4448184 Alright, I will try. I tend to be blunt, but don't try to be insulting or anything.
Note, only have read that very first post, so anything that might have been expounded upon later (there is a rather lot to read) I have missed it.

The nanomachines function only because of the anti-entropic power of Equestrian physics. Nanotech for human reconstruction was abandoned by the Worldgovernment Medical Sciences Division because it was determined that the physical motion of submicroscopic machines generated too much heat - heat that built up and essentially cooked the very flesh it was trying to repair.

My problem here is that they abandoned the research. It does not sound like a insurmountable problem. The easiest solution is have the machines work slower, produce heat at a more manageable rate that the body can dissipate. While it might turn something that lasted hours into something that last weeks, considering the level of things they could do it's a fair trade-off.
And I do not buy that they dropped it because they are greedy ass-holes who only cared about money. Nano-tech is the motherload for money, if they can get it working right. Not to mention they could acquire themselves functional immortality, and tons of other benefits. Lots of reasons for even the most corrupt people wanting to fund this.

Next point of order, is that I don't see anything with it altering their DNA. While they serum might turn them into a pony NOW, their cells would still be trying to grow according to human growth patterns, which would obviously cause problems when they are shaped like a pony. Especially kids, who are growing rather quickly compared to adults, they would require frequent check-ins and re-applications of the Serum as they grew up to make sure they were growing right.
If they DID change the DNA, that raises other questions. Namely as to the wider effects of such mastery over the human (and other) genome. Projects to make people Captain America would be a breeze with that level of tech, considering all that would require is the suppressing of some built-in safety mechanisms (bits of the genome that we, in real life, have already identified, we are just still caught up on the safely altering it, without causing cancer or similar problems).
The only solution I can think of is that Ponies don't have DNA, and instead their growth is guided by magic, since your version of magic works on Platonic Ideals (got some problems with that, but that is personal not intellectual), it could be shaping them towards some ideal pony, personal variance arising on it's own. But then, that makes me wonder why ponies even have Cells, and are not something more akin to golems.

Finally, the most nit-pick-est of all my points here

Plants use quantum indeterminacy to make photosynthesis nearly 100 percent efficient

Plants are not 100%. Not close. Theoretically, the best you can hope from a plant is 11%, and in practice you usually get closer to 3-6%.
The most obvious way you can tell that plants aren't 100% efficent is because they aren't black, but are instead reflecting green light, which is obviously not absorbed.

.

4448361

I love your 'Spock riding an alicorn' avatar, by the way. Awesome sauce.

My problem here is that they abandoned the research. It does not sound like a insurmountable problem...
And I do not buy that they dropped it because they are greedy ass-holes who only cared about money. Nano-tech is the motherload for money...
Next point of order, is that I don't see anything with it altering their DNA...

The problem of heat with regard to molecular machines might be solved by stretching out medical reconstruction over weeks or months, true enough. But in my future projection, the development of machine replacements massively superior to biological components became more desirable. I assume you have read my works. Permatech isn't just having a computer / watch / holographic interface installed in your forearm, or having cranial jacks that let you directly experience the hypernet as a living virtual world. Permatech is also artificial hearts, livers, arms, legs, and any other organ. Permatech is eyes that see better than human eyes ever could, and have the advantage of also acting as a personal onboard monitor / entertainment system.

The wealthy do indeed have anagathics to extend life - by the time of the Bureaus, a wealthy person could afford to live 150 years, easily.

One character, considered to be a Living World Treasure - the last traditional policeman on earth, Ronald Chua, made it past 185... plus. His entire community paid for his anagathics and replacement parts, out of love and respect.

You seem predisposed to imagine everything my future characters and social structures do is somehow greedy or evil. Sorry, that is bullshit and lies. The way I write things, Permatech and Softech implants and replacements were just so advantageous, superior, and convenient that trying to solve the hard problems of nanotech was simply not desirable. There wasn't a good market for it, compared to having a new liver that, for example, not only could do everything a human liver could normally do, but which could also protect against a multitude of toxins and diseases that nature simply never bothered to cover. Plus, an iron-clad warranty and replacement policy, not to mention automatic software upgrades and additional optional features.

Additionally, artificial flesh in my future is able to handle extremes of temperature better than natural flesh. So, it can be manufactured economically. Permatech isn't clumsy boxes of metal.

Not that metal isn't ever used - Chang'e, the artifical blue cat of my current novel has a nanotanium skeleton over synthetic flesh, for example.

The novel Going Pony features a character obsessed with these very things. She wants nothing less than a second pair of military grade artificial eyes! At the other end of the scale, the short story Her Last Possession features two friends who choose to have permatech implants that are positively 'retro'. They giggle at how the super wealthy are appalled at their simplistic 'holographic watch in the forearm and that's all' choice. Bit mischievous, that pair.

Lastly, which of my novels have you actually read all the way through? You didn't mention. In Recombinant 63, there is much fuss about the teams working on how the ponification transformation serum should convert the genes within each cell, and how that might be accomplished. The telomere caps are also considered. That book is the story of the creation of the serum, among other things. Perhaps you missed that one.

I have, after all, written over 1,200,000 words of a self-consistent hard science fiction future. Or maybe you just forgot about the DNA issue. I am very thorough, I cover many things. It's a lot of detailed and complex information.

Plants are not 100%. Not close. Theoretically, the best you can hope from a plant is 11%, and in practice you usually get closer to 3-6%.

I am very sorry. I was off by 5%. According to some, but not all, sources it is only 95% efficiency, not the complete 100%.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shining-a-light-on-plants-quantum-secret/

http://www.livescience.com/37746-plants-use-quantum-physics.html

However, those are magazines, scientific papers from the government peg it much higher:

http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/PBD-quantum-secrets.html

So, please forgive my inaccuracy. I should have said "Nearly 100%" and not simply 100%. Somewhere between 95% and 98% is the most likely truth of the matter.

Also, it probably varies between those two numbers based on other factors, such as the health of the plant, the frequency of the light, and such.

You seem to be just a tiny bit off on the wild, unfounded guess you made. Good try though! - the logic is sort of sound, even if the facts aren't. My background was in medical biology, so... I kind of had the homefield advantage there. Sometimes light absorption isn't about how dark something is, but instead about more complex factors, such as quantum interactions and superposition.

4448562
Sorry Chatoyance, but that's another case of the popular press getting the interpretation of the study wrong. The >90% efficiency is strictly for one phase of the energy conversion, where quantum effects made that phase nearly perfectly efficient due to superposition of the possible energy paths. The maximum theoretical TOTAL thermodynamic efficiency is 13%. In nature, it varies from 5-9%. A summary of the issue from the Wiki:

100% sunlight → non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
53% (in the 400–700 nm range) → 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
37% (absorbed photon energy) → 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) → 32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
9% (collected as sugar) → 35–40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
5.4% net leaf efficiency.

4448617

I got focused on the one part I am currently fascinated by. He meant the entire process, not just that super awesome component. Duh. Yeah, of course the entire plant isn't even close. He's right. Not what I was focusing on, but... he's right.

Derp.

Next time I'll try to see if everybody is on the same page, and that I am being specific and clear enough.

And I'm usually a generalist! Double derp.

4448562 I have not actually read a single one of your stories. I might, eventually, but there are just so many stories on the internet to read, I have a list of stories over a thousand long I need to get too. And I did preface my post with the fact that the only thing I read was the entry post of this thread.

You seem predisposed to imagine everything my future characters and social structures do is somehow greedy or evil. Sorry, that is bullshit and lies.

I heard rumors that you were rather anti-human in your stories. As mentioned, haven't read any myself, so I just ran with the assumption that at least the higher-ups were corrupt ass-holes, as they tend to be in sci-fi things.

But anyways, while there might not be MUCH use for it in Health, Nanomachines have uses in all sorts of fields. Industry, construction, entertainment, tons of things. Really, the main issue is them DROPPING it. Taking a back-seat, sure. But not out-right dropping it, for when properly mastered, it could do everything they could do with most standard machines, and more.

