SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 5

Hello all!

I’d better get you in on some details about playing SMAC. I haven’t been able to get to them because of the extentisve work needed on explaining these crazies. We can, and can’t, take a break with the Gaians.

I said that there are 7 factions in the base game (not including the expansion game, Alien Crossfire). What I forgot to mention were their AI personalities and how they interacted with each other. Yang and Lal (we’ll get to him) go at each other due to their collective tyranny vs. liberalism. Miriam hates Zakharov and vice-versa. Corazon hates Morgan because her military values are antagonistic to wealth (Morgan’s specialty), though Morgan himself has little bitterness towards anybody. Perhaps he returns it to Corazon, and sometimes he gets mad at Deidre (the topic of this post), but he tries to get along. Deidre too, lives in an unpleasant relationship with Morgan, due to his industrialism harming the Planet. Yang, though aggressive, is pragmatic, and works in temporary alliances. Lal still tries to get along with everyone. Miriam and Corazon usually become antagonistic to everyone as the game progress. But curiously, Deidre and Corazon rarely war with one another. And, she and Morgan can survive being next-door neighbors, as long each party stays on their side of the fence.

Lady Deidre Skye and Gaia’s Stepdaughters: (dee-druh sky) AKA the Gaians. The Gaians are freedom-loving space hippies (who can harness the power of alien biology to kill all humanity) who just want everyone to live in peace and love with each other, man, and the Planet! Deidre herself is a trained, genius biologist, with a forlorn, dreamy beauty about her (and she’s an introvert).

Like with Zakharov and the University, and Morgan and his cronies, Deidre and the Gaians are a maturation of an ideological movement that took a couple of centuries to develop, environmentalism. All well and good on a mostly serene planet like Earth, but on Planet Chiron, a death world, environmentalism is put to the test. The ultimate goal of the Gaians is harmony with nature, and to refuse to pollute the new Planet like Earth. As a faction/ideology, they are not possible in most contexts unless there has been significant technological advancement and understanding. Now, make no mistake, despite the name, the Gaians aren’t neo-pagans in space. Nor do they live like cave-men, they still use technology extensively. They’re mystical, sure, but how can you not be when talking about natural beauty? And, pay no mind to the psychic powers that they are dabbling with, that isn’t magic, it is just natural abilities they are copying from the local alien wildlife.

Like with ‘science’ and ‘capitalism’, ‘environmentalism’ is tricky to talk about, namely because it is a hot-button topic, because they’re all like pseudo-religions to some people. This muddles things more, because all three can be a way of thinking or a way of doing/lifestyle or be mixed in with a political movement. All three are crazy because us humans are stonking crazy. Personally, I think environmentalism exists because humans don’t know how to interact with nature any more. What is our relationship with nature, especially since we can atomize it (and ourselves) or permanently poison it—or at the least so damage the biosphere that nothing more complicated than bacteria, plants, and small animals will survive.

Is nature a god, like the old pagans say? Is nature a tool to be used, like materialist movements will say? Is nature ‘more pure’ than mankind? More? Less? Is nature more human than humans? Trust me, these questions have gone far, far back to—about the early 1800s. You know, post-1700s, when the Age of Enlightenment was promoting science, and mocking anything it didn’t like, but also when (in Europe at least) nature went from being a creation of God to then a ‘machine’ made by God to then just a machine (God not found), but also as a way back to God but also a way to secret knowledge not explainable by rational science…I’m telling you, humans are weird, and nature doesn’t care. Is nature our mother? For C. S. Lewis, if she is, then Nature is our step-mother (of the fairy tale variety), or perhaps the older Christians were right, and Nature is our crazed, irritable, irrational, vicious, bountiful, beautiful older sister. But all in all, what is humanity’s relationship to nature? (Though I know of no thing that ever calls nature ‘Father’.)

Now, the controversial accusation against environmentalism is that it is an anti-human movement, out to reduce the human population because—because why? To save the planet, kill the humans? Or, at least, stop them from being born in large numbers? Saving the planet is not that great a pitch when the survivors still want to live in luxury. Or are you killing humans to save them from misery? I’ve heard that one, too. What…what is the benefit, the goal, of having a natural world free of humans? Or is it like a different kind of Eden, but the garden had no humans at all?

