Dune Series PHD Episode 10 The Evolution of Ixian Technology in Frank Herbert's Dune Series

Dune Series PHD Episode 10 The Evolution of Ixian Technology in Frank Herbert's Dune Series

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[Music] the evolution of machines and technology especially that of artificial intelligence many years in the past of the events in june became the nexus that created the butlerian jihad this event caused humanity to alter the fabric of society in the imperium to direct evolution itself dying numerous paths that are essentially established by the schools of thought such as the guild the bani jesuit the sukh and the mentats these schools although not exclusively seek to replace the dependency on thinking machines with their spheres of influence in higher mathematics politics medicine and logic respectively the religious edicts and dogma of the great convention the cet and the oc bible directed against the development of complex and intelligent machinery seeking to cement this in the society of the re-emerging imperium by making the construction of such machines a mortal sin herbert's approach by extrapolating butler's ideas allows him to shape the imperium into an atovistic and feudal society however within this society there still remain many complex machines in use within different areas of technology frank herbert in presenting his viewpoint of the double-edged nature of technological dependence demonstrates this in june by the way such technologies create specific problems to their users which help to maintain a standoffish nature to their applications this in turn helps to perpetuate the aravistic nature of technology under the prescriptions of the butlerian jihad and the great convention within the imperium a number of societies within the imperium specialize in specific technologies that come close to violating the accords created by the butlerian jihad including those of riches ix and the bernie shlilacs the ixians however are predominant in the later books of the series in the re-emergence and development of machine technologies a good early example of ixion technology is the various devices that are created and rely upon the use of what is called the haltzman effect the little explained holtzman effect in the june series is an underlying scientific principle which provides the basis for a number of technologies these range from the shields used by individuals buildings and ships and even the engines that power the guild highliners when they fold space to the use of suspensors utilized in glow globes and other devices such as hunter seekers herbert describes the use of a number of holtzman effect devices in the terminology of the imperium appendix to june and one such example is the defensive shield shield defensive the protective field produced by a haltzman generator this field derives from phase one of the suspensor nullification effect a shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds depending on setting the speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second and can be shorted out only by a shower-sized electric field these personal shields are often used in an emergency as a last line of personal defense and we see paul in the beginning of june being trained in the use of shield and knife the shields create a technological conundrum for those who use them in the case of personal defense they are useful up to the point where they can stop fast-moving projectile weapons and speedily used melee and missile weapons however the veritable standoff that is presented when using technologically advanced weapons is curious if a lars gun connects with the holtzman field of a shield the interaction creates subatomic fusion which results in a nuclear explosion for this reason advanced weapons such as last guns are what herbert calls limited in a field generator shield culture members of the houses of the landsrad and their households sometimes wear such shields but the main way to safely assault someone wearing such an item is by using a knife hence the resulting evolution and technologies creates a return to the most basic of primitive weapons and tactics holtzman shields are seldom used on arrakis except outside of fortifications and buildings within the shield wall and in towns such as arakin in the desert shields are tantamount to suicide as the vibrations of a shield that uses the holtzman effect have the almost immediate result of attracting every worm in the vicinity to the wearer the worms of arrakis are attracted to and travel towards rhythmic vibrations including those created by human footsteps to avoid attracting the worms in the open desert the fremen walk without rhythm and when they need to travel a great distance they summon worms with the use of a thumper in order to ride the great beasts the irony is not lost upon us that house atreides is laid low by their reliance and dependency on the shield generators in arakin which are sabotaged by a harkonnen agent in the conclusion of june paul uses his family atomics to breach the shield wall of arakin letting the desert and the worms in to deal with the harkonnen and the emperor's sardicar the final confrontation between paul and his enemies is a moment of uncertainty in his prescience but his triumph and rise to the position of emperor is ultimately brought about by his skill with the kris knife made from the tooth of a dead sandwich again herbert shows us that in his universe where the simplest technologies in the hands of those whose minds have been trained to use them prevail against those who have dependency on technology and let their minds and skills falter the other major use of the holtzman field is in the application of space travel used to create the haltzman drive which powers the enormous guild highliners the guild represents by far the most severe of the biological evolutionary developments brought about as a direct result of the butlerian jihad the huge highliners use their haltzman drive engines to fold space allowing them to travel between worlds without moving and the guild's monopoly on space travel is such that the imperial calendar is based on their foundation prior to the development of guild navigators and stairsman space travel was accomplished by using advanced computers to work out the complex mathematical calculations required for travelling the vast distances of the imperium safely with the advent of the butlerian jihad such machines are forbidden and the guild