Economics and Geography
--------
One of my favorite games is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which despite the name was almost entirely imagined by Brian Reynolds. On a newly settled planet, the head of the game's corporate/libertarian faction had this to say:
Although the details will be different, this will applies to most ideas of space colonization. The details differ. In that game, there is simply no going back to Earth for more stuff, but from Luna, Earth is only a few days away. When we establish our first Lunar colonies, they will absolutely be bootstrapped off of Earth's economy. Critical goods will be imported, rather expensively, and continue for quite some time.
But in some ways, the situation on the Moon is even worse than than on Planet in Alpha Centauri. The term used in ecology is ecosystem services, which is the idea that life on the planet provides things of value to people, pretty much for free. There have been some interesting attempts to quantify it -- estimates get in the trillions of dollars pretty easily.
But imagine what a hunter-gatherer gets for free from the environment: game to eat, air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and raw materials to make portable shelters. Any able-bodied man can get those for free with a few tools, but on the Moon, right now, these are incredibly expensive. Purifiers for air and water, agriculture for food, and synthetic shelters are the order of the day, and then the expense of imports to bootstrap this system.
Where our Moon Kingdom evolves from here starts to get much, much more speculative. What happens in magic, energy, transportation, materials science, and biology and agriculture matters a whole lot. Anyone writing fanfic can almost go in any direction, from mostly hard sci-fi to very soft space opera.
But it's still worth talking about the economy, because of geopolitics. Geography is destiny for states, and has been for a long time. On one end, Egypt's access to water and easy defense has ensured five thousand years of continuous civilization. On the other, things can change: Persia and Afghanistan were once fabulously wealthy and powerful from trade, but even now Afghanistan is on the margin of civilization. This change is mirrored by the backwaters of Portugal and Spain, who became world powers once they had the tech to sail around the Cape and bypass the Silk Road entirely.
The geopolitical situation will, of course, change over time. At the beginning, the Moon Kingdom must be a backwater, an undeveloped area of virgin soil at the very margins of human expansion. But of course, things change. As industries shift to the Moon, it may be preferred for some things, like mining or as a base for further space missions. The realm may become desirable, enough to invade, as it did back in the distant past at the end of the Silver Millennium.
Canon, unsurprisingly, has pretty much nothing to say about the economics or geopolitics of the Silver Millennium, other than the fact that an invasion from Earth did occur. Was there trade, or magical transportation, or rockets, or tree-ships? Or were the Earth and Moon societies fairly independent until the very end, when dark forces brought them together in violence? Endymion, Prince of Earth, being able to court a Moon Princess doesn't really say much of anything, beyond the ability of the ultra-rich to go to space, which is perhaps only ten to twenty years in the future in our own future. There's very little to be learned from the past, as we can't emulate it in the future.
There are three basic scenarios for a fanfic writer writing into the Crystal Millennium:
1. The Moon is a colony of at least one Earth-based government
2. The Moon is generally not habitable outside of buildings
3. The Moon is highly terraformed, and habitable as a world
The first one reflects the canon, at least at the point in history from which Chibiusa returns to the past. At that point, Crystal Tokyo is the capital of Earth, meaning the Moon is not a separate polity, but supported by an Earth government. Possibly it's a political union by marriage — much like the one that united Aragon and Castile into modern Spain — but how on earth does Mamoru get a crown on Earth without his bride? In the manga continuity, everyone is reborn later, so possibly he is reborn as a monarch, and the myth of the state can finally be completed (see the Nationalism section).
Or maybe I've misread the manga as WikiMoon says "In the manga, Crystal Tokyo was formed in the 21st century when Usagi was 22 years old," which was apparently some twenty years ago. I wasn't expecting to dive into it this much, but it is the geopolitics chapter, so I might as way get it out of the way now: I'm not sure what IR theory would cause the nations of Earth to suddenly grant leadership to a young couple, even in exchange for ten-times lifespans for everyone. The phrase "it's better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" comes to mind, and fascism tends to glorify death. It's hard to see this happening without force majeure, and potentially religious wars. Messy.