But don’t get me wrong—humans have no right to abuse the natural world. Nor do I think the natural world has a ‘right’ to abuse humans, per se. We are allowed to cure disease and move out of the way of a hurricane, or stab a bear trying to maul us. Hmm. How to talk without getting bogged down in a theological battle? Aha! The biggest thing to keep in mind is that, yes, nature is not man-made and that its existence is independent of human action or caretaking. You can say, that ‘nature’ is an alien that shares this planet with us humans. Think about it! Think, of the forest and jungles. The forest, in older times, was the place of secrets, magic, mystery, where one could find demons and elves skulking in the trees. The trees! An entire environment—forest or jungle—made by a million of the same organism! When you walk into a forest, do you walk into a collection of organisms, or one great big organism*? Are you not walking into an alien body? Do you not see an entwined highway of branches, where no creature has to touch the earth and yet can traverse across the entire forest? Running, climbing, flying—all out of the reach of man!

[*Trick question—most trees are separate, but there are a wild amount of fungi that grow together underground that fuse into one organism, like the Armillaria ostoyae in the USA state of Oregon.]

Have you not seen the cicadas, after seven years, waddle from the ground and up the stripey bark of an oak, each bark-bit like a cliff, and the cicadas climb them in unison, as effortlessly as they walk up a wall? Haven’t you followed them, with your eyes, drawn up the bark and through the branches on a day after rain, when the sun bounces light between leaf and waterdrop; the canopy like green skin of a new-born creature, or a flashlight shining through an egg? All from one beam of sunlight?

And you can whisper to yourself, ‘Thank you God!’

No? Do you call yourself an environmentalist? Pwah! Ah well, there were crows there in the high branches to peck at the cicadas (dumb fowl and bugs).

I’ve found that there are indeed a number of reasons to hate nature just as I’ve found a number of reasons to hate mankind, and reasons to hate mankind under the guise of saving nature. There are too many to list, because then I’d have to write longer than the Morgan entry! I think, we love nature too much because we hate human faults even more. There is a brutal honesty in the natural world—the protection of kith and kin, no questions asked, because you are born part of the pack. The pack members don’t sell each other out for profit margins (Ellen Ripley, Aliens 1986). Or, perhaps, the hatred of things that are outside your control, and abuse you greatly, even taking limb and sanity from you? (Ahab, Moby-Dick 1851.) Perhaps a disgust at competition? The devouring of the weak? Revulsion at the inherent disorderliness in the world, that causes pain and suffering? Yet counter this with the insatiable need for more, that life requires the taking of life—that all things die, regardless, and feed whatever survives?

…Life sure is uncomplicated as a rock.

What’s the goal of environmentalism? There are as many answers as there are understandings of the question, ‘what is the relationship with nature and humans?’ So, frankly, you DO have to question an environmentalist’s personal motives to find out.

Yet, I MUST say something controversial. I think environmentalism is a feminine disorder. As Zakharov and Morgan obsesses over things, money, objects, so too does Deidre, like a mother, try and prevent conflict and thus prevent suffering. Or, you could look at it another way—humans and ‘Nature’ are in an abusive relationship, and humans are the b****. Or perhaps Deidre is like a crazy cat lady, who, having no children of her own, but unable to channel her tenderness, saves the life of every small animal and bird, and lets the beasts turn it into a pigsty! Or perhaps that vegetarianism, so common among waifish women, is not to save animals but is a symptom of horror at your own fragile mortality? Beauty and life and loveliness, all desirable, all fade away…

I think Deidre is specifically guilty of ‘mothering something to death’ (see her quote on ‘Hybrid Forest’), of being so overly protective that something withers and dies. Because that’s also a feminine disorder—and men have plenty! I’m well aware of all of them! But women have problems too, and one of them is not only a lack of courage, but a refusal to see that adversity does make a (surviving) person stronger. Yes, Freddy Nietzsche first said the famous line, but he wasn’t the only ****head who understood this! It’s dumbfounding, too, in spite of what ‘rational science’ says, but life requires a constant competition to stay healthy, let alone thrive. All organisms are demanding; even our own organs constantly compete, siphon away nutrients from other organs, and it’s only the brain that keeps them in check! What I’m getting at is an understanding, that no creature or thing is self-sufficient, and has constant needs. Evil people hate this, because that means they can’t live forever. Mothers hate this, because that means they have to understand that they aren’t Goddess—they can’t provide for everything and can’t protect everything and can’t prevent violence and strife. I warn you all—being a mother is a power trip.