as a school of thought focuses almost entirely on mathematics as a result the guild soon develops their own navigators able to perform the incredibly complex calculations required for space travel unfortunately for the guild this level of mathematical ability requires a limited form of prescience presumably because of the nature of galactic drift and in order to accomplish this they live in tanks which are immersed in the drug melange sufficient immersion in melange by the guilds navigators and stairsmen causes massive mutation the price they pay for interstellar travel free from the dependencies of the intelligent machinery required for such navigational feats this freedom however results in complete dependency upon the drug melange to provide the necessary degree of prescience required for space travel it shows an inherent weakness in the guild's modus operandi as it does with chong who rely on the guild for interstellar commerce it is through the hydraulic despotism that the dependency of the imperium for melange has in almost all of its social and political strata that paul is able to rise to prominence using his own greater prescient abilities to seek out the pre-spice mass on arrakis and threaten to destroy it once and for all it is this same presence that allows paul and later leader ii to maintain a stranglehold on all of the socio-political groups within the new imperium under a treaty's rule ultimately the guild with their limited prescience are used to shield the conspirators from paul and his government in june messiah and it is this development that creates another evolutionary leap in the technology of the imperium namely the creation of ixian no technology this technology developed over the many years that cover the later books includes no rooms or no chambers no globes and eventually no ships the purpose of no technology is essentially threefold first and foremost no technology is created with the direct intent of hiding its contents from someone with the ability of prescience they do this by means of emitting and absorbing radiation in direct synchronicity to their surroundings in addition to this these ships rooms and globes are also used as storage facilities for long-term preservation it is therefore suggestive that they have anti-entropic qualities within their interior thirdly the exian new ships which we are informed are being designed for the guild are probably the greatest flaunting of the prohibitions of the butlerian jihad in that they ultimately have a degree of machine prescience in order that they may be piloted without the need for a melange dependent guild navigator ixian no rooms are first mentioned in god emperor of june beginning with the findings of the journals of later ii in dar es balat on arrakis that we note is now called rakis this prelude to the beginning of what we refer to as the second great june trilogy is presented as the initial findings of an archaeological dig many years following the end of lito ii's three and a half thousand year long rein third and we believe that this is equal important to the actual discovery there is the storehouse itself the repository for these journals is an undoubted ixian artifact of such primitive and yet marvelous construction that is sure to throw new light on the historical epoch known as the scattering as was to be expected the storehouse was invisible it was buried far deeper than myth than the oral history had led us to expect and it emitted radiation and absorbed radiation to simulate the natural character of its surroundings a mechanical nemesis which is not surprising of itself what has surprised our engineers however is the way this was done with the most rudimentary and truly primitive mechanical skills leto ii's rule is characterized by the way he views himself as the ultimate predator virtually invulnerable to attack and the almost total completeness of his prescience does indeed make him like a god to the subjects of his empire while many technologies are forbidden toys to his subjects it is in part through him that certain technologies begin to flourish again the degree of physical change he has undergone for example means he depends greatly on the use of a suspenser card to travel around on later the second's great focal point for his own suffering is like his father before him the curse of almost total prescience while it is apparent that the exians created a new globe for him to store his legacy to the future the ixians also decided to attempt to use this technology against him by using a no room to bring about the creation of hawaii nori leo ii had a particularly good relationship with a former ambassador to his court from the world of ix called malki and hawaii nori is described to the god emperor as being his niece malki himself is described by the bani jesuit as a boudin companion to the god emperor and believed that he might have been genetically designed with that official context in mind malki was a roguish man who enjoyed the company of the emperor's fish speakers whom he called the emperor's hurai a term which ledo ii finds himself using on occasion his roguish qualities and appeal to the god ember seem to come with a certain kind of wild honesty towards ledo ii sensing as he does there is little point to lying to someone who is prescient even openly revealing ixian secrets that the god emperor already knows seemingly for his own amusement the fact that hawaii nori is engineered in a sense from her uncle suggests that the exians are approaching the god emperor from a psychological point of view the qualities that both huay nori and malki represent suggest a profiling of literal ii's personality and unique characteristics which could well be tantamount to asking the question what you get someone who has everything and in this case also knows everything the essential mark of malkie's and later hawaii nori's character is their ability to surprise and entertain leader ii this harks back to the curse of prescience that afflicts paul atreides and later leader the second to a much greater degree that presence as an evolutionary development provides its possessor with almost total stagnation as an individual with virtually nothing being able to surprise or entertain them nothing is ever new once again we are reminded of the influence of samuel butler's erawan on the june series of particular note is butler's chapter the world of the unborn where he discusses the aerowonian view of time who believed that we