Re: Gwr Kulchur notes

Jesse S. Bangs wrote:

> Roger Mills sikyal:
>
> > "You know you're a Gwr if..." is now available--
> > http://cinduworld.tripod.com/gwrkulchur.htm
> >
> > Comments welcome, even as to format and editing-- it seems a bit
> > disorganized and wordy to me, though no more so than some of the pages
on
> > Mark Rosenfelder's site....
>
> Very interesting! The Gwr don't come out as sour as you had said that they
> might, although they're perhaps a tad ingrateful to the Kash. I'd be
> interested in hearing a Kash interpretation of the world's history.
We'll be getting to that, a little-- but actually, I've been deliberately
leaving out a lot of background ancient history, to give a picture of what
the average person _nowadays_ knows and thinks.
>
> I'm curious that nuclear weapons and other modern machinery have
> (evidently) been available for 750 years, but the general level of
> technology does not seem to be any higher than ours. What is the reason
> for this?
>
Not available-- everything came to a halt 750 years ago. Imagine a nuclear
exchange between US and USSR in about 1955 or so.  There weren't all that
many missiles and bombs, missile technology wasn't all that
advanced--rudimentary computers, so a lot of inaccurate targeting.  And
quite primitive nuclears, not much better than what we used on Japan, and
much dirtier.  That was roughly the situation at the time of their nuclear
war-- and each side threw everything it had at the other, in the last days.
It was enough to really wreck the 2 participants in the far northern
hemisphere, but not enough to cause world-wide disaster. Weather patterns
kept a lot of the fallout out of the Southern Hemisphere.  Thus the Kash
came through it all relatively unscathed.

Before the war the Gwr had a petroleum-based economy almost as profligate as
ours, based on exploiting oil fields located in Kash territory, with
refineries in Gwr lands.  And even then, the fields were being depleted, but
they didn't worry about that.  Almost all the major refineries were
destroyed, some of the oil fields were badly damaged (this in the
conventional bombing phase of the war, which only lasted a couple months and
never involved ground troops...both sides ran out of fuel for their planes,
hence the final resort to missiles).  Anyhow, in the settlement after the
war, when the Kash essentially took control,  everyone was happy to see war
and nuclear weapons absolutely banned, but the Kash also made sure that all
further research involving anything nuclear was very tightly controlled. The
petroleum industry was rebuilt, perhaps more slowly than necessary, and the
Gwr still get the lion's share, which they mostly burn up.  The Kash use
their share mostly for petrochemicals, with small amounts for diesel fuel
and, along with coal, for energy production to supplement their advanced
solar, wind and tidal technologies which were already in use before the war
(some "impractical" ideas that the Gwr didn't think worth pursuing).

There have been only minor discoveries of new oil, and it's estimated that
at present rates of consumption, the supply will be exhausted within 100-150
years [= about 200 of our yrs. max].

Anyway, the war set the entire planet back in major ways, and disrupted
every society. Reconstruction took a very long time, and only in the last
150 years or so have the Gwr begun to approach their former level.  It's
also true that the Aliens haven't helped as much as was hoped; they do find
the Kash more simpático and tend to favor them.  But they have also studied
the Gwr and their history, and aren't about to introduce anything resembling
a fission or fusion power plant in the foreseeable future.

(Disclaimer:  my technological savvy is almost nil.  I just hope this
scenario is somewhere within the realm of possibility.)