A variant of this is that Mamoru and Usagi simply become Emperor and Queen of Japan, and declare Crystal Tokyo. Surprisingly, this is not unlikely. Because of how the Japanese imperial family works, all of the women are not considered royal once married, which means they have an extremely small group of qualified royals, which could easily be wiped out by some evil enemy of the week. So they get crowned in Japan by legions of adoring fangirls, and perhaps expand slowly, diplomatically. Presumably including colonizing the Moon, which could involve scenarios two and/or three.
This is the least interesting scenario economically, because it will work much like colonization did in the previous few centuries: at first a few ships will arrive, with lots of external investment to build a colony, local resources will be extracted just to support the colony, and finally a local surplus will allow trade back to the motherland.
The main difference between scenarios two and three comes down to: how much can that shiny miracle rock actually do? Can the Silver Crystal take a celestial sphere and make it habitable, with a working carbon and hydrological cycle, all in one go? Remember the quote earlier, but modified: "No gradual evolution from previous ecological systems is possible, because there IS no previous ecological system. Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order." Either Usagi can work a miracle that large, or she can't. If she does do it in your story, she is absolutely, definitively a goddess. (The inverse does not apply to Metalia, as it's far easier to destroy life than create it.)
In our story, we'll be going with scenario two, with a gradual evolution into scenario three. This is to say Usagi is not (yet) divine, and that outside of an initial settlement around the palace ruins, we can't do life support. Canon does support the life-support around the palace argument, as Serenity still lives to do a great Working after everything else on the planet is destroyed.
This is still quite an achievement, as Steve Bannon (yes, that one) never did manage to get the Biosphere to work out properly. But over time, the Moon Kingdom evolves the ability to terraform the rest of the sphere, through magic and/or technological means, and gradually expands to the other local planets as well.
The environmental conditions determine a lot of what you will produce. Taking a look at Wikipedia's lunar resources page, most of it is focused on how hard it will be to get materials simply for survival. And for export, only a couple things jump out at me: helium-3, titanium, and rare-earth metals. Helium-3 only has value if fusion power materializes, and that's only twenty years away — always twenty years and never seems to get closer for some reason. In any case, it's focused on resource extraction through large quantities of rock, in order to get the few atoms you actually want, small enough to pack on a spaceship.
In a highly terraformed Moon, the economics of mineral extraction actually gets worse. On Earth, we tend to mine deserts and mountains where we can actually see the strata, and don't have a lot of ecology getting in the way of strip mines and massive piles of tailings. Likely, the economics would favor mining asteroids instead -- and in fact, it may be more profitable in our own, less magical reality. Sure, you may need to import life support to each rock, but you also don't need a lot of energy to go into orbit. Sorry, Vesta-chan.
One thing that makes it a bit easier is that we can make a space elevator on the Moon with today's materials, if not quite today's technology. We have tensile materials that can overcome the Moon's low G-field, but Earth is far too massive to build a cable for a space elevator with what we have now. Depending on how things shake out with space mining and space travel tech, the Moon might end up as a trade stopover between Earth and other places more remote -- but like the mighty cities of Timbuktu and Samarkand, they could be completely bypassed by newer technology.
As you can see, the early economy on the Moon has little in the way of exports, and lots of things they need to import. While it may be a certain President's ideal trading partner, how does the economy make up the difference? The extra revenue from Makoto's florist-bakery and Ami's shabon spray-powered car wash is not going to cut it.
The answer is simpler and more mundane than you'd expect: tourism. Many isolated islands across Earth make most of their income from wealthy foreigners, and the Moon clearly fits this category. Very rich people are spending small fortunes right now to try to spend some time on the Moon.
Economies that rely on tourism, however, are very sensitive to boom and bust cycles. Once the clientele expands beyond that economic strata that can spend for a Grand Tour of the Solar System, who aren't generally that sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, downturns are serious. Travel is generally the first bit of disposable income to be disposed with, and people turn to cheaper alternatives, which the Moon, well, isn't.
There are definitely going to be some odd effect on the tourism, given the fortnight-long days and nights. I suspect most tourism will be done in the daytime, and seasons will only really matter on a terraformed world, and then perhaps not as much as on Earth. On a non-terraformed Moon, the night is extremely cold, without oceans to buffer temperature changes, and atmosphere to retain heat. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be a full 30°C colder, so I think we can all agree the greenhouse effect is a good thing.
Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the difference between scenario two and three does not matter that much to the phase where you bootstrap the economy. What a "easy terraform" scenario does is give you ecosystem services for free, e.g. easy access to air, water, lumber, game — meaning short-term failure of the economy does not equate to state failure.
