mrswdk wrote:What's Alpha Centauri technology?
Technology used on Alpha Centauri, of course....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_CentauriMore than just a game, AC is an education in philosophy, both with its quotes from extant earthly philosophers and with new thought written expressly for the game:
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
"Dynamics of Mind"
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard
"The Sickness Unto Death"
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
... and my all-time favourite:
Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
Sister Miriam Godwinson
"But for the Grace of God"
Written by people who take science fiction seriously, AC relied entirely on plausible extentions of science, technologies that are at least in theory achievable.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri?from=Main.SidMeiersAlphaCentauriHowever, the biggest merit of the game to many came from the way it portrays The Future. The vast majority of it (basically, everything that doesn't involve mental powers, and sometimes even those) is justified by Hard Science, most of the scientific concepts are linked to our nowadays science from friggin' 1998, and the few ones that aren't have already been explored and predicted by theoretical scientists and writers. Combined with the near total absence of nonsensical Technobabble and the clever use of quotes from game characters and real literary works, this setting actually manages to suck you inside and take seriously the struggle for Humanity's own future,
There's my contribution to your education this morning.