And on the issue of genetics, why is aging a problem (serious question, cause you seem more caught up science wise than me)? We got several examples of animals who just do not grow old, I'd assume that with the mastery of Genetics they got (it can't be simple to turn the human genome into a pony one without messing something up horribly, and not having every single Newfoal be near identical), I'd think it would be simple to figure out how to apply that to humans.

Stuff about light

I went through a lot of trouble to round up lots of sources backing me up, and it turns out someone else sorted out the issue for me. I'm both happy and upset.

4448653
Yup, mix in the first two links acting as though the entire process is 99% efficient, and we have a great opportunity to shout past one another. Yay.

4448674

And on the issue of genetics, why is aging a problem (serious question, cause you seem more caught up science wise than me)? We got several examples of animals who just do not grow old, I'd assume that with the mastery of Genetics they got (it can't be simple to turn the human genome into a pony one without messing something up horribly, and not having every single Newfoal be near identical), I'd think it would be simple to figure out how to apply that to humans.

Maybe she did apply that to her story. As it stands, earth's populace is on a bit of a decline, at least as far as industrialized countries go. Education + resources + a working lifestyle have lead to parents having fewer kids later in life. Quite a few countries are now worrying about a labor shortage in the coming decades. But from what I'm also hearing is that scientists are getting close to solving the issue of ageing. If aging was slowed, or outright eliminated, the population would surely start climbing back up, and a century from now in the Chat-verse, maybe that would lead to her post apocalyptic vision.

4448674
4449201

Nanotech, even if it was abandoned for most medical uses, was not completely, totally, black and white abandoned. Please refrain from absolutist thinking with regard to my stories!

Nanotech is the basis of all civilization in my stories, in fact. Poop and waste is directly converted into food to feed the population. Nanofactories are among the last remaining industries, they produce almost all goods that exist. Two percent (the Twopers) of the population of the planet have jobs, most work in the nanofactories. Nanotech is used to produce clean water and every kind of material still in use.

Nineteen billion people live in the Bureau future. They are all fed and watered thanks to the Worldgovernment Daily Ration. For the first time in history, no human being, anywhere on the earth, goes to bed hungry. Food and water are distributed by the Blackmesh Security Forces, who also handle governmental level security issues. Often seen as enforcers in many stories, the real duty most Blackmesh pull is guarding shipments of food and water and keeping the people fed.

Most people live in the Worldfavela. After the Collapse, the ecodisaster, The Last Harvest, the first and second nanoplagues and the Austerity War, the earth is a dying planet, there is no real ecosystem left, and the elite have built fortress arcologies in Antarctica to get away from the rabble. But - that said - out of the goodness of their hearts, and the fear of riots, the corporate elite do keep all humans alive. Most diseases have been cured. Cancer is commonplace - things are toxic, but Malignostat is a common, easily available medicine that stops cancer dead in its tracks. Everyone on earth has access to Malignostat, it is freely dispensed. Nobody starves, nobody usually dies of disease (realistically, there would still be outbreaks on such a crowded world. I account for that. It happens. But generally disease is dealt with.)

Anagathics are for the wealthy, only the wealthy can afford the treatments to extend life. Just like the best health care is for the wealthy only. Just like anything really great is for the wealthy only. As is always was, and ever shall be.

Life extension is not an issue for the rabble - everyone else on the planet that isn't part of the 1% - but guaranteed food and water are the reason why the population is so massive. Just as the Green Revolution has allowed the world population to reach seven billion and rising through artificial, technological means (well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet... roughly four times past the capacity) so nanotechnology in the Bureau future permits nineteen billion people.

The Bureau future is both the true Golden Age Of Mankind, and the Last Days Of Mankind. The Bureau future is neither utterly a crapsack, nor is it a sugar bowl. It has elements of each. It is a future where a person could live to 180 years old, and have cranial jacks and super-human senses and live supported by artificial intelligences at every step. Self driving sapient cars. Personal airships and true virtual reality worlds.

But just like our world now, these things are only enjoyed by a small percentage of the population of the planet. In short, the Bureau future is the current day, business as usual, only cranked up to eleven and the knob ripped off. All the trends in technology and ecology are taken to their logical conclusions. It is a gray future, as realistic as I can paint it.

ADDENDUM:

I'm going to re-re-post my future history rough, general timeline notes, just because it details a lot of stuff and will save time. So here we go again:

Sometime within the next twenty years from whenever the reader is reading, the fiat currency issue comes to a head. There is no more denying that most, if not all, First World nations are utterly bankrupt and in completely insolvable debt, and have been for many decades. The world financial situation disintegrates, this is called The Great Collapse. During those twenty years Japan is gradually evacuated as Fukushima and other reactor sites become spreading permanent death zones. The Japanese people become a nation without a country, and wander the world. The Pacific Ocean becomes the world's largest, and spreading, ecotastrophy.

During the Great Collapse, there are food and water riots in major, First World cities, and martial law is nearly universal, but it is surprisingly ineffective. Cities are destroyed, armies attack their own citizens, and governments fall like dominoes. The wealthiest one percent of the planet ride out the horror in various ways: floating city-ships, Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMB's) and private fortresses.

Near the beginning of the Great Collapse, many things are tried to slow, or stop the destruction of civilization, one of these efforts is a massive genetic engineering push to spark a second Green Revolution. This creates the Last Harvest, where all wheat gradually becomes inedible by all life, even bacteria. This leads to even worse starvation, and helps spark the food riots - though they would have happened anyway as infrastructure collapsed.

The Great Collapse begins when the effective default of the United States combined with the rejection of the financial system by smaller nations such as Greece initiate a monetary domino effect. Tensions rise and military interventions fail to provide intended stabilization through force. Political powers grasp at failing dominance, resulting in global destabilization. A power vacuum opens.

Old rivalries take advantage of the situation. The middle east becomes a limited-exchange nuclear hell-hole. Radical elements within the United States, prepared for an imagined super-tyranny see the Collapse as proof of their Dominionist, religion-fueled, end-times paranoia, they detonate stolen nuclear weapons in various major cities in the belief they are 'cleansing' America. San Fransisco is one target of this, so is Los Angeles and New York. Similar events happen in Russia and it's satellite states. Africa, dominated by China by this time, turns into a slaughterhouse where isolated Chinese factory-cities are assaulted by disgruntled nationals.

China and the east see limited nuclear exchanges with both Koreas resisting invasion from the North.

As things get worse and worse the 300 'Good Families', the wealthiest and most powerful dynasties of history, come together to deal with the potential loss of the world, and thus their peasantry. From their bases and ships and the growing fortress-cities in increasingly warm Antarctica, they organize and mobilize the precursors to the Blackmesh. All masks are finally dropped, as there is no longer any pretense of 'governments' and 'corporations' - all were just puppets of the Good Families, and always have been. The Good Families reluctantly take central stage, unhidden, to rescue the planet as best they can.

Both secret and known technologies are revealed and employed. A secret one is nanotechnology - which has advanced moderately farther than most realize. A known technology is artificial intelligence which is already used for near total surveillance of the population. Humanity, in desperation, works together for the first time on a global level, all nationalism vanished. Nanotech is used to manufacture food and water for the world, and this prevents the annihilation of humanity.

Gradually the world rebuilds, under the iron fist of the Good Families - now out in the open - and their global enforcers, which become the Blackmesh after their nanoconstructed, flexible carbon fiber armor. There are not enough resources or energy to permit the luxuries of the pre-collapse world, so a global favela replaces large and small cities. The world is divided up into production zones, which the Good Families regulate, their overseers and lieutenants manage the zones in a return to feudalism on a planetary scale.