I think it's much harder to predict what a distant Lunar economy looks like. I mean, I don't think that even two years ago professional economists could have imagined the value of AI companies today. If I go back to SMAC as an analogy, the first half of the tech tree involves mostly recognizable things like fusion power, military doctrine, and synthetic fossil fuels. And then the second half has quantum hovertanks, chaos rifles, Will to Power, and Eudaimonia. Once an economy is at the developed state, it's not obvious where to go next.
And, too, it's not obvious that shortcuts can't be taken. Much of Africa skipped right past the phase of universal copper phone lines, dial-up, and DSL -- along with cheques and credit card rubbings -- and went straight to cellular phone based electronic payment systems. If teleportation becomes a technology or magical service, maybe we can bypass expensive rockets.
Still, it's hard to imagine extensive trade interconnection between planets. I don't know how the energy or physical requirements would ever work out. Even if you have a Stargate open constantly (don't do that, if you have an event horizon lasting longer than 45 minutes, please contact your doctor), the bandwidth is not going to match a few container ships on Earth. You only want to import the most essential things, and small, valuable things. Microchips are an obvious import, but no one will want to send IKEA kitchen decor up there. Even in flatpacks! Think about what trade ships sailed with in the 1600s: gold, spices, pineapples (no, really), cloves, slaves (but not on the Moon), sugar, tea, tobacco, coffee, and artworks. The more value per volume in the ship, the better, though mass is slightly more important than volume in rocketry. In teleportation portals, it's cross-section area times time, which is approximately volume.
So then, we need to talk about autarky, economic self-reliance. It basically means that the economy is attempting to produce all things internally. This is an economic system practiced typically as a last resort, or by idiots. Closed China and Shogunate Japan are the classic examples; modern examples include North Korea (by choice) and Russia (by war sanctions). Some islands are largely autarkies, just due to their remoteness. The Moon Kingdom is more or less forced into this stance, though Mars will certainly have it worse.
This does have some interesting effects. Building an economic system out of whole cloth means you do not have to reproduce late-stage capitalism (and can make different mistakes instead!). Outside of the resort towns, people will likely be poorer than on Earth.
Earlier, I discussed that the Moon Kingdom has an ambition to be top-tier military power, a peer rival to the United States, at least in space. Being in an autarky is a double-edged sword here: it makes it much more difficult to be rich enough to meet that ambition, but it also means that if war breaks out, the economy suffers very little. Political conflicts just don't spiral into economic conflicts, which means the Moon Kingdom has a freer hand to enforce love and justice at it sees fit. I suppose that the Moon Kingdom will be successful in this pursuit for similar reasons that the Roman Republic was so successful: societal willingness to give more to the cause, social values about martial strength, and fast integration of new citizens/immigrants/socii.
If I scope it to our ManaChara setting, a couple interesting wrinkles happen. The Stargate will appear, and the Moon will have the only one in the Solar system (by taking the Antarctic gate). Tsunami and Ryo-Ohki are perfectly capable of doing flights to the Moon and back, as well as serving as a navy.
The big change is the presence of Star Trek ships, with two major technologies: transporters and replicators. The first makes transportation easier, but not free or instantaneous; the range is about one-tenth of the Earth-Moon distance. Replicators are a key source of post-scarcity economics for the Federation, but likely have ridiculous energy requirements, moving the scarcity to a different system. Or at least, so I'd like to scope it. Let's share a quote from Ronald D. Moore on the topic:
Or, going back to SMAC for a second, another quote from CEO Morgan:
Welcome to the world of AI art, I guess?
But in Sailor Moon's world, things like the Silver Crystal and Golden Crystal have power to themselves, and perhaps even the transformation wands. Can a matter editor copy souls, too? Eventually I get down to metaphysics in all of these setting discussions, don't I, coauthors?
--------
One of my favorite games is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which despite the name was almost entirely imagined by Brian Reynolds. On a newly settled planet, the head of the game's corporate/libertarian faction had this to say:
Quote:“Our first challenge is to create an entire economic infrastructure, from top to bottom, out of whole cloth. No gradual evolution from previous economic systems is possible, because there IS no previous economic system. Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order; otherwise the system will crash out before it ever gets off the ground.”
— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Centauri Monopoly”
Although the details will be different, this will applies to most ideas of space colonization. The details differ. In that game, there is simply no going back to Earth for more stuff, but from Luna, Earth is only a few days away. When we establish our first Lunar colonies, they will absolutely be bootstrapped off of Earth's economy. Critical goods will be imported, rather expensively, and continue for quite some time.
But in some ways, the situation on the Moon is even worse than than on Planet in Alpha Centauri. The term used in ecology is ecosystem services, which is the idea that life on the planet provides things of value to people, pretty much for free. There have been some interesting attempts to quantify it -- estimates get in the trillions of dollars pretty easily.
But imagine what a hunter-gatherer gets for free from the environment: game to eat, air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and raw materials to make portable shelters. Any able-bodied man can get those for free with a few tools, but on the Moon, right now, these are incredibly expensive. Purifiers for air and water, agriculture for food, and synthetic shelters are the order of the day, and then the expense of imports to bootstrap this system.
Where our Moon Kingdom evolves from here starts to get much, much more speculative. What happens in magic, energy, transportation, materials science, and biology and agriculture matters a whole lot. Anyone writing fanfic can almost go in any direction, from mostly hard sci-fi to very soft space opera.
But it's still worth talking about the economy, because of geopolitics. Geography is destiny for states, and has been for a long time. On one end, Egypt's access to water and easy defense has ensured five thousand years of continuous civilization. On the other, things can change: Persia and Afghanistan were once fabulously wealthy and powerful from trade, but even now Afghanistan is on the margin of civilization. This change is mirrored by the backwaters of Portugal and Spain, who became world powers once they had the tech to sail around the Cape and bypass the Silk Road entirely.
The geopolitical situation will, of course, change over time. At the beginning, the Moon Kingdom must be a backwater, an undeveloped area of virgin soil at the very margins of human expansion. But of course, things change. As industries shift to the Moon, it may be preferred for some things, like mining or as a base for further space missions. The realm may become desirable, enough to invade, as it did back in the distant past at the end of the Silver Millennium.
Canon, unsurprisingly, has pretty much nothing to say about the economics or geopolitics of the Silver Millennium, other than the fact that an invasion from Earth did occur. Was there trade, or magical transportation, or rockets, or tree-ships? Or were the Earth and Moon societies fairly independent until the very end, when dark forces brought them together in violence? Endymion, Prince of Earth, being able to court a Moon Princess doesn't really say much of anything, beyond the ability of the ultra-rich to go to space, which is perhaps only ten to twenty years in the future in our own future. There's very little to be learned from the past, as we can't emulate it in the future.
There are three basic scenarios for a fanfic writer writing into the Crystal Millennium:
1. The Moon is a colony of at least one Earth-based government
2. The Moon is generally not habitable outside of buildings
3. The Moon is highly terraformed, and habitable as a world
The first one reflects the canon, at least at the point in history from which Chibiusa returns to the past. At that point, Crystal Tokyo is the capital of Earth, meaning the Moon is not a separate polity, but supported by an Earth government. Possibly it's a political union by marriage — much like the one that united Aragon and Castile into modern Spain — but how on earth does Mamoru get a crown on Earth without his bride? In the manga continuity, everyone is reborn later, so possibly he is reborn as a monarch, and the myth of the state can finally be completed (see the Nationalism section).
Or maybe I've misread the manga as WikiMoon says "In the manga, Crystal Tokyo was formed in the 21st century when Usagi was 22 years old," which was apparently some twenty years ago. I wasn't expecting to dive into it this much, but it is the geopolitics chapter, so I might as way get it out of the way now: I'm not sure what IR theory would cause the nations of Earth to suddenly grant leadership to a young couple, even in exchange for ten-times lifespans for everyone. The phrase "it's better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" comes to mind, and fascism tends to glorify death. It's hard to see this happening without force majeure, and potentially religious wars. Messy.
A variant of this is that Mamoru and Usagi simply become Emperor and Queen of Japan, and declare Crystal Tokyo. Surprisingly, this is not unlikely. Because of how the Japanese imperial family works, all of the women are not considered royal once married, which means they have an extremely small group of qualified royals, which could easily be wiped out by some evil enemy of the week. So they get crowned in Japan by legions of adoring fangirls, and perhaps expand slowly, diplomatically. Presumably including colonizing the Moon, which could involve scenarios two and/or three.
