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Jul 1, 2017 10:33:03 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:33:03 GMT -7
This thread will cover current scientific priorities, as well as what they hope to advance and how they function. This thread will not cover what science can currently do, as the technology level in this world is very similar to that of the real world. If it exists in the real world, or if it can be done in the real world, it's safe to assume it can be done in New Sumatra. This is not an exhaustive list, only the bigger subjects right now. Table of ContentsBiology (talks about current biological research, mostly agriculture, environment and medicine) Physics and Engineering (talks about current engineering challenges, mostly building height and transportation) Anthropology and Archaeology (talks about the current role of historical sciences, they used to be dead and are now seeing a resurgence) Sociology, Psychology, and Social Engineering (talks about current social engineering goals) Computers and Technology (talks about current technology challenges and security) Space (talks about what the space program has accomplished and what they hope to do) Magic (talks about how difficult magic is to research and what people try to do)
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Jul 1, 2017 10:33:34 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:33:34 GMT -7
Biology In the last century or so, a lot of effort went into finding more efficient ways to produce food. Before, it took up a lot of space and people were becoming worried that it would be impossible to support the population. There wasn't any space to expand farms into, and the city needed to be expanded in order to support the growing population. First they started making multi-layered farms and figured out how to simulate sunlight so that plants could grow indoors. Then they started figuring out plant genetics and started altering them to produce more edible crop. Then they figured out how to cultivate cells and eliminated the need for livestock, instead basically growing meat in the lab. Further research was done on combining them to make new different kinds of foods, so that people could have a greater variety of food to eat. There's been interest in seeing how magic could further improve food production. The other big non-medical topic is environmental research. Some environmental legislation was passed in order to reduce emissions and hopefully help the environment. The effects appear to be helping, as the usable land is growing by about 2cm in diameter each year. However, Twilight Jungle seems to be growing by the same amount, and there are signs of odd plant growth on the city side of the wall surrounding the jungle. A lot of effort is going into figuring out what's causing this additional growth and how to accelerate it. It could be the key to restoring the earth and making life easier for everyone. One of the biggest worries a civilization with such a high population density has is the spread of disease. A great deal of effort and medical research has gone into mitigating the risk of infection, how to handle people that get sick so that it doesn't spread, and how to cure infectious diseases. It's lead to things like a cure for the common cold, but heart disease is a lot more likely to kill people than it is in the real world. If the disease isn't contagious, it's considered less important and is less likely to get much research behind it. While not all infectious diseases have been cured, most of them at least have something to mitigate the effects or risk of spread. Thus, a lot of modern research is going into combating anti-biotic resistance and coming up with alternative solutions to them should it prove impossible. Suddenly having several infectious diseases be harder to handle would be very bad for society. There's some research going into helping other conditions, but it's significantly less than that. More resources are actually being put into figuring out how to more efficiently use resources so that people can actually get proper treatment for the problems science already knows how to deal with. People with completely curable life-long problems, such as diabetes or kidney failure, often die from them because it requires too many resources to help them right now. It would be preferable if this didn't happen, thus trying to get more from production and trying to figure out how to use less to get the same results. Similarly, a lot of research is being done on how to clone and create artificial organs and blood to help people with organ failure.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:33:45 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:33:45 GMT -7
Physics and Engineering Much of the research in this area is going into producing stronger metals so the buildings can be bigger. With the city already pushing the limits of what the usable area can hold, being able to continue to build up is important to the city's development. The rest is mostly based on incremental improvements existing things. Better sealing on windows to lower air-conditioning costs and help keep bugs out. Helping with improving medicine, building better tools, and new ways to examine the inside of a human body without cutting it open. Increasing heat resistance on the tram tracks so that faster trams could be built. There's also a lot of talk about building high speed trains out in the wasteland to help people get from place to place more easily, and possibly to help facilitate exploration. The biggest thing holding them back is not knowing where to put the tracks. Trains can be quite fast, but they're limited by where the tracks are and it's difficult to move them once they're built. Thus, people are watching wasteland expeditions closely for something like this.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:33:58 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:33:58 GMT -7
Anthropology and Archaeology Until recently, these were considered dead subjects. The wasteland had no signs of old civilizations, and New Sumatra had been flattened and rebuilt several times to accommodate the growing population. There were no old buildings, and very little signs of the city's history, with stories and old journals being about the only things researchers could use. Even the wasteland hasn't turned up any signs of history yet. Most of New Sumatra's ancient history has been lost, and there hasn't been any way to find it. The discovery of the ruins have changed that. The stone in the ruins doesn't come from anywhere near New Sumatra, not even from the nearby wasteland. Based on how it looks and how the plants have grown into the walls, the ruins are quite old. History enthusiasts are excited that there may finally be something for them to research and perhaps more about the world's history can be discovered.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:34:24 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:34:24 GMT -7