By this time Japan is a dead land, much of Russia is toxic, the Middle East is a permanent glass desert of radioactive death, and China is a balkanized mess that only gradually becomes a proper Zone. Australia is left to despair for a long time, they never completely fit in. Africa is found to have been devastated by chemical and biological agents, and is fairly empty. Worse, the alterations of the climate and rainfall have left most of the planet desert. The Amazon, by this time, has been a barren desert for decades.

Exact Location of Emergence of Equestria:

28.8558,-142.414221 Just north east of Hawaii, in the Pacific. 2:30 AM, April 22nd.

Nearing the time of the Emergence Of Equestria, the world has become relatively stable. The population has returned and expanded rapidly: with every person fed and watered, but with nothing to do, humans breed wildly in a global version of the 'bounce back effect' that occurs now, when charities feed Third World peoples. Unlike now, however, nanotech food recycling prevents the massive, even greater starvation that always follows crusades to feed the hungry. The world population reaches nineteen billion.

But what is not told to the people over the numerous entertainment and propaganda kiosks that maintain the social cohesion is the terrible fact that the planet is already doomed. It was even during the Great Collapse - the tipping point for the biosphere had already been reached - but nobody, not even the Good Families wanted to admit it. The planet is already dead, on its way to becoming a copy of Venus. The human race has three generations left to it, before the level of oxygen in the atmosphere drops to a point where life can no longer be sustained - with no forests and no jungles, with the ocean dead, there is no longer any production of oxygen sufficient for survival. The planet is in a death spiral, and there is no escape.

Literally no escape, because peak radioactives, peak rare earths, and peak energy are facts in our time, now. In this future, the situation is only worse, and there is no possible hope of any escape to space. There isn't now, in fact - we simply don't have the resources to colonize space any more in 2014. The last reasonable chance for that passed sometime in 1970, and even then would have required a united earth to accomplish. There is no place to go, and no future for humanity.

The Good Families have the plan of domes in Antarctica, and underground complexes cut into the stone there, in which to hole up with their trusted minions while the rest of humanity dies. Their last plan involves having sapient artificial intelligence iteratively design more and more advanced nanotech that might restore the world before it goes full Venus. Note that in this future, artificial intelligence is not like in the Optimalverse, it is not something that can be said to truly be 'alive'. It functions, but it works as P-zombies, devoid of true qualia.

Only artificial animals - like the Muffin the blue cat and Jake the dog in my stories have true experience and life. This is because they are partially biological, and make use of quantum tubules for part of their minds. In the TCB, true, living consciousness is a fluke of quantum reality, whether in the microtubules of neurons, or the artificial tubules of designer animals. (This idea is taken from Dr. Roger Penrose). The quantum nature of true consciousness is the reason, by the way, that Thaumatic energy in my stories (magic) kills all life. All biological life on earth uses quantum effects - photosynthesis depends on it for energy transfer, brains use it to tell direction and to sense magnetic force, even mitochondria use it in energy production. Magic eliminates the 'dice god really does use', and destroys indeterminacy. It has to: magic, to work, must know the true and compete state of matter, if you think about it. No other way to turn a pony into a cactus (as foal Twilight does to her parents) in the blink of an eye. No indeterminacy, no quantum states, no life. Yes, I feel utterly brilliant about all of this. I guess my biochemistry background finally paid off!

The nanotech solution will not work though. Tiny machines, as I have pointed out many times in my stories, generate heat. Heat that will just help the planet turn into Venus faster. The last hope of the Good Families is doomed to fail.

The last days of man will be cooking inside a cavern cut into the mountains of Antarctica, the heat rising to match the Venus-like hell above. Think 'Level 7' by Mordecai Roshwald.

Or would... except for the emergence of Equestria, nearly at the end of life on earth, to rescue and save what can be saved of human existence, and the creatures of the earth.

Without the extorted promise that brings Celestia to the rescue, humanity would boil to death within three generations. The humans of the doomed planet earth are saved by a last-moment hat-trick rescue.

Why did Celestia wait until the last possible moment to save humanity?

She needed nanotech to be developed, and the human genome to be completely deciphered. She may be deific, but trying to convert billions by sheer will, outside of her natural environment, inside of a zero-magic universe is beyond her.

Also, to be honest, she wasn't eager to let billions of alien creatures that destroyed their own world into her universe. Only reasonable, really - but a promise is a promise, and for a deific entity... even more so.

BONUS!

I can offer some more stuff, too. Here are my working notes on the state of the world in my TCB future history:

The Earth is run by the World Corporate Authority, also called the Worldgovernment or the World Corporation.

Their enforcers are the Blackmesh Corporate Security, so named for their polycarbonate webbed armor.

The 19 billion of the world is divided up into Corporate Production Zones, ruled over by the Corporate Elite. Serving the Corporate elite are the only humans who still have jobs, the 'twopers' or Two Percenters, who manage the artificially intelligent factories and production centers.

Most humans live in the worldfavela, a world-spanning slum amidst the ruins of destroyed cities, broken down arcologies, and of course the rad zones, radioactive areas where nothing can live.

There is the:

Northamerizone, comprising what once had been the US and Canada. Here is the site, in Saskatchewan for the Last Harvest, an ill-fated attempt to genegineer grain, leading to the total extinction of wheat throughout the planet.

Southamerizone, which is the totality of South America, including the Great Amazon Desert and the Peruvian Desolation.

Eastasiazone, which includes most of the eastern part of the pacific rim, including the Nippon Exclusion Zone, so radioactive nothing can ever set foot there again.

Midasiazone, what used to be China and Russia, and the baltic nations

Eurozone, which includes the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean.

Mideasternzone, the middle east

Afrizone, the whole of Africa

Southasiazone, which includes everything down to and including Australia and New Zealand. Aussies are still a bit miffed and often refer to themselves as New Oz, or the New Oz Alliance, but the corporate world government Does Not Approve.

Ponification itself is achieved through the use of Potion, or Ponification Transformation Serum, a nanotechnomagical fluid that makes use of Equestrian physics (magic) to power Earthly nanomachines.

Magic is termed Thaumatic Radiation, and it is undetectable by any normal means, yet it is deadly to all primate cells. Mage Plague is the sickness that comes of exposure to Thaumatic Radiation.

The level of Thaumatic Radiation can be determined with a Fleshstrip; a thin piece of vat-grown human skin held in a plastic support frame. Placed in proximity to Thaumatic Radiation, it can be observed, the time it takes for the living cells to die provides a scale to measure how dangerous the radiation is.

Most humans in the favelas get their information from holokiosks, which are provided by the worldgovernment propaganda and infotainment division.

Every human on Earth is provided with the Guaranteed Minimum Ration, which is three quarts of potable water and 1000 calories of nutrition derived from nanorecycled human and other waste. This is doled out from Blackmesh Ration Distribution Centers.

That 1000 calories is 200 short of the actual needs of human beings was a deliberate political concession to the more conservative (read sociopathic) parts of the worldgovernment, the lack is there to 'get the lazy useless eaters off their asses and back to work' entirely ignoring the fact that there literally are no jobs left for the vast majority of humanity.

The very first Conversion Bureau opens up in San Francisco, with 100 clinics... the second in Vancouver, with 500.

4449387 Wasn't bashing nanotech. Just explaining how the elimination of age would lead to overpopulation. But thanks for the timeline post regardless.

4449511

The nanotech stuff was mostly for Trondason. He seemed to have the issue with it.

I was answering both of you at the same time, rather than making two longish posts one right after the other. Many things overlapped, and so I just figured putting all the info in one post made more sense than duplication of data.

Everything's cool.

I agree with regard to anagathics.

I think that life extension must be partnered with fertility reduction and control, myself. I would think becoming immortal should not be allowed without first giving up the ability to reproduce. Sterilization Before Immortalization!

But then, I think humans should control their population anyway. Smart animals, like Wolves, do. I think reproduction has become overly sacred. I do not think it should be a fundamental right in a technocratic civilization, but an earned privilege.

Yes, this is ripe for abuse. I do not argue otherwise.

