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Jayngfet wrote:I would say there are a lot of inventions that only exist because the inventor heard about it in fiction first.

Can you think of an example?

Hoverskateboards (YT link)
They're energetically so impractical, that the only reason they exist is the film "Back to the Future".

Oh wait, he said "read"....

Then there are also the Hoverbikes, and flying cars, but then those came to existance because there's always a weirdo combining things. This is not a result of "cool fiction, I'm going to build that!".

Simon Lake developed a lot of the technology for the modern submarine after reading a bunch of Jules Verne books. That same author's books also inspiring a lot of work on the modern helicopter by Igor Sikorsky. Then you have Goddard's explicit influence from H.G. Wells, as well as numerous other scientists and inventors for the same, and so on and so forth at every step of the process. This all being well documented with statements from the inventors themselves and their patents being in the books.

You can get pedantic if you want and say they didn't technically invent the submarine because the concept had been around in a rougher, less widely used, and less viable format, same for helicopters, rockets, atomic power, and so forth. But at that point you're just nitpicking past what the actual documentation shows. I usually think inspiration is a loaded concept that people put too much stock into, but you've severley downplayed what's more or less a matter of record. The fact is that people, especially at a young age before their careers are set, are very impressionable, and people have devoted a lot of time and energy towards specializations and educations for far less.

Even if you assume someone will eventually come along and invent the same thing anyway, or the same person would just get the idea at another time, that just means you're adding extra steps at every point in the process. If Goddard doesn't build his rocket until many years later because he didn't get the idea where he did, and then Slizard doesn't work out his issues for the same reason, and then every subsequent scientist never saw Flash Gordon or Star Trek or whatever their particular programme was, the cumulative effect essentially sets the technological timeline back by many decades, simply because of the fact that suddenly there are literal thousands of steps in advancement that either get delayed or simply don't happen.

You don't even need to look very far. If you're telling me NASA's new generation of gold trimmed humanoid robots was made in a vaccuum, with their mission patch that's just the death star and a bunch of droids in a millennium falcon, a chief technologist who began his career by making explicit that he wanted robots like those made real, and a statement that boils down to "this is where the inspiration comes from", I'm not really sure what to say.

New innovations come in two ways.
- You have a dream or goal you want to reach.
- You have a new idea, tool or technology to play with.

The stories are similar, but they aren't restricted by with isn't yet possible, so they get big headstart.

So scientist and inventors are developing "today" but writers and artist are developing "tomorrow".
And they both inspire new science and fiction.

Given that we're not going to be visiting Earth or Human territory with the Loroi in Outsider, what sort of foods native to Earth would the Loroi find inedible and which would be instant favorites? I imagine a full list would be too long so just a few key examples or notable exceptions, would be fun to know.

There are Perrein cuisine items that many non-Perrein Loroi consider inedible, so it has a lot to do with cultural perspective. Especially since Loroi digestive systems are very robust.

Many styles of Loroi cuisine are very bland, so very spicy food would probably either be a delight -- or a horror -- to Loroi depending on the individual. I can easily imagine some Loroi as not being able to tolerate any "heat."

How robust are we talking? Inexpertly-prepared-fugu-is-a-walk-in-the-park robust? Or deep-fried-butter-for-every-meal-sounds-fun robust? Is it just that every space elf comes equipped with a full compliment of enzymes for any task, or is it more that nothing escapes the churning maelstrom at the core of the blue devourers?

Also, how much more food experimentation is Alex in store for?

I think the most relevant question there is exactly how much do former Soia planets even have in terms of flavor variation in terms of what's even available.

The whole empire mostly farms one grain type and if what we see Alex eating is any indication there isn't much processing or flavoring going on by default, since the only rations we see mostly look like fruit, some berries, and a blue thing with a core that makes it look like it also grew there. The only things that look like they could be processed are the brown rounded thing in the smaller container and the little rings, but there's no guarantees there. The rounded thing looks like it could be bread but given my understanding of how bread is usually packaged and how much Loroi are described as eating that doesn't really seem likley. There's too much of it unless it's meant for groups and making something round for a square container is an inefficient use of space, especially when you presumably need to cram a lot of it in for rations in a closed system. When you have a limited diet engineered to be edible across species and your preparation doesn't look too involved you'll have a limited amount of flavors as a matter of course. I could be wrong but that was always my take going by the cover of chapter 2.