Sociology, Psychology, and Social Engineering Given the amount of people in the city, managing people has been a very important part of the city's development and has been a huge point of research. The social sciences have been very goal orientated since it became a serious discipline. It's made it as much as a hard science as physics or chemistry in the sense that they're trying to learn enough about people that they can predict their behavior and build social and building structures around that. It's helped determine the current layout of the city, where connectors and stations go, how they're laid out, how stores are built, where they're put, and how the interior is designed. Schools and daycares were built around years of research so that the children could be as happy and successful as possible, and be ready to contribute to society when they grew up. How to properly control the media and public opinion has been studied extensively and implemented. Much of what the social sciences have set out to accomplish has already been achieved. Society is orderly and people are content. Much of the current research is more about incremental improvements and optimization. The big fields are improving schooling, and making people feel happier working to increase productivity. Psychology still has many mysterious about the human mind to discover, so their research is much more about learning new things rather than improving existing things. They frequently work with neuroscientists to figure out the connections between the chemical and electrical processes and human behaviors. Their main goal is to help people with mental diseases, particularly severe ones such as schizophrenia, and to try to find better ways to educate people with severe mental disabilities so that they can better fit into society. Cures for things like autism are being looked at, but how to properly accommodate them, especially those that are considered high functioning and just have social troubles, is considered equally as important.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:34:38 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:34:38 GMT -7
Computers and Technology In the last fifty years, computers have become an important part of society. It's rare for a family to not have at least one computer, and cell phones are so common that the government has set up automatic text messages every time someone makes a purchase to help prevent people from buying things with stolen credit cards. With the dramatic increase in use, the demand for improvements has been high. Computers have gotten smaller, to the point that they can easily fit in the palm of someone's hand, and that has been useful for the crowded city. Now people don't need to reserve entire rooms in buildings to hold their systems, so that space can be used for something else. However, there's been a limit to how small computers can get, and it's dependent on the displays. People want their displays big, and that has made progress with further shrinking computers slow to a crawl. People have been looking into projected displays and the like to hopefully make computers even smaller. Other incremental improvements are being developed too, such as better cables for faster internet speeds, and trying to make them near indestructible so they don't break when dropped. The other big area has been computer security. As computers became a regular part of society, the amount of people that could actually use them increased, and thus the amount of people that want to use them for nefarious things also increased. With the increased use of computer networks, securing the physical computers only does so much anymore. It's described as a never ending race between the security specialists and the hackers. The moment security is patched up and back doors are patched, someone will find a way around it and tell everyone, which means it needs to be patched again, but someone finds a way around than and then... The biggest difference between New Sumatra in the real world is that the security specialists are less concerned about inconveniencing their users. It's for the good of everyone, they can deal with slower page loads and a few extra clicks. That's not to say that no one cares about the users though. Researchers have been working with psychologists and sociology experts to find the optimal way to build web pages and applications. Figuring out how they should be structured, where people are most likely to look, how to properly lead the eye so everything's as user friendly as possible, all of these things have been discussed so that the user will always do what the designer expects when they use their software.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:34:49 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:34:49 GMT -7
Space Fifty years or so ago, people were worried that New Sumatra was reaching capacity and that it wouldn't be able to support anymore people. At the time, the population was still steadily growing, but the city's ability to produce food was plateauing, and there wasn't anymore room to build more apartments or ways to get more food to support the growing population. The wasteland proved nigh impossible to traverse, and attempts to find new usable land had failed. Thus, people started looking to space. Perhaps it would be possible to colonize the moon or a nearby planet. Anything would have worked at the time. Thus, the space program was started. At first, it was just a lot of high powered telescopes to scout out what might be out there. There was no telling what might be out there, or if the effects of the wasteland applied to space too, so they played it fairly safe. Unfortunately, what they found were lifeless planets, a planet with an atmosphere of poisonous gas, and several huge balls of gas that looked solid but really weren't. The dream quickly died and people started looking for other solutions to the overpopulation problem. With that problem largely solved, very few resources went into space program and it stagnated. They have yet to even launch an unmanned probe into space, let alone try to get someone to the moon. With the sudden increase in resources, some scientists are hopeful that the space program can pick up again but aren't holding their breath. One of their goals is to launch a simple probe into space to maybe get a few pictures of the earth. People aren't sure what they'll see, but perhaps there are other pockets of life on the planet and maybe those will be visible from space.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:35:03 GMT -7
Post by Kitten4u on Jul 1, 2017 10:35:03 GMT -7
Magic Magic has been a contentious point of research because of how annoying it's proved to research. Most of the physical world is predictable. If you put a mentos in a bottle of soda, it'll fizz in amusing ways. If you added magic into that, it might be amusing, it might do nothing, it might seriously explode and hurt everyone conduct the experiment, it might just turn the soda purple. Who knows? It could easily be different every time as magic just seems to do what it feels like. It's made several researchers consider it not worth the effort at all, especially considering how low powered magic in humans seems to be. Others have looked at Twilight Jungle and have seen that magic can be far more powerful and that, perhaps, it's possible for humans to harness that power. Most of the research is done by surveyors, and considering most of them are fairly young and not scientists, it's about as chaotic as magic itself. The Surveying Association collects all the information given to them in order to try to paint a cohesive picture, and the researchers that are interested in researching magic collaborate with them. Given how little is known about magic, the primary goal is just figuring out how it works, with a secondary goal of figuring out why it seems to be so much more powerful in the creatures in the jungle than it is in humans. Surveyors are paid for the information they provide, so most try to give at least a little. It includes things like monster descriptions, samples from weird plants and animals, drawings and sketches, and sometimes even their own bodies. Magic research involving people is still heavily controlled by the ethics committee, so such experiments tend to be safe for the surveyor and don't normally result in them being cut open.
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