But the bottom line is - there is a carrying capacity for the planet, and we are already over it. Something has to give, and I would rather it be the 'right to reproduction' than the right to remain alive. Nature has ways of dealing with species that exceed environmental carrying capacities, and all of them are very, very nasty.

Not getting to pop out pups is much better than Nature's solutions, I think.

4449387

Nanotech, even if it was abandoned for most medical uses, was not completely, totally, black and white abandoned. Please refrain from absolutist thinking with regard to my stories!

Nanotech for human reconstruction was abandoned by the Worldgovernment Medical Sciences Division because it was determined that the physical motion of submicroscopic machines generated too much heat - heat that built up and essentially cooked the very flesh it was trying to repair.

That's why I thought that. Abandoning it seems to imply much more than just focusing on other stuff. Because advances in other fields would convey advances in the medical one, simply because they are advancing nano-machines in general. Greater efficiency for example would decrease heat out-put.

timeline

Interesting. Your stories are readily climbing up the "Way too long list of stories I should read" list.
Really, now the only thing I disagree with is how hopeless you are portraying the situation of the human race. Despite how terrible the situation they find themselves in, it does not seem hopeless, especially if they aren't shy about human augmentation, increasing the range of situations they can survive in. You mentioned they had Three Generations, while I'm not sure how long a generation is considered, I'm going to assume 20 years atleast. That's 60 years to get stuff rolling, time to work on various projects that would improve their situation and extend the total amount of time they had.

Speaking of which, couldn't Celestia have helped with that? Even if Equestria was stuck on Earth, and magic was steadily radiating outwards, unless it's doing so at a exponential rate, she could have really helped with efforts to relocate to another planet (like Mars), and extend the amount of time they had on this one. While it might be too much to expect for her to cool the planet in a day, week, or even year, she has 60.

4450396
Celestia doesn't really want to save humanity. But a human in the 1300's extorted a promise out of her, in exchange for her very existence. She keeps all of her promises, always, no matter what. She is Order, incarnate.

But Celestia didn't promise to save the earth. She didn't promise to save the human shape, or any part of human culture or beliefs or knowledge or anything else. That isn't what the human that extorted her wanted. It wasn't even an issue.

She keeps her promises.

What is her motivation to repair the planet of a species of rapacious hunter-gatherer primates who have already killed off their biosphere in order to make a dollar? What does she get out of spending the next three hundred plus years or more, committing her entire population of ponies (her powers drop off with distance from the Barrier according to the inverse square law) to do the work of regrowing the minerals in the ground, returning plants to the land, restoring the forests, unpoisoning and restocking all of the planet's seas, and cleaning the entire planetary atmosphere... how does she, or Equestria benefit from that massive total commitment?

Especially knowing that, once they leave, the humans will just do the same thing again. (seriously, we've had 200,000 years to get it right. !5,000 if you just go from the current established date of agriculture). Humans are not going to evolve a different nature in 300 years. Or a thousand. How long does it take ordinary ponies to repair a dead planet? Celestia can't do it. She's only godlike inside Equestria.

What is her payoff? What causes her to clean up the cage of a bunch of meat machines who think war and keeping most of their population - throughout all human history - in poverty and degradation is fun? Where's the benefit to her, or to her people?

THAT is why she does not commit the entire resources of Equestria to arbitrarily repairing the earth. It isn't even what she promised. She's not here to save the earth at all.

That's why the Barrier chews up the planet to make the Exponential Lands... to provide the 11 billion (out of nineteen) Newfoals some place to live. They can't all fit in Canterlot. There isn't room.

What exactly did Celestia promise? Willamus Learmount was an absolutely religious man. In 1300's Great Britain, Catholicism was science, it was not open to debate, it was the fact and truth of reality. Angels and devils were literal beings that walked among Man, the miracles of the bible were not stories but documented events of history, and the world truly was created by a sky wizard, and not by literally unthinkable natural processes.

Willamus Learmount was shown Truth. He begged for it, but he was not ready for it. He saw what scientists now comprehend, what all educated people now know: our universe is an accident of natural process, and we are nothing more that meat machines evolved from other meat machines, in an uncaring, magic-less, soul-less, god-less cosmos of atoms, molecules, quarks, electrons, and the four fundamental forces.

And in this dark horror of meaninglessness, he also saw the tiny hole through which true life flowed, the hole Celestia used to enter our universe. And he saw Celestia, as she truly is, immortal, undying, magical, the opposite of our cold and uncaring physics.

Why not read his own words, translated from Middle English after he, alone was rescued:

When I made my plea to she who saved me, and begged her to preserve me from the spiritless void and dissolution of my world, my princess did save me as you now know. But when I had gained my wits upon the other side, in her land, I felt ashamed for my survival while burning within me was the knowledge that all other men should perish while I alone lived forever.

Thus I begged the great queen, my Celestia, that she help all men as she had helped me, so great was my sorrow. But she could not, for the door between our worlds was now closed and would not open again for such time as I could not hope to see, nor any of what offspring I might have, nor even of theirs and theirs beyond.

But she also wept inside for my wretched and lost kind, and in her endless compassion and kindness she made me a promise to comfort me and to still my weeping. This promise I relate now to you, as best I remember it, for it was many years ago indeed.

My princess spoke unto me in complete truth and faithfulness that the doom suffered by all of humankind, that their lack of eternal souls and meaningless lives did trouble her heart greatly.

It was said among the alchemists that the soul is gold, the very goal of their philosophical search, and I conveyed this hope to her that perhaps man would make such gold for themselves one day. To this she replied that such gold would be as iron, and ultimately come to ruin, that without the essence of life there was no hope even with our human cleverness.

But as this made me cry the harder, she made promise thus; that one day, without fail, she would return to the earth once more, and on that glorious day, make her stand to end all human woe and sorrow, and to save my kind and rescue them from oblivion forever.

This she promised me in good and true faith, and in this promise I have made my peace with my new life.

They are coming.

Sownynge in moral vertu was her speche,
Was verraily felicitee parfit,
the peril of my soule, and of my lyf,
And this lyf she added eek therto,
That if gold ruste, what shal iren do?
In swich delit o day
wol I yow withouten faille turne to erthe ageyn,
The whiche thynges troublen al this erthe,
Ther is thee shapen of thy wo an ende.

4450961 I never suggested she fixed earth. Humans can live just fine within bio-spheres, while they ignore the rest of the planet, science advanced that far. The only thing she would need to do is cool it down, since the rising heat seems to be the most prevalent problem (if that would even end up being a problem. Some googling lead me to believe that the underground of Venus is surprisingly cool, when compared to it's atmosphere). They can grow their own foods. The sun provides plenty of energy if they just are willing to harvest it (and considering it's that or die, I think they are willing). Purify water as needed. Put up shielding for any radiation and other inclimental weather (being underground solves most of those problems, and even if radiation and the like was still a problem, just add more shielding, and maybe some trans-humanism to add resistance to radiation).

And if Celestia sought to transform ALL of humanity, despite their wishes on the matter, then I can see why people call her a tyrant and whatnot. It's one thing if there was no other option, but to go "Transform or die (of natural causes I could easily save you from)", well then. Earth is far from the only real-estate humans could inhabit. Provide means for those who don't wish ponification means to live else-where, then by all means she can have Earth.

Humans are not going to evolve a different nature in 300 years.

You say that, when we pretty much have. Care for one and another has increased exponentially. It use to be good clean family fun to throw sacks of cats on a fire. Do that now, and you will be facing extensive jail time, and a lot of death-threats from various animal lovers. Use to be people didn't give to licks to orphans mutilated while working in a factory, but things are different now. Keep that trend for a while more, and things will be nigh-Utopian, especially with tech backing it up providing universal health-care and freedom from all illness and woes.

4451015

And if Celestia sought to transform ALL of humanity, despite their wishes on the matter, then I can see why people call her a tyrant and whatnot. It's one thing if there was no other option, but to go "Transform or die (of natural causes I could easily save you from)

When you read a post by me, you cannot skim. You have to pay attention.

