Invasion re-creation

[selden]

There's an article in The Register mentioning that some Dutch sailors are re-enacting an invasion of England when the Dutch had managed to do serious damage to the docked British war fleet back in the mid 1600's. Everybody seems to be finding it entertaining.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/24/...le_medway/

I'm wondering to what extent such things might happen in OA. Many of the EG articles are quite serious, for example, and doubtless many of the transapients involved in past conflicts would still be extant. Would they consider similar re-enactments all that amusing?

[stevebowers]

The Battle of Erson or the Battle of Hubble's Nebula might be popular scenarios. Some modosophonts might even use reenactments as a form of ritual suicide.

[selden]

That's not very amusing!

[Drashner1]

Some transapients might be into this, others not. The most direct way to 're-enact' past events would be in the Cybercosm - virtual worlds that recreate and simulate an event, possibly a vast number of times. S2 and higher transapients could 'play' millions, billions, or trillions of modosophonts or lower minds at the same time. So their version of re-enacting might be rather more...involved than what we normally think of when using that term.

Todd

[stevebowers]

I'm reminded of the ship in Iain Bank's novel Excession, the GSV Sleeper Service; it contains tableaux of famous historical (land) battles, with numerous real humans in biostasis, posed in various attitudes as if in combat. Going into stasis is a commonplace practice, in Banks' Culture, as people like to pause their lives from time to time while they wait for something interesting to happen.This also happens in Orion's Arm, most often when the people concerned are travelling.

Anoyther thing that happens in OA is that long-lived people like to end their own lives ceremoniously and at a time of their own choosing; that is why I suggested the suicide role for these battle re-enactments. Even if a sophont doesn't want to end their own timeline irrevocably, they might wish to participate in a battle or other highly dangerous activity, with the knowledge that they can be restored from backup if necessary - their backups can be updated during the battle up until the final moment, assuming that the data can be retrieved or transmitted in time.

Note, of course, the same applies to real battles- modosophonts in a real space battle could be retrieved and reconstituted over and over again, but this takes time and resources - something that are limited in warfare. In addition, most modosophonts would not be able to compete against specialised military expert systems, which would act much more rapidly and ruthlessly than the average modosophont - unless that person were radically enhanced, making the whole experience very far from normal everyday life.