerate, which means even more to accelerate. A flyby would be a lot simpler than a landing.
And How!
Absolutely, it would take a lot of mass. The one way I envision unmanned interstellar travel occurring is through taking in interstellar gas, fusing a small amount (p + d --> He-3), and shooting the rest out the tail end. But the object absolutely has to be decelerated. Presumably, the objects are the primary payload, so there's no use in flying by. Deceleration might be complicated in that interstellar gas is being blasted out of the way, and possibly out of reach of the spacecraft.
-- Daphne Xu
As far as the interstellar flight
We need to consider the planet(s) in question.
What are the intentions of your space faring race in regards to the planet?
Do they plan on colonizing it? Teraforming it? Mining its resources?
Does it currently have life or is it a lifeless planet?
Does your space faring race care if there is currently life on the planet? (in case of teraforming)
Will your race be teraforming the planet?
In the case of a dead planet your race plans on teraforming, If the ship or part of it is constructed in a way that can protect its contents from the collision it could be crashed into the planet. Then once the dust has settled the robotic and other machines on board can begin teraforming or construction of your teleportation gate. Depending on the size and speed of the ship when it crashes on the planet it could cause an extinction level event of any life on the planet prior to teraforming.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Seems to Me...
...the logical way to get teleporting machines to a system light years away in the absence of FTL capability is to send them at lightspeed or near-lightspeed in the form of information, such that when one arrives, the first thing it does is to build something out of the raw materials there: either the teleporter itself or a machine (3D copier?) that will make it, and whatever else is needed.
Information doesn't have to decelerate, just be capable of being captured at the other end, like the very few neutrinos that get stopped by atoms on Earth.
The difficulty with any method that doesn't involve a sentient being traveling there is that there's no way to find out whether it's working until it sends something back -- which thanks to relativity won't arrive for years. Even if you find someone willing to teleport there after it arrives but before the senders hear anything back (thus risking getting decomposed at the one end without being coherently put back together at the other), or if you know there are aliens there that have the tech skills to do a turnaround after you've provided instructions, you still have the likely decade-plus wait at the sender's end to find out what's happening. (Communications under this scenario, of course, don't travel any faster than the object does, since the object's being turned into information in order to get there at all.)
The good news, perhaps, is that all your automated message has to make when it gets there is a receiver. (Or a manual, if you think aliens at the receiving end can make it once they get instructions.) The transmitter could be built onsite after senders arrive, under the one scenario, or by the aliens under the other.
As far as the gender names are concerned, I think anything you do, whether or not the reader sees the logical connection, would probably work, though your idea of giving readers what amounts to a head start doesn't hurt.
In your example, I can't make a connection out of "scrattes", but after your introductory paragraph, I'd guess the "cwenes", like medieval "queans", are low-status individuals available for sex without being considered as possible "wives". (Indeed, since queans, like prostitutes today, apparently could be of either biological sex -- though their partners/employers were men -- there was no assurance they could qualify as wives even without the status problem.)
A possible difficulty, unless your "wives" are betrothed from birth, is that you're using that one term differently from our expectations, to connote eligibility for legal relationships rather than females actually in them. You might want to consider making it "wyves". Of course, I'm theorizing from your descriptions here, without knowing precisely what you have in mind.
Eric
Thanks. After humankind
Thanks. After humankind spread into space, a patriarchal reaction in the core worlds created the "Rule of Man," but people fled to "Amazon" worlds on the frontiers.
In the Rule of Man, gumas are xx or xy men and about 10% of the population, wyves are xx women and 45%, and scrattes are xy women and 45%. Most are grown in birthing tubes, allowing gene-splicing and hormonal control.
Outside the Rule of Man, cwenes are everyone. Most would be considered wyves or scrattes.
(Yes, I took "Rule of Man" from Traveller, but I changed the meaning.)