Perrien is the exception, but Perrien is also more earth like in that it has a wide variety of naturally developed plants and animals rather than a few microbes and/or artificial organisims and their descendants.

And BTW, how common are habitable worlds in Loroi space, or the Local Bubble in general? (In this setting.) By habitable, I mean the narrow definition of the term (breathable atmosphere, liquid water, biosphere, survivable by Human/Loroi standards). Given the many precursor empires and their terraforming projects, I'd assume there are many (certainly many times more than could be expected naturally), but I could be wrong. On the other hands, the Humans only found one (Aldea), while the rest are usually uninhabitable by unprotected humans (usually Arean deserts).

CF2 wrote:How robust are we talking? Inexpertly-prepared-fugu-is-a-walk-in-the-park robust? Or deep-fried-butter-for-every-meal-sounds-fun robust? Is it just that every space elf comes equipped with a full compliment of enzymes for any task, or is it more that nothing escapes the churning maelstrom at the core of the blue devourers?

The Soia-Liron biochemistry is very flexible in terms of this kinds of things it can digest and derive nourishment from, and so Loroi are less likely to be poisoned by an exotic food item than most humans, but it's a matter of context and degree. Many Perrein animals are quite poisonous, and some Perrein food items are toxic to Loroi if not properly prepared.

As Jayngfet mentions, the colonial monoculture of Loroi food may mean that many Loroi will be more inclined to react negatively to exotic foods, even if they are less likely to be actually poisoned by them.

CF2 wrote:Also, how much more food experimentation is Alex in store for?

The subject will be brought up again.

Victor_D wrote:And BTW, how common are habitable worlds in Loroi space, or the Local Bubble in general? (In this setting.) By habitable, I mean the narrow definition of the term (breathable atmosphere, liquid water, biosphere, survivable by Human/Loroi standards). Given the many precursor empires and their terraforming projects, I'd assume there are many (certainly many times more than could be expected naturally), but I could be wrong. On the other hands, the Humans only found one (Aldea), while the rest are usually uninhabitable by unprotected humans (usually Arean deserts).

They're certainly much more common in the Union/Hierarchy/Periphery/Nissek region than they are in the Great Wasteland that is human territory, for the reasons you mention. I'd say they're still relatively uncommon, but it's a large area with thousands of star systems, so there are a lot of them.

hi hi

Perhaps some Loroi are more picky about their food than others. I've certainly known some prodigiously picky humans when it comes to food. Once, I was at a party, and some people there had a hour plus long discussion about all the foods they won't eat. The one that I remember most clearly though was, "If the steak isn't corn fed, I just feed it to my dog."

The Loroi do seem to have a cultural leaning towards in-group bias, so I get the feeling that some Loroi might turn their noses up at exotic food just to keep up appearances, even if they might actually like it. But perhaps I'm wrong about that?

icekatze wrote:hi hi

Perhaps some Loroi are more picky about their food than others. I've certainly known some prodigiously picky humans when it comes to food. Once, I was at a party, and some people there had a hour plus long discussion about all the foods they won't eat. The one that I remember most clearly though was, "If the steak isn't corn fed, I just feed it to my dog."

To be fair, corn fed steak is essentially an exersize in snobbery rather than picky eating. It's the difference between "this is weird and gross." and "I'm too good to eat this.".

As another line of questioning, are Loroi instincts particularly diversed from humans? Their lack of familial relationships, the typical stance on what "love" is, and a few other details give me this idea that they don't really group together out "in the wild" in the same way humans do. Maybe I have a pessimistic streak but there's a certain posessive element to human relationships that just isn't there across multiple articles and it's making me question if that's cultural or just the way they're wired to think by default.