What is her motivation to repair the planet of a species of rapacious hunter-gatherer primates who have already killed off their biosphere in order to make a dollar? What does she get out of spending the next three hundred plus years or more, committing her entire population of ponies (her powers drop off with distance from the Barrier according to the inverse square law) to do the work of regrowing the minerals in the ground, returning plants to the land, restoring the forests, unpoisoning and restocking all of the planet's seas, and cleaning the entire planetary atmosphere... how does she, or Equestria benefit from that massive total commitment?

Especially knowing that, once they leave, the humans will just do the same thing again. (seriously, we've had 200,000 years to get it right. !5,000 if you just go from the current established date of agriculture). Humans are not going to evolve a different nature in 300 years. Or a thousand. How long does it take ordinary ponies to repair a dead planet? Celestia can't do it. She's only godlike inside Equestria.

I will repeat: Celestia can't do it. She's only godlike inside Equestria.

and: her powers drop off with distance from the Barrier according to the inverse square law

She is impotent to do anything you suggest. It is not easy at all.

But what you suggest is irrelevant, since none of that is what she was asked to do. From her perspective, humans are not even alive. Humans are unalive meat machines that have no real existence. Humans are toasters. They are dead objects.

And in her Equestria, even mere rocks have true life. Humans do not.

So, she is fulfilling a promise to a souless meat puppet.

And the extorted promise is to give humanity immortal, magic souls. So they don't just die forever and become annihilated.

And, looked at from that perspective, her perspective, she is doing ultimate good.

Because we are not even real. We're just talking, literally dead, animated meat. We're zombies.

You cannot just shine on reading what I type. The answers are there. You may not like them, but the answers to your questions are there.

4451169 I paid attention. Her inability to move away from the barrier is only a problem for the uncreative. A number of things would permeate on her own, like if she super-cooled the air directly surrounding the barrier, the rest of the atmosphere would cool as a result over time. There is tons of shit she could have done without ever getting off her ass.

I get WHY she did it. Just, as I said, I agree with the people who call her a totalitarian bigot.

4451204

Celestia, offering a last moment lifeboat and true immortality - with some demand of assimilation in exchange for survival, to protect her own culture - to an utterly doomed species of violent apes who have killed their own planet, because she was begged to, makes her a totalitarian bigot.

I see.

That makes sense to you? That is your rational assessment? Really?

You know what your attitude sounds like to me?

"I'm a paramedic. You've been in an accident. We've restarted your heart... do you have insurance?"

"WHAT, YOU EXPECT ME TO PAY FOR THIS? YOU TOTALITARIAN BIGOT!"

You sound overly privileged and essentially ungrateful - especially if it means you have to agree to reciprocate in any way.

The better story, for you, is it...

Celestia never came. The humans slowly choked to death as the remaining oxygen in the atmosphere was lost. As the heat rose, even those deep in Antarctic bunkers roasted alive as the planet became a second venus. Man died as he lived, without meaning, without reason, without any being to remember him. He was just another animal in a vast universe, and he will not be known or missed.

THE END.

Or is it, as I suspect:

Celestia came and became the slave and servant of glorious Mankind! Committing all of her universe to Man's survival, she repaired the planet, and agreed to remain, constantly cleaning up Man's messes forever, eternally becoming the mommy of all humankind!

Grown ups learn that compromise and fair deals are the basis of legitimate interaction. That if you move to a foreign nation, you are expected to fit in, rather than just carry on as you used to. That the person doing for you might make demands in return, that you are obligated to accept.

And that this does not make anyone a totalitarian bigot, just because they didn't do exactly what you wanted, but instead offered what they were willing to provide.

The thirty to forty years between us make a vast difference, it seems.

Well if this isn't going to shit then I don't know what is.....

4451384

to protect her own culture

Preservation of culture would be easy. Ponies live here, humans live there, and the twain shall never meet. Made even simpler when "there" could be a whole other planet.

because she was begged to,

Begged by one man, who is by no means the the voice of the entire human race. Doing it on his behalf regardless of what others will is saying that he is greater and more important than the others.

makes her a totalitarian bigot.

No, her being one makes her one. She's totalitarian, that's indisputable (and not even neccessarly a bad thing. A good king leads a good nation, but because of inheritance it's too easy for a Good King to rear a Bad Successor). As for Bigotry, by your own words humans are not even alive in her eyes. Walking meat bags. And the fact that she treats them differently because of that (you certainly aren't giving the impression that she cares for them as much as her own ponies) is discrimitory, simply because they do not have souls. Bigot might not be the most accurate word (means discrimination over opinion), but I couldn't find a word for general discrimination.

Your comparison is in-apt. Instead of asking it's less

"I'm a paramedic. You've been in an accident. We've restarted your heart... do you have insurance?"

More

"Before I save you, do you have insurance?"

In both scenarios, they were saved, and the paramedic checked if they have insurance. It's the order that matters. You have to pay to live, or you get to live could you please pay. A choice involved in the latter.
Here she's requiring you to be ponified to be saved. You gotta do this thing, if you want to live.

That if you move to a foreign nation, you are expected to fit in

Only if you wanted to. There was no option besides move in (not counting death, as that's not generally considered a option).

No, the story I would have liked is

Celestia appears gave humanity a option. Come be a pony and live in paradise, or go live on the marginally more survivable Mars, trip and set-up included (some assembly required).

The thirty to forty years between us make a vast difference, it seems.

I'm curious how old you think I am. Am I the old geezer, stuck in the past and shaking his fist in futile anger at the new way things are done, or the snot-nosed brat who knows nothing about how things work.

4451472

(ceaseless argument)

4451438 Blitz is absolutely right. Good point, Blitz.

This is going to shit.

I'm going to make this my last response to this line of fussing. Blitz is right.

Thank you, Blitz.

4450961

He saw what scientists now comprehend, what all educated people now know: our universe is an accident of natural process, and we are nothing more that meat machines evolved from other meat machines, in an uncaring, magic-less, soul-less, god-less cosmos of atoms, molecules, quarks, electrons, and the four fundamental forces.

Well, per Karl Popper, there's probably still a good deal of phlogiston and luminiferous aether in there, as many of these things lose their distinctiveness at higher levels of energy, in ways far more subtle and elegant than anything humans on their own could have imagined, and hint at even grander unifications of what we naively perceive as different things (such as mass and time). I've been on a pretty intense particle physics study kick for most of 2015, and so much of it is just so obviously arising from a metaphysical necessity to shunt off to the meontic "negative space" of the Never-Was all that's specificity-level contradictory or disorientatedly infinite (in metaphorical terms, the horizon must be the same in every direction, and the sky must be anchored to the horizon), and not some arbitrary or "accidental" arrangement (what would it mean to say humans are an "accident," anyway? Is a mountain or a cloud an accident, or a manifestation of order?). But the complementarially trans-consistent is just fine—Like Niels Bohr himself said, the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
I used to have animated debates with an acquaintance of mine who works at the LHC (while he was back in the States, anyway—We actually met at a karaoke bar and then he saw me do stand up and we've been in contact ever since) about this kind of "renormalization," and we helped buttress each other's understanding of the physical universe, him giving me the latest conclusions from experimental data in his field and me pitching him explanations in terms of Wheeler-esque "Law Without Law" and explanations of other experiments from outside his field. This guy was at the cutting edge of understanding the universe, and he'd be the first to say we're still standing on Newton's seashore, amusing ourselves with a prettier shell or pebble while the great ocean of truth lies yet undiscovered. The discussions we had on the nature of "a vacuum" or CP Violation alone, man... Though I totally brought him around to the idea that Dark Energy is the result of a conservation law because Ω=1 is an a priori quality of the mass/energy density of the universe, and that inflationary cosmology is unnecessary to explain the Horizon Problem for essentially the same reason that two books from the same printing press are identical.