And rightfully so! It is just as addicting, too. And how does a mother maintain power? By paralyzing everyone. Perhaps you can say the same with women in general—paralyze people, make them worthless, exile them, poison them; raise such hellish racket that everyone becomes emotionally disturbed but you promise to make it stop if you get what you want; make yourself untouchable by having everyone so ‘love’ you that they’d never harm you…or get a man to do it. But then he back-talks, so that’s a problem. Aha! Command over psychic alien beasts! That will solve the problem.

As with the other factions, one has to ask, what is the end? Zakharov and Morgan don’t seem to want those answers; Yang has a kind of utopian-dystopia; Corazon has vigilant-if-crude survival; Miriam will make God’s kingdom on earth*. Lal, we will get to him later.

[*Well, she may, if she gets the anthropology and theology right, but she has no right to complain when God judges her and tells her to turn from her sinfulness.]

Deidre? The strange thing about environmentalism, when it changes from political action to a theology, is that it’s not very supernatural. How can it be? How can there be something ‘above’ (super-) the nature, what exists? There have been attempts at this, and they all lead to pantheism—all things are God*. You are God, as am I, as am Nature—as is that rock, that chair, that pile of unmentionable substance…though the serious pantheists will apply some common sense and have a hierarchy of better and lesser gods. Still, there is nothing above this base materials. Where does it end? Supposedly, it doesn’t, or (for the more brutal) till the eventual heat-death of the universe. It could lead back to a kind of ‘enlightened paganism’, whatever that entails. But one has to remember something crucial—unless there is some kind of non-human being, commanding us humans, the environmentalist tract is merely saying ‘Nature is superior to humans and that’s because humans say so’. By necessity, it requires either the suicide of all humans (see playstyle) or it requires that there be less humans who then—well, alter the ‘humanity’ of their being into something more in keeping with ‘nature’. Not saying the sex-fetish furries—they have too little ground to stand on. Maybe human-animal chimeras? Or, more in keeping with the passivity of nature, human-plant hybrids? But like the furries, it requires transhumanism technologies to work.

[*While I wouldn’t call him an environmentalist of the 2000s nor a transcendentalist of the 1800s like Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) does have a logical system that ultimately leads to pantheism, which I think is the first of its kind in Western European cultures.]

Gaia’s Stepdaughter Playstyle: Become space-druids and unleash the forces of [nature] xenobiology upon the surviving colonists! Use the [space-magic] innate unlocked human abilities of psionics to warp the minds of your foes!

The Gaians have bonuses to efficiency and planet-score but penalties to military and police. They are and aren’t space-hippies. So, in-game efficiency is a variable used, along with distance from your HQ city, that determines how much energy-money a given city makes. It’s a mechanic that mostly prevents wanton expansion, because it if is too low, none of your cheap slums you pumped out will produce any energy-money. This means that the Gaians can, somehow, make a pretty-penny if they build a dense collection of cities around their HQ city, or they can spread out (their tendrils) over many cities of a larger area without worrying too much of energy loss.

‘Planet-score’ is a mechanic that first, determines how often the mindworms attack your cities, and then with later techs allows you to capture mindworms and use them as military units. What does that mean? It means that you have a bizarre adaptation the other factions have to adapt to (read, ‘magic’) because mindworms use ‘PSI combat’—they ignore technology bonuses when fighting and instead use entirely different mechanics for fighting*. Other factions must use different countermeasures when fighting your monsters or else they’ll lose.

[*Technically, any faction can research the techs to capture and grow mindworms as military units, the Gaians do it better.]

But the real dread is environmental destruction. And by that I mean using the environment to destroy your foes. Again, any faction can do this with the right technologies, but the Gaians do it better. There is terraforming technology in-game, where (eventually) you can raise or lower mountains, plant forests, drill giant mining boreholes—and plant alien fungus. Alien fungus, which acts as a barrier to Earthling units, and is the home for mindworms and other critters. And the Gaians can plant the stuff all over the place without being penalized by it. If other factions did this, they be assaulted by constant infestations and their food production would suffer, because while you can ‘farm’ on fungus tiles, the yield is always poor … unless you’re Gaians.

Now, the penalties to police and morale? Well, the Gaians kinda are educated space-hippies, so they don’t like fighting (they have a sub-par Earthling military) and are afraid of using police, so they are more vulnerable to riots in their cities. Effectively, this means that you have to drown the Gaians in luxuries to keep them happy, which means you have to rearrange your Civilian-workers to have some ‘produce happiness’ all the time instead of being productive! Like working themselves to death in the mineral mines or boiling in the solar panel farms. Those suckers are as hot as electric ovens and you put hundreds of them together in one field.