‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 595

He had heard her talking and went to check on her.

20 Comments

Foraging for nuts and berries is fun!
But foraging for comments is better!

I’ve been wondering… If people need programmers to “rebuild” their cities, how would they even affect the decay of a physical structure?
Programming isn’t gonna rebuild a foundation, or make an air filter. You need physical robotics or machinery to do those things.

General programming and actual robotics programming require different code systems, as well as different approaches, due to one involving purely logical creations, while the other has the restrictions of the physical.

I’ve always assumed that a lot of the machinery from before still exists and is mostly usable. The bigger issue is checking for potentially lethal flaws created by The Virus so that your repair bots don’t go on a killing spree.

What Marduk says may be the case. I say this as someone with general programming knowledge who had to program an autonomous robot and, due to a glitch early on, accidentally sent a ~120-pound machine into a small crowd of people. That stuff is DANGEROUS if you aren’t careful.

“accidentally”

I’m onto you hacker!

From the Tao of programming:
—-
A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
A deer blends perfectly into the forest colors.
Software rots if not used.

These are great mysteries.
—-
There is more than a little truth to that. Seriously, if it’s not used for a long time, a program will need to be fixed before it can be used. Reasons for this vary (a common one is ‘libraries it uses got updated and aren’t backward compatible’).
Also: Robot apocalypse. You’ve got now a lot of scenarios that would never have been programmed for.
* instruct robots: ‘Do not path under the leaning building, when it falls it will crush you.’
* Instruct robots: ‘do not path through wet rooms/hallways. You may short out and be ruined’
* instruct robots: ‘do not path over uneven floors, they may collapse’
* Hack (yes, HACK) into headless systems who’s administrators have died, to regain control of them. For properly maintained systems this is easy, for anything else this can range past difficult to nightmarish.
* repair broken networks (contrary to popular belief, it’s not as simple as running a wire between two points – it’s a net and traffic gets routed. Route it poorly and the whole net can suffer)

In a world where you can ship a 5 lb resource around the world for $5 and use it to help manufacture 1000 of the latest, most advanced microchip? You’ll do just that.
In a dystopian world where half the mines for a rare resource have flooded, and the rest have defunct equipment, no amount of money can get you that resource and you simply cannot make those microchips.

Really, with their tech base where it is, I’d expect humanity to die off in weeks, bounce back in few years (like 2), or get held where they are by an active malefactor. I’m betting we have the last option at work here.

Dr Grace, what are your sins?

To be even remotely self sustaining for a short time, each city needs pretty impressive manufacturing capabilities. If I had to guess, the resource shortage is a handful of metals and minerals.

It’s also possible that regardless of manufacturing capability, some things are nearly impossible to repair. Have you ever tried repairing the concrete foundation of a building while a house was still on it? Imagine doing that for an airtight, city sized house.

Lastly, the Virus is still around even if it’s currently dormant. There are likely a lot of robots and machines that are manually turned off and never used for fear of what the Virus might do if it acted up again.

With the creation of 3D printing, and the long-term possibilities of the technology, there is really no telling how important programming will become even for physical structures in the future. I could see construction vehicles being driven by programs that are based around 3D printing tech. That’s just one area where I could see programming playing a large part in building cities. Anything is possible!

I just had a disturbing thought. What if the point of the game is to make The Outsiders happy until they die. So the cities keep the games running which distracts their own citizens but also prevents the citizens that are trapped outside of the Cities from trying to affect the city the reason it’s free for Outsiders is because the city’s decide on who to import based on it and the rest of the people can just rot Where they are.

I mean, that’s kind of explicit. The cities can’t import everyone, so they pick and choose, and the game is there as the medium for the Outsiders to connect to the civilization parts. They do get shipped food, though, so it’s not like the cities just leave them to their fate after connecting them to the grid. I would say ‘keeping them happy and sane with ability to socialize’ is a pretty major thing for the cities to do for them though.

If it’s so easy to ship resources out, and that there are enough quantities to ship out, it begs the question why smaller towns and cities aren’t forming as the resources are available to bring outsiders to a central location and form communities.

Nah, a proper city would need h*lla infrastructure for all the life support it would need. I’m sure groups of survivors would band together to make survival more likely, but it would probably never be an actual city. The resources being shipped out are those very basic nutrient bars and maybe a handful of goods every now and then, as most would be used by the proper cities to maintain the bigger, more stable population centers. And there’s only so much you can find in the rubble that would actually be usable at all, much less for its intended purpose.

The answer is air. Shipping someone 100 pounds of food will keep them going for weeks. Shipping 100 pounds of atmospheric life support to contain you, your furniture, the house you live in, and the field(s) you need to farm is cost-defeating. Much easier to expand the housing and life support of your own city and ship the Outsider in.

The fact that they aren’t means that there’s at least one critical shortage of something somewhere (probably many more). Maybe the life support bots are broken, but the shipping bots still work. Maybe nasty-gunk food is easy to produce, but concrete for the new shelters is in extremely short supply.

Sorry, said that wrong. By “cost defeating”, I mean it would take a MASSIVE number 100 pound shipments to build a structure that would support one person in a somewhat self-sustaining manner.

Honestly that probably is the reason. Provide entertainment to prevent uprisings against the already fragile cities. One good riot could probably end a significant portion of the human race.

Of course we would never do such things today.
Jersey Shore
America’s Got Talent
World Wide Wrestling
Jerry Springer
Reality television et al
Movie theaters
Rap music
Portable MP3 players to keep our minds from actually thinking without distraction…

… nope, no brain-deading the masses here!

…So basically Mae accidentally shouted into her dad’s face?

Somehow, I thought that the outsiders provided something back to the cities. Not just entertainment from the Game.

People in the city are expected to support the city: do work, or provide enough entertainment in the game that an extra body consuming resources provides sufficient return. So, participation in the games costs money, and depends on being good enough to be popular.

People outside the cities? They don’t drain resources, not really (shipped food, will be the same amount no matter what the person does), and they provide entertainment.

At least some outsiders would have functioning farms. MaryJane commented on the difference between city farms (indoors, hydroponics, safe) and outsider ones (unreliable, people near death, etc.), but they can’t all be on the verge of failing, can they?

Magnetic pole reversals are somewhat common/normal in earths history, and don’t cause massive die-offs.

There was also a supervolcano eruption though (mentioned on p249), and p205a mentions other volcanic eruptions and calls them (on 205b) “normal.” Magnetic pole reversals may not cause die-offs, but massive ash emissions can be problematic for, say, agriculture.

Magnetic pole reversals are somewhat common/normal in earths history, and don’t cause massive die-offs.

How do we know this? There have also been mass extinctions. As long as they hadn’t happened since we came on the scene, we wouldn’t really know. Would we?

We do know when the magnetic pole reversals happened. We also know when the mass extinctions happened, and have pretty good theories for why they happened. We can see that the pole reversals don’t really affect that much. I mean yes it screws with life forms direction sense, but its not a lethal issue, and they figure it out in a few generations.

However, a supervolcano and a bunch of other volcanoes, plus all the earthquakes, and probably tsunamis, as well as messed up weather patterns caused by all this tectonic upheaval… that is going to cause problems for food survival. Droughts, ash cover, flooding and storms, makes farming hard. Fishing is probably one of the best sources of food, but coastal infrastructure is wrecked.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 595