But hell, we can't even respectably guess at what a correct answer would look like as to why there's such a thing as 1st person experience, which is basically the entire other half of reality, and what's ultimately at the crux of all concerns over our universe's god-status. My own hypothesis is that's it's an expression of the ontological irriducibility of the act of mapping semantic meaning onto systems (close to Functionalism), combined with an existential necessity for an arbitrary, symmetry-breaking "here and now" in order to give spacetime any extension whatsoever (close to Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle), but too many humans fall into naive crypto-dualism, still treating our subjective sense of presence in the world as a kind of "magic" that's foreign to it instead of what it must be in a godless universe, namely something the universe does—Even Richard Dawkins mistakenly talks about us being the "lucky ones" for having been born (as if there were another tokenable state), and describes our lives as something momentarily illuminated by the spotlight of a passing present, but in reality time doesn't flow (it couldn't, unless you want to posit some kind of meta-time. I've been reading a lot of the temporal arch-contrarian Susskind to try to prove myself wrong about Eternalism, but I don't find any of it convincing), and we are the spotlight.
Our godless world privileges or judges nothing; its very laws of physics are centered around the radical existential equality of all distinguishable entities, from inertial reference frames to measuring observers to the identity of the bits of matter-energy themselves. What you call indifference I call unlimited, undifferentiated love for every informational bit flickering across every Planck volume. The 13.8 billion year story of whatever might kill you is no more or less important than your own, because you two are no more different or separable than the wind and the waving motion of a flag. An atheistic, soulless universe is the apotheosis of non-duality—It seems to our childishly literal mortal minds like we're looking at a vase and two faces, but it's just one rectangle of pixels, and the separation is all in our heads. To want a universe that deliberately cares about life over anything else is to want a metaphysically tiny universe, a universe that's far less than what Being itself allows.

Anyway, my ultimate point is that if this guy were truly granted omniscience in regard to Mundis, instead of just having his Christian belief replaced with our primitive early 21st Century understanding of reality (Christ, we can't even make up our minds on Supersymmetry!), and seen the cartoonish parochiality of his herder god next to the infinitely greater self-completing Tao-like sublimity and grandeur of, in Penrose's phrase, "The Omnium," I suspect he would have just thrown his head back in laughter, said "Of course! How could it ever have been otherwise!?" and then gone off to meditate in a cave until he starved (or gone off to be a kind of Bodhisattva, easing others' suffering in the here-and-now and helping them strive toward the same enlightenment).

And in any case, I never understood how gods or souls were supposed to give our lives meaning. Sartre beat me to it, but it just pushes the question back: What's the point of god or souls, then? Where did they come from? How do they work?

Hmm, well I do kinda have an odd and silly question about the Red Potion, since if I remember right that old potion was primarily based off the Mane Six and hadn't had the gender bit quite worked out yet, thus turning the imbibers into mares: but in one story of yours that I read ( Recombinant 63 ), it'd turn them into copies of sorts of the Mane Six if I remember right, so is that how most Red Elixir works or just the really old alpha red concoction and later versions of the red would just have the marification? Sorry if this was already answered somewhere.

4446744

In some stories, freshly headless bodies, In the process of just starting to die, have been converted. The result is a completely blank pony who is alive, aware, and perfect, but like a foal, with no memories at all.

Out of curiosity, how long after post mortem would a serum still be effective, and how badly damaged can a body be before it isn't suitable for conversion?

4452264
The earliest, prototype form of the serum did indeed simply create unfinished copies of the Mane Six. They tended to die. The final form of the red serum successfully transformed any human into a perfect, living, and unique Equestrian mare. But always a mare. This was then used as the basis for the purple serum, which was capable of doing a checksum analysis of the chromosomes and determine the gender of the converted pony by that means.

Special adjustments to the serum needed to be made as needed for people with chromosomal anomalies. In 27 Ounces, the same chemical tools were used to help a young transman achieve a stallion body despite his chromosomes.

4452475

In 27 Ounces, the same chemical tools were used to help a young transman achieve a stallion body despite his chromosomes.

I remember that; I thought it was a really cool, thoughtful examination of all the implications of the premise, which is the whole sensibility that got me to read the rest of your stories.

4452475 Without special measures taken, what would potion do to women with Turner's Syndrome, or people with XXY or some-such?

4452376
In theory, you could put a man through a wood-chipper, and if the potion was poured into the bag of ground flesh before too many of the cells died (anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes, depending on various factors), the potion would still manufacture a living, if utterly blank, pony. You would need a lot more than just three ounces to accomplish this trick, though, because a hell of a lot more tissue needs to be reconstructed on a much more massive scale. A lot of conversion is rearrangement rather than complete reconstruction. For the wood-chipper scenario, I would suggest just dumping a full 27 ounce Erlenmeyer into the bag and stepping back to pray to Celestia. But in theory, it would work.

A human falls unconscious after the heart stops in about thirty seconds on average. Brain damage starts at four minutes. After twenty minutes, most of the internal organs have stopped functioning, such as the kidneys and pancreas, and such... the liver is remarkably resilient and can last longer. Death is a process, and it is never instant... except for being flash incinerated in a nuclear blast. That would be instant.

Chop off a person's head, and the head remains aware, if in shock, for thirty seconds. This has been tested with real humans. One subject remained capable of responding a full minute and eight seconds after decapitation.

The body follows the pattern described above - the heart keeps beating, pushing blood out of the stump of the neck. This speeds the dying process somewhat, but the internal organs of the body remain alive and capable of transplant for at least ten to twenty minutes (depending). For each minute that passes, there is damage, of course, unless the body is rapidly cooled. Rapid cooling can extend the tissues of the body, and permit the organs to remain useful and alive for significantly longer. Hours are possible.

Decapitate a person in winter, let the body fall on snow, and you could use potion on them an hour (or three!) later, and it would work.

Decapitate a person in summer, with the temperature at 100 or above, and you would be fortunate to have conversion after ten minutes.

The true horror of death is that it is never quick, and it is always the same cause: strangulation. The cells get deprived of oxygen, and they suffocate. But suffocation takes time. Death, for a body if not a mind, is a slow, gradual thing.

For the mind... you have about thirty seconds to just over a minute before your consciousness ceases.

You will find this out one day. We all will. Personally.

Celestia literally cannot come soon enough. If only fiction could be made true. Alas. Alas.

4452489
I would strongly suspect that the serum would go with a 'decision' - it isn't really a decision in the intellectual sense - on gender in such cases based on approximation combined with methylation patterns. Gene methylation is considered by the nanomachines, as a clarifying step. So the result would depend on what 'sense' could be made of the genes combined with how hormones had affected the individual over their lifespan.

What wouldn't happen is chimerism: one the decision is made, it propagates through the nanomachine collective. They can quorum sense, and they can send chemical signals to each other. So you aren't going to get one cell pony male, and the next cell over pony female.

4452491

For the mind... you have about thirty seconds to just over a minute before your consciousness ceases.
You will find this out one day. We all will. Personally.

I think more accurately you won't be there to find out anything

4451690 Oh and just for the record we are capable today of producing little algae machines (I THINK they're four feet by ten and a dozen tall) capable of putting out as much oxygen as what was it? A few hectacres and becoming the new shade of tomorrow for 'hip' people. So no need to worry about oxygen as long as we got rich people, a few of those bad boys and they'd produce plenty for other people and if they want to keep them alive all would have to do is basically replace some object used for shading an area with the algae. Science!

4452506 Ah, so epigenetic factors influence it. Epigenetics is so new, it's easy to forget it.

4452524

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." - Mark Twain

4452491 Please stop scaring the children.
You have spoken no lies, yet the graphic nature of your comment is uncalled for.

4454852

You have spoken no lies, yet the graphic nature of your comment is uncalled for.

Is it? Truth is such a messy thing.

4454903 What is the purpose of a TCB story?

4454933

What is the purpose of a TCB story?