It's easy to express a preference for one food or another when food is plentiful. I think a lot of food preferences will tend to disappear if people are starving. Barring starvation, I think food preference is mostly about what you're used to and individual quirks. I like a wide variety of foods, including some very spicy foods, but I know people of the exact same ethnic and cultural background as myself who literally can't tolerate anything spicy at all. But if the alternative was starvation, I suspect they would quickly learn to tolerate whatever was available. I think we have to allow there will probably be a varied spectrum of food preferences within an entire species, when it comes to a society in which food is readily available.

Jayngfet wrote: As another line of questioning, are Loroi instincts particularly diversed from humans? Their lack of familial relationships, the typical stance on what "love" is, and a few other details give me this idea that they don't really group together out "in the wild" in the same way humans do. Maybe I have a pessimistic streak but there's a certain posessive element to human relationships that just isn't there across multiple articles and it's making me question if that's cultural or just the way they're wired to think by default.

I'm not really sure how to quantify something like this. It's easy to look at an alien circumstance and think, "this seems unacceptable to me, and totally dehumanizing"... but I think it's important to consider that for 99.95% of human history, our ancestors lived every day in conditions that most of us in the modern world would consider totally unacceptable and dehumanizing... and yet, they were no less human than we are today, and they persisted.

That doesn't really answer my question though.

I think if I'm understanding Arioch correctly, he's saying that their relationships and concepts pertaining to relationships such as "love", are different from our current human norms, but not by so great a gap as past norms of ours have been. So, to put it simply: no the Loroi instincts are not particularly diversified along some sort of biological line that makes them especially alien, they're just different in the simple cultural way.

If our gender division were less evenly split we might find ourselves adopting some cultural norms similar to the Loroi, or if the reverse were true and Loroi more evenly split they might find themselves closer to what we'd see as culturally normal for Humans.

Arioch wrote:They're certainly much more common in the Union/Hierarchy/Periphery/Nissek region than they are in the Great Wasteland that is human territory, for the reasons you mention. I'd say they're still relatively uncommon, but it's a large area with thousands of star systems, so there are a lot of them.

Thanks. Is this the reason why the region is called "Great Wasteland" and why the Loroi and Umiak don't seem to be interested in expanding there?

CF2 wrote:I think if I'm understanding Arioch correctly, he's saying that their relationships and concepts pertaining to relationships such as "love", are different from our current human norms, but not by so great a gap as past norms of ours have been. So, to put it simply: no the Loroi instincts are not particularly diversified along some sort of biological line that makes them especially alien, they're just different in the simple cultural way.

If our gender division were less evenly split we might find ourselves adopting some cultural norms similar to the Loroi, or if the reverse were true and Loroi more evenly split they might find themselves closer to what we'd see as culturally normal for Humans.

That just kind of leads into the reason the question was asked though. It's not that one group believes this, it's that it's the norm for a culture with both notable physical and biochemical traits that developed seperatley on three different closed off planets worth of subcultures that became the way it is. It's the Loroi norm, through all of that. So it's a valid question to ask if that's just the way Loroi process their instincts and emotions at a basic level, or a cultural norm that arose over time for sociological reasons.

There is still great disagreement about which parts of human behavior are biological and which parts are cultural, so I'm not sure this is a straightforward question to answer regarding the Loroi. Three different Loroi populations separated for a significant amount of time developed cultures with some very recognizable similarities, so there's an argument to be made that some elements of their warrior culture may be hard-wired into them. However, each of these societies dealt with local challenges in different ways, so they have the ability to adapt.

Victor_D wrote:

Arioch wrote:They're certainly much more common in the Union/Hierarchy/Periphery/Nissek region than they are in the Great Wasteland that is human territory, for the reasons you mention. I'd say they're still relatively uncommon, but it's a large area with thousands of star systems, so there are a lot of them.

Thanks. Is this the reason why the region is called "Great Wasteland" and why the Loroi and Umiak don't seem to be interested in expanding there?

That's part of it, yes.

The other reason is that the great wasteland is where all loroi frat parties take place.

boldilocks wrote:The other reason is that the great wasteland is where all loroi frat parties take place.

Thus explaining alien abductions and anal probing.