It has been pointed out that Cora and Dabbler are being very careful about technological pollution with the leg, or at least the incubator it’s floating in, while at the same time, Cora granted some pretty high tech glasses to Sydney.

Cora could probably defend that if she really wanted to. The targeting function of the glasses could probably be replicated with our tech. It’d be more cumbersome, certainly, but with some good software and a high res CCD chip, I bet it could work. The comm function is also nothing special, really. Frix didn’t send his message from deep space straight to the glasses. Cora left a hyperspace relay, not quite in Earth orbit, but close enough to Earth to be functional, while not being somewhere we’re going to bump into on our way to Mars.

We’re further from the one way screen inside the glasses, though letting us have the schematics for that probably won’t directly endanger the global ecosystem. The power source for the glasses that allows it to do all that stuff is a different matter. That’s the kind of stuff that can cause technological upheaval. Every portable device designed these days starts around the battery, because that’s the thing that takes up a ton of space and contributes a lot of weight. If we had a fuel cell that could fit in the ear hook thingy on a pair of glasses, it would be a huge leap, especially if it could scale. If we suddenly had an electric car that could travel 10,000 miles off a power source the size of a VHS tape, there would be massive economic consequences.

Sylv isn’t referring to an incident on Earth, but a well known near miss in the intergalactic community. It was one of those cases where the Xevoarchy (the Space UN) debated whether or not to intercede with a species struggling with a case of self extinction. You’d think it’d be a simple thing to want to swoop in and save a species, but imagine making that decision about humanity during the height of the Cold War. At least a century or two from achieving extra solar system space travel, hoarding nuclear weapons, an endless history of war and superstition and racism and socio-economic abuses, etc, etc, ad nauseum, etc.

Now imagine the representative of your race needing to vote to commit a corvette from your navy to swing by a planet and help sort themselves out while your constituents are calling to spend resources on more domestic matters. Again, it’s nice to think everyone would be all “let’s help and make the universe a better place” but the reality is that some people are selfish and short sighted and ideologically compromised, so the galaxy at large is only a slightly better place than most individual inhabited planets.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!