Why did Mesa ever develop Congo

Tenshinai wrote:

davevw wrote:...

The pharmaceuticals they were getting couldn't have been worth that much.

I don´t recall the exact wording but i do believe the drugs were considered VERY valuable. Unique IIRC?

Yep, according to Textev;

Crown of Slaves:

"It might change faster than you think," demurred Du Havel. "I've been studying the economic figures available for Congo, as many as I've been able to track down. Which isn't much—and that's significant in itself, because it means it's been a gold mine for Mesa and they're keeping it hidden. That planet is potentially rich, Jeremy. The market for pharmaceutical products isn't going to go away. And I don't believe for one minute that Mesa's brutal methods for extracting the wealth are necessary. They just use up people because it's easy for them, and it's their way of doing business. Give us a few years—fewer than you think—and we can start producing more wealth using civilized methods than Mesa ever did with whips and chains.

Torch of Freedom:

Du Havel had waved that aside. "Don't worry about it. The one thing Torch is not, is poor, even with having to provide initial support for most immigrants, who usually arrive with nothing much more than the clothes they're wearing. But the support doesn't normally last long, because the job market is booming. Plenty of pharmaceutical companies have been quite happy to come here and replace Manpower's operations with their own."

The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

kzt wrote:The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

Yup.

Add to that making it an F5 star, which would probably be heading into its red giant phase in the same length of time Earth spent developing multi-cellular life. Granted, a sample size of N=1 doesn't establish that it can't happen, but it doesn't provide any support that it can happen, either.

kzt wrote:The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

In theory yes. In reality it is much more problematic.

Just for one example, some drugs that have been made synthetically has never made it to massproduction because they were found to be useless or have drastically worse sideeffects than the original substance. This because naturally extracted stuff sometimes works as it does because it´s NOT pure, and because what is extracted with the "useful part" might even be required for it to work.

And then there´s the issue of creating complex molecules. If the pricetag for one dose of medicine equals the GDP of a small city for a year, it´s just NOT going to happen. And that´s the simple truth, a lot of substances there are easy ways to duplicate the molecules, but some are difficult enough that decades of research is unable to do it, and some might not be possible without atom by atom manipulation, and that´s when you end up with the ridiculous pricetag.

It´s not that it can´t be done, it´s that the price for doing it becomes laughably high.
And even with future improvements, atom by atom manipulation is just too troublesome to use for common medicine.


Molecular scale computers is childsplay easy compared to manufacturing complex molecules, it´s just not comparable in any way.

Hutch wrote:
Yep, according to Textev;

Crown of Slaves:

Torch of Freedom:

Thank you. Yeah, "goldmine" probably says it all.

JohnRoth wrote:

kzt wrote:The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

Yup.

Add to that making it an F5 star, which would probably be heading into its red giant phase in the same length of time Earth spent developing multi-cellular life. Granted, a sample size of N=1 doesn't establish that it can't happen, but it doesn't provide any support that it can happen, either.

Not true. An F5 star should stay on the main sequence for 5.4 billion years--a billion years longer than the Earth has existed so far. The old Rand report Habitable Planets for Man estimates that F2 is about the brightest a star can be to last long enough for higher forms of life. That report is old, but that particular part of it is still pretty valid.

Tenshinai wrote:

kzt wrote:The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

In theory yes. In reality it is much more problematic.

Just for one example, some drugs that have been made synthetically has never made it to massproduction because they were found to be useless or have drastically worse sideeffects than the original substance. This because naturally extracted stuff sometimes works as it does because it´s NOT pure, and because what is extracted with the "useful part" might even be required for it to work.

And then there´s the issue of creating complex molecules. If the pricetag for one dose of medicine equals the GDP of a small city for a year, it´s just NOT going to happen. And that´s the simple truth, a lot of substances there are easy ways to duplicate the molecules, but some are difficult enough that decades of research is unable to do it, and some might not be possible without atom by atom manipulation, and that´s when you end up with the ridiculous pricetag.

It´s not that it can´t be done, it´s that the price for doing it becomes laughably high.
And even with future improvements, atom by atom manipulation is just too troublesome to use for common medicine.


Molecular scale computers is childsplay easy compared to manufacturing complex molecules, it´s just not comparable in any way.

If there's an organism that manufactures it, then that organism can be reengineered to manufacture it reasonably cheaply. As of right now, we're only on the threshold of that technology.

In any case, I'd imagine that gene therapy will substitute for most uses of medicinals for chronic conditions. With CRISPR technology, we're already at the threshold. Assuming things manage to hold together, we're going to see a biological revolution in the next couple of decades.

kzt wrote:The plot was always pretty stupid. This is a universe where people build molecular scale computers. And where nanotechnology is just something everyone uses for manufacturing. You can just MAKE the drugs once you have a sample to analyze.

JohnRoth wrote:
Yup.

Add to that making it an F5 star, which would probably be heading into its red giant phase in the same length of time Earth spent developing multi-cellular life. Granted, a sample size of N=1 doesn't establish that it can't happen, but it doesn't provide any support that it can happen, either.

SWM wrote:Not true. An F5 star should stay on the main sequence for 5.4 billion years--a billion years longer than the Earth has existed so far. The old Rand report Habitable Planets for Man estimates that F2 is about the brightest a star can be to last long enough for higher forms of life. That report is old, but that particular part of it is still pretty valid.

Thanks for the data point - I was unable to find a decent reference for estimated lifetime vs main-sequence spectral class.

Let me add a comment: On Basilisk Station was published in 1992, From the Highlands in 2001. I doubt if anyone in the early 90s thought that biotechnology was going to take off like it has. From my perspective the view of far-future biotechnology seems about as realistic as H. G. Wells using a cannon to shoot people to the moon.

If people are interested, a PDF version of the Rand report Habitable Planets for Man can be found at: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pu ... B179-1.pdf

It was written in 1964, and is probably the most comprehensive examination of the features and probabilities of habitable planets ever made. It is 176 pages long, and a version of it was published as a book, which can still be found for sale. I believe that several science fiction authors have mentioned that they have used data from the report to make realistic worlds. The researchers examined examined every aspect of habitability they could think of. Since the available planetary data was limited to the Solar System, a lot of their speculation on probabilities is out of date. But most of their research on the planetary and stellar requirements are still useful.

JohnRoth wrote:If there's an organism that manufactures it, then that organism can be reengineered to manufacture it reasonably cheaply. As of right now, we're only on the threshold of that technology.

In any case, I'd imagine that gene therapy will substitute for most uses of medicinals for chronic conditions. With CRISPR technology, we're already at the threshold. Assuming things manage to hold together, we're going to see a biological revolution in the next couple of decades.

That´s pretty much the current hype yes.

And if it was actually that easy i would be really happy.

There´s a huge gap between specific cases and general ability to do it.

This is why if you walk into a drug store and start checking up how they´re actually made, you will probably find a lot of things that might shock you.

And the last 15 years or so, has been a constant stream of "within <5 years there will be...", and they´re still saying it, about the same stuff they said it 15 years ago. And in most cases they´re no closer to making it real today than they were then.

Yes there is definite progress and all, but the hype is just hype.

For example, CRISPR has the unfortunate issue that targeting just what you want may or may NOT be possible at all.
Not to mention that there´s a number of major sideeffect issues with it as well, issues that right now we simply do not know if they can be solved ever.
It might take just a minor modification/improvement to fix it up completely, or it might not be possible to fix it end of story. Sure it might still be highly useful even if it isn´t fixed, but it would be restricted to very few, very narrow uses.