This is the least interesting scenario economically, because it will work much like colonization did in the previous few centuries: at first a few ships will arrive, with lots of external investment to build a colony, local resources will be extracted just to support the colony, and finally a local surplus will allow trade back to the motherland.
The main difference between scenarios two and three comes down to: how much can that shiny miracle rock actually do? Can the Silver Crystal take a celestial sphere and make it habitable, with a working carbon and hydrological cycle, all in one go? Remember the quote earlier, but modified: "No gradual evolution from previous ecological systems is possible, because there IS no previous ecological system. Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order." Either Usagi can work a miracle that large, or she can't. If she does do it in your story, she is absolutely, definitively a goddess. (The inverse does not apply to Metalia, as it's far easier to destroy life than create it.)
In our story, we'll be going with scenario two, with a gradual evolution into scenario three. This is to say Usagi is not (yet) divine, and that outside of an initial settlement around the palace ruins, we can't do life support. Canon does support the life-support around the palace argument, as Serenity still lives to do a great Working after everything else on the planet is destroyed.
This is still quite an achievement, as Steve Bannon (yes, that one) never did manage to get the Biosphere to work out properly. But over time, the Moon Kingdom evolves the ability to terraform the rest of the sphere, through magic and/or technological means, and gradually expands to the other local planets as well.
The environmental conditions determine a lot of what you will produce. Taking a look at Wikipedia's lunar resources page, most of it is focused on how hard it will be to get materials simply for survival. And for export, only a couple things jump out at me: helium-3, titanium, and rare-earth metals. Helium-3 only has value if fusion power materializes, and that's only twenty years away — always twenty years and never seems to get closer for some reason. In any case, it's focused on resource extraction through large quantities of rock, in order to get the few atoms you actually want, small enough to pack on a spaceship.
In a highly terraformed Moon, the economics of mineral extraction actually gets worse. On Earth, we tend to mine deserts and mountains where we can actually see the strata, and don't have a lot of ecology getting in the way of strip mines and massive piles of tailings. Likely, the economics would favor mining asteroids instead -- and in fact, it may be more profitable in our own, less magical reality. Sure, you may need to import life support to each rock, but you also don't need a lot of energy to go into orbit. Sorry, Vesta-chan.
One thing that makes it a bit easier is that we can make a space elevator on the Moon with today's materials, if not quite today's technology. We have tensile materials that can overcome the Moon's low G-field, but Earth is far too massive to build a cable for a space elevator with what we have now. Depending on how things shake out with space mining and space travel tech, the Moon might end up as a trade stopover between Earth and other places more remote -- but like the mighty cities of Timbuktu and Samarkand, they could be completely bypassed by newer technology.
As you can see, the early economy on the Moon has little in the way of exports, and lots of things they need to import. While it may be a certain President's ideal trading partner, how does the economy make up the difference? The extra revenue from Makoto's florist-bakery and Ami's shabon spray-powered car wash is not going to cut it.
The answer is simpler and more mundane than you'd expect: tourism. Many isolated islands across Earth make most of their income from wealthy foreigners, and the Moon clearly fits this category. Very rich people are spending small fortunes right now to try to spend some time on the Moon.
Economies that rely on tourism, however, are very sensitive to boom and bust cycles. Once the clientele expands beyond that economic strata that can spend for a Grand Tour of the Solar System, who aren't generally that sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, downturns are serious. Travel is generally the first bit of disposable income to be disposed with, and people turn to cheaper alternatives, which the Moon, well, isn't.
There are definitely going to be some odd effect on the tourism, given the fortnight-long days and nights. I suspect most tourism will be done in the daytime, and seasons will only really matter on a terraformed world, and then perhaps not as much as on Earth. On a non-terraformed Moon, the night is extremely cold, without oceans to buffer temperature changes, and atmosphere to retain heat. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be a full 30°C colder, so I think we can all agree the greenhouse effect is a good thing.
Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the difference between scenario two and three does not matter that much to the phase where you bootstrap the economy. What a "easy terraform" scenario does is give you ecosystem services for free, e.g. easy access to air, water, lumber, game — meaning short-term failure of the economy does not equate to state failure.