are drawn through life backwards or again that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor the world of the unborn is a chapter written by higgs summarizing the erroneous attitude towards their children and is based upon a text of mythology that is presented to him by one of the professors of on reason before discovering the erymonian attitude to the unborn he comes across an entry on a previous race of man that existed according to their myths before the eremonians the entry also notes the following strange fiat for man he must perish if he get that which he must perish if he strives not after if he strives not after it he is no better than the brutes if he get it he is more miserable than the devils huaynori it seems is also genetically designed with legally suspecting that malkie may even be hawaii's genetic father leader ii dolls however realized that hawaii has been conceived inside an ixian new room and where he is capable of seeing just about everything with his prescience he knows about the no room by the fact that there are certain areas he cannot look into hwai nori has been conceived outside of the purveyance of leto ii's prescience for the very reason that she will be something new to him possessing the entertaining qualities from her genetic father malkie which the god emperor so enjoyed she has been genetically engineered by the ixians with the help of the trial axu to be the perfect companion to a being who is virtually a god and who has a horde of companions spanning the whole of humanity within the recesses of his mind's memory in many ways high nori as a genetic construct is similar to the first duncan idaho gola hate although in this case she is not a gola in that sense she has not been directly recreated from the tissue of a dead individual and had their memories restored but rather is an entirely new being created with genetic elements of malkie although in this case female and has been educated to behave in a sophisticated manner that would ultimately appeal to leto ii in that sense she is also a genetic development that has been created out of the necessity to attempt to overcome an almost all-powerful evolutionary trait that of precedence this in itself has emerged from the need to evolve human beings beyond their normal abilities in order to replace the dependencies that humans had on artificial intelligence which ultimately brought about the butlerian jihad it came to leto that if she could change places with him take up his burden she would offer herself the fact that she could not do this added to her pain she was intelligence built on profound sensitivity without any of mulkey's hedonistic weaknesses she was frightening in her perfection everything about her reaffirmed his awareness that she was precisely the kind of woman who if he had grown to normal manhood he would have wanted no demanded as his mate and the exians knew it why's purpose is entirely to charm lee to the second and even as she informs him of this and he acknowledges what he already knows the sense of leader of the second's prescience having already seen all of this is continuous with us throughout the novel leader ii for that reason alone is one of the finest characters to be created in literature almost perfect in his godhood and in humanity the intrigue to the reader comes from catching the briefest glimpses of his remaining humanity which has all but been sacrificed to the golden path leader ii's cruelty and the role he plays as the ultimate predator in his eyes is to ultimately set about the necessary requirements for humanity's evolution via natural selection to allow mankind to adapt to the forthcoming extinction event this evolutionary necessity is directed from a number of points of view and i shall discuss these further when looking at leader ii in more detail but in particular two of these are related to the development of ixian technology the new technology being developed as a means to hide someone from the prescience of leader ii in this case huaynori is a direct result of evolving technology to get around an evolutionary trait of the god emperor's mutation his all-encompassing prescience the god emperor's oppression of the technological innovators such as ix and the bani thailax while simultaneously seeing to it that they supply him with the necessary machines he needs to accomplish the goals of his golden path ensure the continual development and evolution of design within the respective cultures the benefits of this become apparent later in the last two books of the june series in that the ixian new ships are essential to the great confrontation that is coming the potential disasters in terms of heading back towards the society prior to the butler in jihad are we think obvious toledo ii hinting at perhaps the unseen enemy is in fact the returning thinking machines the ixians contemplated making a weapon a type of hunter seeker self-propelled death with a machine mind it was to be designed as a self-improving thing which would seek out life and reduce that life to its inorganic matter i have not heard of this thing lord i know that the ixians do not recognize that machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine this is ultimate sterility machines always fail given time and when these machines failed there would be nothing left no life at all simultaneously to this the god emperor himself is continuing with his own form of the bani jesuits breeding program where he breeds a treaty stock for a very specific reason he also has a tendency to breed his duncan idaho golas of which there have been many over the previous three and a half thousand years since the original hit the end result is not to create more quiz at saturax but in fact to develop a human who is genetically resistant to the scrying abilities of those with prescience the first human who is capable of doing this is an atreides scion called siona the daughter of leader the second's major domo and also a result of the god emperor's atreides breeding program the ultimate push of his predatory tactics in shaping human beings and technology are the atreides who are bred with a genetic immunity to those who have prescience and the ixian no ships which can hide those within from prescience and can also use a limited form of machine presence to travel without a navigator hence finally ending the guilds 13 000 year monopoly on space travel [Music] you

2021-09-28 05:05

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