SEARCH IN THE GALAXY

It was a project to commemorate the Legacy of the original Emperor Cleon. On a world as overcrowded as Trantor, they need orbiting platforms and connected places like the space elevator. It will happen here too if we don’t destroy ourselves or are not destroyed. Think of the fuel saved by launching directly from space instead of a rocket? It will be done by the clone hybrid of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It will be called the JOBSGEM. The first one will be created in South Africa, then China, Australia, E.U., but based in Russia, Brazil and Nevada. The U.N. Will unofficially run it, but it will strictly be the tool of Copirateocracies bordering on Religious Fundamentalism as even science will have it’s name changed and breakaway society forms following values exposed by Ayrn Rand and Aldous Huxley.

Hi! thanks for reading my story. Definitely all of your questions/thoughts are good ones, but the whole Foundation series (and most SF in general) is a simplified pocket version of complex reality. Plus I didn't have room to overthink the concept too much. I was more inspired by recent US history, where a certain party based most of its platform on hating the Other Guys. Also there was a guy in 1939 who used the same gambit, making everyone hate the "other guys".

I get that there is a tradition of showing that nice leaders are nice even to the cleaners, but yeah, I agree it's a clumsy scene. Especially if you have ever talked with any cleaner. Once a cleaner told me that they had started doing performance reviews at her place of work and they asked her silly questions like "Where do you see yourself in five years time?" She was rolling her eyes. Ink stains I find a little more reasonable. Clearly in the Galaxy they're still using pens to write important maths on paper, look at all the paperwork in the library. Maybe it's a cultural tradition to have a hard copy of those things, and Hari Seldon was actually jotting his equations on paper. And also, it makes sense for the Foundation to have such backups, in case that at some point they are no longer able to manufacture computers.

None of you have proposed an alternative idea to antimatter to explain what the bombs could be. If you have one, just say it. As I said before, "nano-explosives" is a name, not an explanation. And as Thorn said before, nukes wouldn't be small enough. I don't have any strong notions about how good the security of the space elevator was. Clearly, not perfect, since it was brought down. I only argued that it was probably less-than-perfect because the Empire is falling. Since Trantor had enough space traffic to justify a space elevator, then space travel must be cheap enough. Gaal doesn't look like she has a lot of money. People using the space elevator instead of a shuttle after an interstellar trip are no different from people catching long bus ride, instead of a taxi, after getting a plane. If you think that if TSMC's main factory was bombed, chips would simply rise in price, you are in for a serious surprise if that ever happens. Many of the chips made there are simply not made elsewhere. It's generally assumed that the factory could be brought back to operations in a reasonable time, but I don't know if there have been any contingency plans made, or how good any contingency plans are. I'm not aware of how big was the chunk of Trantor's interstellar commerce that was brought down with the space elevator. If you have any insider fan info, just say it.

If the space elevator has low maintenance costs (and I see no reason why they would be high), then it should be cheaper to get the space elevator than a shuttle, and people would catch it for the same reason they catch a long bus ride instead of a plane. On the question of antimatter bombs, as far as I know, there are no noticeable sources of concentrated antimatter in the galaxy, so collecting antimatter from somewhere isn't practicable. The other option would be making antimatter, but the amount of energy used to make it would be greater than the amount of energy that you could generate from it. The antimatter could be used for bombs but not as an energy source. Calling something "nano-explosives" only gives it a name, it doesn't say where the energy for the explosion comes from. The space elevator is a single point of failure, but then, people have been known to build planet-wide single points of failure, such as the main factory of TSMC in Taiwan that produces a significant amount chips in the low nanometer range, or some of the facilities around the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia. The question on the cracks on the Empire is an entirely new one that deserves its own thread, so I'll open it.

The way I understood the replacement Cleons is that every time a new Cleon is born, it isn't just one Cleon, but two: one that gets to live a normal imperial life, another one that is put in suspended animation and ages at the normal rate, and remains unconscious all the time unless he's needed for an emergency replacement. That's why we see a replacement Brother Dawn and a replacement Brother Day that are the same age as Brother Dawn and Brother Day. I think the emergency replacements are somewhat inferior, because what I've seen so far makes me think that downloading a human brain into an AI isn't a very good copy of the original person. The Hari Seldon AI in episode 8 was having trouble behaving close enough to a normal human being in those circumstances, let alone one that likes Gaal. I don't think that having a somewhat inferior Brother Day is an unsurmountable problem. Brother Dawn, Brother Dusk and Demerzel would compensate for any deficiencies. Demerzel must have been leading the Empire herself after Cleon I died and while Cleon II was only a child. Brother Dawn is afraid of being killed for not being good enough or close enough to the original, and his emergency replacement being woken up to take his place, but we haven't seen Brother Day's or Brother Dusk's opinion on the issue, so it could well be that his fears are unfounded. The question of who has the real power, whether the Emperor of Demerzel, is a good one. In the books, Demerzel has the real power, but she resigns because, as a robot, she reaches a point when she finds it too hard to follow the Laws of Robotics (including the Zeroth Law) in her position of First Minister. I'm not sure I find that reason to give up power particularly convincing. So far, we've only seen the Emperor separated from Demerzel to go on his religious pilgrimage, and that doesn't give us any clues on how capable is the Emperor of running the Empire without Demerzel.

I think you know the answer ... it's all a hokey construct and doesn't take into account that ppl learn, even at the age of 90, despite knowing that they're in their final decade of life. The whole preserved Emperor is about maintaining some sort of ages 40 to 70 optimization strategy so that the thoughts and ideologies of the Emperor of those decades stay constant forever. I would imagine that even Cleon the 1st saw that this was a mediocre idea versus giving him artificial organs, cybernetic implants, and a massive multi-parallel servers, in some super cloud formation, to keep his consciousness going so that he could learn and grow forever. In other words, the present Cleon would in fact be a type of 400 year old man who's seen it all, much like Ito. But of course, this is a "JJ Abrams" type of show and thus, anything goes even if it doesn't make sense.

I forget. What did Seldon do to slow the decline?