I think it's much harder to predict what a distant Lunar economy looks like. I mean, I don't think that even two years ago professional economists could have imagined the value of AI companies today. If I go back to SMAC as an analogy, the first half of the tech tree involves mostly recognizable things like fusion power, military doctrine, and synthetic fossil fuels. And then the second half has quantum hovertanks, chaos rifles, Will to Power, and Eudaimonia. Once an economy is at the developed state, it's not obvious where to go next.
And, too, it's not obvious that shortcuts can't be taken. Much of Africa skipped right past the phase of universal copper phone lines, dial-up, and DSL -- along with cheques and credit card rubbings -- and went straight to cellular phone based electronic payment systems. If teleportation becomes a technology or magical service, maybe we can bypass expensive rockets.
Still, it's hard to imagine extensive trade interconnection between planets. I don't know how the energy or physical requirements would ever work out. Even if you have a Stargate open constantly (don't do that, if you have an event horizon lasting longer than 45 minutes, please contact your doctor), the bandwidth is not going to match a few container ships on Earth. You only want to import the most essential things, and small, valuable things. Microchips are an obvious import, but no one will want to send IKEA kitchen decor up there. Even in flatpacks! Think about what trade ships sailed with in the 1600s: gold, spices, pineapples (no, really), cloves, slaves (but not on the Moon), sugar, tea, tobacco, coffee, and artworks. The more value per volume in the ship, the better, though mass is slightly more important than volume in rocketry. In teleportation portals, it's cross-section area times time, which is approximately volume.
So then, we need to talk about autarky, economic self-reliance. It basically means that the economy is attempting to produce all things internally. This is an economic system practiced typically as a last resort, or by idiots. Closed China and Shogunate Japan are the classic examples; modern examples include North Korea (by choice) and Russia (by war sanctions). Some islands are largely autarkies, just due to their remoteness. The Moon Kingdom is more or less forced into this stance, though Mars will certainly have it worse.
This does have some interesting effects. Building an economic system out of whole cloth means you do not have to reproduce late-stage capitalism (and can make different mistakes instead!). Outside of the resort towns, people will likely be poorer than on Earth.
Earlier, I discussed that the Moon Kingdom has an ambition to be top-tier military power, a peer rival to the United States, at least in space. Being in an autarky is a double-edged sword here: it makes it much more difficult to be rich enough to meet that ambition, but it also means that if war breaks out, the economy suffers very little. Political conflicts just don't spiral into economic conflicts, which means the Moon Kingdom has a freer hand to enforce love and justice at it sees fit. I suppose that the Moon Kingdom will be successful in this pursuit for similar reasons that the Roman Republic was so successful: societal willingness to give more to the cause, social values about martial strength, and fast integration of new citizens/immigrants/socii.
If I scope it to our ManaChara setting, a couple interesting wrinkles happen. The Stargate will appear, and the Moon will have the only one in the Solar system (by taking the Antarctic gate). Tsunami and Ryo-Ohki are perfectly capable of doing flights to the Moon and back, as well as serving as a navy.
The big change is the presence of Star Trek ships, with two major technologies: transporters and replicators. The first makes transportation easier, but not free or instantaneous; the range is about one-tenth of the Earth-Moon distance. Replicators are a key source of post-scarcity economics for the Federation, but likely have ridiculous energy requirements, moving the scarcity to a different system. Or at least, so I'd like to scope it. Let's share a quote from Ronald D. Moore on the topic:
Quote:Replicators are the worst thing ever. Destroys storytelling all the time. They mean there's no value to anything. Nothing has value in the universe if you can just replicate everything, so all that goes away. Nothing is unique; if you break something, you can just make another one. If something breaks on the ship, it's "Oh, no big deal, Geordi can just go down to engineering and make another doozywhatsit." Or they go to a planet and that planet needed something: "Oh, hey, let's make them what they need!" We just hated it and tried to forget about it as much as possible.
Or, going back to SMAC for a second, another quote from CEO Morgan:
Quote:“Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called ‘moral value’ of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.”
Welcome to the world of AI art, I guess?
But in Sailor Moon's world, things like the Silver Crystal and Golden Crystal have power to themselves, and perhaps even the transformation wands. Can a matter editor copy souls, too? Eventually I get down to metaphysics in all of these setting discussions, don't I, coauthors?
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto