"They didn't have the tools to make the tools to make what was needed..."
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 173-228 AT 4, p. 194.
Martians cannot make self-guiding machines because they lack:
"...the resources, human as well as natural and technological, that would have to be invested to make the apparatus that made the apparatus that was needed. Why had neither Federation nor Synesis ever managed to give Mars a boost over the threshold?"
-The Fleet Of Stars, 5, p. 60.
In Technic civilization, no one helps the poorer planets across the economic threshold because everyone who would have been able to help is too busy making super-profits for themselves - until David Falkayn founds Supermetals. The Federation, then the Synesis, are unhelpful not for this reason but because the cybercosm discourages human activity off Earth.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And there was a moral difference as well between the Technic and HARVEST OF STARS examples. The former was simply exuberant heedlessness when Technic civilization was explosively expanding. The latter (the cybercosm) starved the Mars colony as a matter of deliberate policy.
Ad astra! Sean
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