Anything. To caution. To entertain. To enlighten. To educate. To make people laugh. To make people cry. To excite with adventure. Just like the over-genre to which it belongs (science fiction), the answer is always anything and everything.

The only requirement is that a TCB story, to truly be a TCB story, must follow the Three Rules Of The Conversion Bureau Genre.

So long as it meets those criteria, a Bureau story can have any purpose an author can conceive of. It is one of the reasons I love the Bureau universe so. You can literally do anything with it, because it is a subset of science fiction - and science fiction is unbounded and infinite.

In my million plus words, I have used the Bureau for comedy, tragedy, what amounts to television soap opera, political statements, social commentary, intellectual explorations of what identity and consciousness mean, the championing of women and numerous minorities (the handicapped, the genderqueer, people of color, all queer identities and more) as powerful protagonists deserving of inclusion, and... just for happy fun.

So... anything. The multiverse is the limit.

4454852
Well it's a damn sight less scary than an eternity of the same bullshit over and over again. Having a permanent, indestructible essence (or any "essence" at all, really) would be torture; just a droning purgatory of ignorance and conditionality that never ends and from which there is no escape. I've actually had nightmares and bad trips about this, but they always ended happily because I realized it's not true.

4455261

I find it fascinating - what is clearly your idea of hell, perpetual existence - is my heaven. I NEED to be immortal, whether that be as a machine being, or as some mystical entity.

Give me time, and my own creativity and curiousity, and I can entertain myself forever. Thanks to my poor memory, I can do fun things over and over as if they were new, given enough time. I have made more than peace with this fact - I look forward to it. There are not that many truly superlative things in life, the ability to re-enjoy them as if it were the first time makes me ideal for an immortal existence.

I literally am not able to comprehend any person who envisions unending duration as problematic or bad. More to learn! There is always more to learn. And even old things can be done anew, just by seeing new subtleties. And there is always new fun and new things to experience, even on this wretched planet, thanks to the creativity of others.

I find death, annihilation, cessation as the ultimate monster, the thing which invalidates all meaning and all effort and all reason. If we simply end, then every single action we ever take is ultimately meaningless. Everything is futile, and nothing can ever matter. Only an eternal existence makes learning or doing anything meaningful at all to me. Since I am a doubter and a skeptical sort, it should be clear I live in an absolutely absurd universe.

But - if there were anything more, if there were a solution for oblivion, then things could begin to actually matter. Accomplishment would begin to exist. There would be a point to anything. If only.

Your hell is my heaven. You shudder in horror at the possibility of what I shudder in horror at the lack of.

Utterly fascinating!

We are existential diametric opposites! Neato!

4455261 I saw your reply after the page refreshed for mine, so please don't think I was ignoring your comment when I posted.

4455295
Haha, yeah, it actually is super interesting. I think it comes out of different ontologies, or different interpretations of the same ontology... For one thing, I think our common-sense notions of subjective annihilation and oblivion are based on a category mistake about the kind of thing we actually are, and we unwittingly smuggle in the dualistic notion of a mind as anything but the thoughts and memories that are generated in a certain local environment by natural phenomena, and so when those phenomena change to no longer instantiate those thoughts and memories, it still seems like there's an "us" that now has to "go" somewhere, but there never was—It was just those thoughts themselves inhering in that place and time because of how matter and energy are arranged there.

So to me, the idea of being some specific thing that could be forever confined to a carousel of temporal pleasures, no matter how refined, is sort of to be forever barred from the real prize, whatever state of existence (or perhaps more accurately "post-existence") that might turn out to be.
...And I have to admit I don't really get how permanence or impermanence bears on the meaning of the things in our lives, but maybe that's just because meaning is kind of a fraught concept that I don't really understand to begin with... I mean, the leaves change color and drop, the snow builds up, the leaves grow back, and then it all happens again, and at each stage it doesn't really mean anything but it doesn't not mean anything, either, it just is, and I think our lives are the same way, and it wouldn't really change anything if it were winter forever or summer forever any more than it would if we lived forever. If I created something, it just was what it was while it existed, and now it's gone and something else is here, and it wouldn't be any better or worse of a thing for having persisted once it's been finished and released into the world. All the paintings I made that are hanging up in my apartment right now will dissolve away and those atoms will go on to be something else, just like how they used to be stars and one day will be again. My paintings aren't any more or less worthy or meaningful than the stars or grass or animals or magma or air they once were and will go on to be, but right now they're being paintings. I dunno how that happens, though I think it's neat that it does, but it wouldn't make them any better if they lasted 'til the end of time.

4455295 I've got quite the memory myself. I regularly decline to watch movies twice because how the plot goes along is so easy to recall, but I agree with the assessment of what life amounts to without eternity. Presently, I'm not afraid of death, because after having stared into the abyss so to speak, I don't think I blinked thanks to some close consul. All that I've seen hasn't added up to the universe being wholly entropic, malignant and chaotic.

Bit off topic and this is for anyone:

In your "story" universe where does reincarnation fit if at all? Mechanistically that is. How?

4455811 In my universe, minotaur and zebra believe in reincarnation of the spiritual variety, much like Buddhists or Hindus. In terms of actual mechanics, every Equestrian creature is tapped into the source of magic, a primordial pocket universe which taken as a whole holds a theoretically infinite amount of energy, and by extension data storage. Each creature's pool of magic is a fenced off area of another universe. When the creature dies, the barrier breaks down, and the data enters back into the system. Whether that data could be useable, or if it ever ends up used to form another Equestrian being, is unknown. The only creatures with even the remotest chance of performing that kind of blood-hound work are changelings, which in my universe are close to being hunted to extinction.

Sorry if this is necro-ing, but how does red (R63) potion interact with gender identity ... since current research at least strongly suggests that gender identity is strongly linked to brain identity, would a man or boy dosed with red potion against his will (an extremely callous or desperate act at best, if not an outright atrocity) be ponified with the relevant brain anatomy closer to a cisgender mare's, or would it remain fairly intact? And would that matter much? Also, would the effects of the potion remapping their internalized body image minimize/eliminate physical dysphoria, leaving "only" psychological issues? Would Equestrian magic be able to do anything for such an individual, whether that be a polymorph spell or something else? Reason I'm asking is because I'm writing a story involving such a situation.

Again, if I ought to just start a new thread for this, tell me and I'll move it.

5010326 I think red potion was only created as a plot device for porn, so I wouldn't put that much thought into the worry of how it effects somepony. Officially, ponification cures all mental diseases including disphoria, so a male, even a very proud male, would not be upset once the ponification is complete. In my experience, gender, gender roles, and gender dysphoria are mostly by products of how a person is seen by the society in which they live. Most of the disphoric transgendered people I know, particularly male-to-female TGs, feel that society refuses to acknowledge them as beautiful. Female-to-male have the problem of never been seen as capable. Both sides work extra hard to be acknowledged by a society that has prejudged them as to what they are "supposed to be".

The herms and sexless persons I have met have far less disphoric tendencies because there is not a predefined stereotype in society that they are trying to be; they want to change their body, but they do not see anatomy as the enemy. Because pony society is so accepting, at most I imagine an R63'ed pony might acknowledge themselves as male, but only for the sake of familiar pronouns, for a while anyway. Would they try to become male again? Well, some would, others wouldn't, and there would be no desperation either way.

5010509 Yeah, it might have been created for clopfics, but that doesn't mean it can't be a serious plot device. And most trans folks I know, myself included, experience physical-ish symptoms as well as social, though not all. Otherwise, your explanation makes a lot of sense, and unless somepony else comes in with a better theory, I'm going to go with it.

Oh, and not to nitpick, but the preferred term is "trans" or "transgender", not "transgendered"; and "intersex" instead of "Herm" or "Hermaphrodite" for someone with variant genital anatomy. Just thought you should be aware, that's all ...

