evilauthor wrote:jmseeley wrote:I've been wondering sort of control mechanism the original plan envisaged.
At a guess? The Truth.
"Hey, there's big nasty aliens out there that would love to exterminate us all. So as long as you guys don't build anything that emits radio signals until Year X+500, you can do whatever you want!"
There'd be no need to create a church to stifle innovation. Hell, there'd be no need to stifle innovation period! The colonists could have started off with a 19th century or even early 20th century tech base, with explicit guidelines on electricity and where and how it's safe to be used.
Arguably, there wouldn't be much impetus to innovate simply because everyone knew that once the time limit ends, they could all upgrade to spaceships and computers again. So why bother reinventing the wheel?
The original plan envisioned a self-replicating command staff located in remote enclaves with a functional (but small and carefully shielded) tech base to ride herd on the remainder of the colonists. Recall that the "pre-tech" industrial base they had going for them by Nimue's arrival was pretty darned good. This was not a subsistence-level society and, as Nimue and Co. have demonstrated, it could have been improved upon still further without crossing the "radiating lots of energy" line. Essentially, the folks in the enclave would have interacted with the colonists and their descendants as mentors and teachers. They would have provided the equivalent of college professors, for example, with impeccable backgrounds (i.e., they would have been humans, not "angels," with a fully developed back story who would interact with the rest of the colonists for 40 or 50 years and then "die of natural causes" and return to the enclave.) In addition, there would have been interaction between the enclaves and the evolving local governments, where the truth would have been known to a small circle of leaders. Even if rumors of the full story had leaked out, the enclaves would have been in a position to control the situation --- by moral suasion by first, second, and third choice, or by physical coercion should more diplomatic efforts fail --- without plunging the entire surviving human race into an abyss of ignorance. In addition, the plan from the beginning was that the enclaves would maintain an advanced medical capability which would have been available to intervene in the case of pandemic disease or similar catastrophe.
In other words, the original plan never envisioned simply throwing the colonists ashore in Safehold without a very carefully arranged and preserved reservoir of the human race's knowledge under the care of custodians charged to preserve it for later return to the descendants of the original colonists. And those same custodians would have been available to handle any emergencies which might have arisen, which would almost certainly have included squashing the reemergence of serfdom or some of the other societal ills which have afflicted Safehold.
Is it possible that the enclaves as envisioned under the original plan would have gone off the tracks in the half millennium of low-tech? Yes, it is, of course. That plan was far less likely to have gone astray than Langhorne's "solution to the Gbaba problem," however. It was also the basis for the Alexandria Enclave's disagreement with Langhorne's policy of book burning. They were trying to follow the original mission plan;
Langhorne was the one who'd trashed his own orders and gone off on a wild tangent.