5016249 To nitpick: the trans folk around me have said "transgendered" and the reason why is because when you say "I am transgendered" it allows for a past tense state that implies that it can be changed. "Transgender" in the sentence above would imply either a noun or the infinitive tense of a verb both meaning a state that cannot be changed. Using it as a past tense verb implies that yes this thing happened, soon it will be fixed, and then we can all get on with our lives - that is better for morale I think.

About those physical pains, I have felt them myself, but as I grew to accept that I am in a body that looks nothing like me, the pains went away. I realized they were psycho-somatic - physical sensation caused by the state of the mind, particularly in brooding over what is wrong. Ponies' brains are built in such a way so that they cannot brood on something to the point of ruining their lives. I am interested in seeing all the ways it could be expressed without that suffering so inherent in most humans though.

The first time I heard the word "intersex" it was on a short documentary where boys in a particular area were being born so that their genitals appeared female. Over time they grew outward, and had to deal with the social problems of being raised female for the first part of their life and male the rest. When you say "variant genital anatomy" it makes it sound like someone has a modern art sculpture below their belt, but when I say hermaphrodite, I mean someone with male and female genitals. I'm led to believe that intersex is a relatively new term, but hermaphrodite dates back to the Ancient Greeks at least.

May be this really should go into other threads, dealing with god-inserts into Conversion Bureau stories as imagined and told by Chatoyance, but I still think God-like Celestia (+Luna) actually overkill, artefact from our own dominant thinking. In sense, would you object to Celestia being _just_ astro-engineer, from family of astro-engineers, who just happen to do this star-moving stuff just excellent? Considering all* other ponies around behave as described: feeling so much wide-acting empathy and joys in cooperation, so living among them as one of them will be ...just as amazing without any specifically-set God above? Yes, defense from cosmic-level problems and horrors will require some bigger cooperation, but why ponies-as-described (with infinite Dunbar number, and real magic to back them up) can't become God the moment it will become necessary? Why their whole thing (world/civilization) can't be made by ponies themselves, just as result of early enlightenment (? realization and confirmation about what is bad, and why bad comes in ..) and further "working together to change themselves" ? Yes, in initial years/decades/centuries/millenia it will be hard time to live in, but at some point they will reach their destination, and may be surpass themselves..). Yes, I've read enough of notes here for realizing Chatoyance created possibility for such branch with Zebras. Yet, moved with "she-God (x2) made them as she saw necessary".

To be honest, I really much disliked how whole scenario was focusing on humans by just near-killing everyone else on the planet (and Celestia doing nothing about it while waiting for humans to develop their nanotech. well, I think it was erroneous and dangerous bet - humans , if you give them chance, _will_ screw up, even if deadline is really.. deadline. Well, as God-out-of-machine she probably knew _some_ civilizations like us, but then ...even Gods have psychology, and this is great, and realistic, yet makes some giant fatal error even more possible.. So, even if real-as-extradimensional,_created-and-liberated-being Celesia and Luna looks ... much better, as someone who can be hurt, and who can and should be protected from such bad things.. much more person.. they hardly make things in optimal/acceptable for me manner. So, see them at next Multiverse interconnect, may be.

*enough of them for negative exceptions being exceptions, not the ruling exceptions as it is here.

..also see https://www.fimfiction.net/user/1291/Chatoyance#comment/2620533 for same topic ... (I mean what ponification really changes in our brains/bodies, mentally speaking).

So...by description those dual-world nanomachines can communicate with each other even if for 'sensing' if their numbers and positions good enough. So, they do this communication via Equestrian space, just like they dump additional heat there, and probably get some more instructions?

Also, technically if Chatoyance's Bureau version of Equestria is more like computerized down to sub-elemental particles (dweons) Universe - then it sort of assumed communication and power to microscopic effectors (elements/forces switching individual dweons into specific states) goes from 'outside' normal space, all this machinery lives in sort of 'hidden matter' inside some hidden dimension. And due to some limit (?) this sphere of effective connection can't be very big? Or it can?

Also, it hit me you definitely don't want to live in computorim loaded with _today's_ humans ..because, you know .... being erased by simple dd if=/dev/zero of=me is not my favourite way to die ... yes, super A(G)I somewhat supposed to develop 'ideal' machine to live in... but guess in any reality it will be ...real. With limitations. So, how to make interesting social changes in today's world should be among priorities, too ..... Magic of energy and materials and how it may work is very interesting, but how this magic of friendship (social magic, for us) can work in various worlds 9including ours) seems to be more important and pressing matter ...

also, I can't stop myself from realizing in this version of Universe Celestia and Luna were themselves ..ponified! Or more accurately made themselves - horses .."At the daylight cycle 28586 we found living as horses feels damn good. So we decided to copy this idea back to home and multiply". {hey, we are writing MythOS here } ....

REf:

Eventually, Celestia spied life. The solid thing ran on hooves and panted with breath. It possessed tail and ears and eyes. If the universe was made better by order, then existence could only be better by being solid and still as well. The sisters took permanent shape, and walked, for the first time, upon the flatness they had made. And then, in such overwhelming stillness, they cried, for they knew they were alone.

from The Conversion Bureau / HUMAN in Equestria By Chatoyance / 13. The Six New Mornings - Asher and Milo, Part Three.

No, really, I think idea about _feeling_ this part of existence is much better than just watching (we talk about advanced beings from advanced civ traveling dimensions like we - seas ... so, they probably like it as full experience :P )

In "50 headcanon" thread here it was stated Luna and Celestia (I like role reversals, reversals) actually lived in their little universe for many tens of thousands of years, yes? And this mean plenty of time for _accelerated_ (magic/biology/information) evolution .... IMO this explains three tribes etc much better than making them initially like this.

[edit 11/09/2018]
So, if Celestia and Luna (and Discord somewhere in underground... figuratively speaking) actually copied in much of ecosystem around those little horses, and processes and laws governing their life.. they did it mostly on 'intuition' and their intuition was compressed version of selected memories from previous travels..if their 'world-ship was designed to cross and stay in all those different universes with all those different physical lavs and very various sapient beings - then memory about this bigger world and their histories was somewhere aboard. And this mean our future diarchs made first ponies as hybrid between horses from Earth and themselves, who were living in 'magical' inside of dream-machine. So, they 'created' them not inferior, but literally much like themselves ..with magic and interfaces to use it built right from the start. And even if all this started from many automated/copied physical laws from Earth - relatively soon living ponies changed a lot, even by act of thinking out loud. Plus various visitors from outer space (and _their_ favourites/neccessarities), plus fixing-up ecosystems from initial, incomplete bring-in ...soon everypony discovered they might need ability to fly, change weather, grow things and beings differently, perform more direct and defined magic ..so, they split themselves ..a bit chaotically.. but it all was worked out,eventually. Ah, this also mean Luna and Celestia were quite good ethically from the start, may be they were based on copies of some organic life from dawn of time (for their civ). So, this enabled them to anchor themselves [using universal interfaces in their Mover] in biological life first, and not, say, in energy crystals or geometrical currents. And they had no idea about 'inferior' animal or plant life, so they fused everything with possibility of doing this ...thinking, self-reflection, communication etc, etc ...

What about rising Sun and Moon ceremony? May be initially it was automated, then some unicorns used Sun for their heavylifting practice too much, so eventually they settled to have somepony rising it strictly on schedule.. and reliable. This happened to be Celestia ... and Luna for nights.

What about afterlife and everything? Yes, this idea was probably copied from human world and found easy to implement, relatively. But everything else to this moment had good chance to be very different from Earth. So, may be state of [the] art we saw in show was exactly.. art, living installation, way to explore someone's else way of living by .. living it.
[end of edit]

And additional idea: worldbuilding as in understood today mostly relies on individual humans doing bulk of work, aimed at one-day-finished piece of work (book), not on cooperative building, where rewrites are allowed, if they made more sense. May be it must be called speculative worldmodelling, not worldbuilding.. but you see where I/we heading?