Quote:Well, you should know that trying to pin down the tech level in a superhero world is like trying to eat jello with chopsticks. But I'll give it a try. Warriors' World is running about 30 years or more in advance of our state of the art. UN infantry has powered armor, AIs and robots can be built with relative ease. Beam weapons are just starting to make their appearance in military arsenals. Forcefield technology is understood, although outside of the occasional gadgeteer it usually requires a large permanent installation and a dedicated power source. Computers are more powerful, the Net more interconnected; because of the presence of electropaths and superfolk who can turn into electricity, computer security is signficantly more sophisticated and capable.
I know that you've detailed some of the history, but I would like to know a bit more, such as general level of technology (what kind of sci-fi stuff they have, how high tech some of the stuff is, etc.)
Space travel technology is similarly advanced, thanks in part to the dozens of alien artifacts gathered over the years. (See below.) Earth's scientists haven't quite come up with its own star drive technology yet, but it's a matter of "when," not "if". In the mean time, we have more than enough other races happy to foist their junker starships off on the new kids on the block.
Gravity technology had it's "eureka" moment in the early1980s, and by the middle 1990s there was a wide variety of commercial gravity products on the market. The number one manufacturer is the Anson Corporation, whose Gravmaster series of AG drives has revolutionized airline safety, off-road vehicles and cargo handling, just to name three fields. Despite their obvious feasibility, though, there are only a few flying cars -- the FAA and similar bodies across the globe have vigorously resisted multiplying the number of flying craft in the air by a factor of a hundred or more...
Quote:Earth, it seems, appears to be the galactic equivalent of the little convenience store inside the train station concourse. It's not exactly in the flow of traffic, but close enough that it's no trouble to go there. Aliens have been visiting the earth long enough and frequently enough that the folks who don't believe in them are the lunatic fringe, instead of the other way around. For instance, one of the big celebrities of the late 80s was an AI robot probe from an alien civilization who hung around the planet photographing and interviewing people for a year or so before returning to deep space.
maybe contact with aliens and what not.
The Meeranon (bipedal felinoids) have a long-standing trade agreement with the U.N.; although they are not a populous race and few of them actually reside on Earth, they are one of the most recognizable alien species to the average citizen. A symbiote race calling itself the Seeders visited the planet in the early 1990s, claimed to have created humanity, and asked the U.N. for permission to colonize/uplift dolphins. That request has been debated ever since... but the Seeders are apparently very patient.
Individual members of another dozen or two races can be found on Earth at any given time; some are private citizens living quiet lives, while others are criminals on the run, and others are tourists and thrill-seekers who've come to see Earth's unheard-of assortment of unique paranormals. The U.N. doesn't do anything much about these (except the criminals, who come under Warriors jurisdiction), although the suggestion has been made that a central alien registry bureau be formed. Once again, the topic is being debated...
In the mean time, the Warriors have frequent contact with other extraterrestrial (and extradimensional) civilizations, reports on which go right to the U.N. (and from there to the world at large).
Quote:No one's really sure, although every historian has his pet candidates. Pretty much everyone agrees Rasputin had to have been at least a proto-metahuman, but beyond that, well, the topic can cause fistfights at academic conferences. The key problem is that nobody can really agree where (and how sharp) to draw the line between human and metahuman -- a problem which has been plaguing professional sports since the 1950s. How fast can an Olympic runner go before he's too fast? How much can a competitive weightlifter lift before it's too much? A lot of people are uncomfortable putting an absolute upper limit on the levels of human achievement, but by the same token a lot of people view using metahuman enhancements in sports as "cheating". Extreme cases are easy to figure out, but the borderzone between is very fuzzy and few people want to look stupid trying to de-fuzz it. The identification of the metagenes in the 1980s has hurt almost as much as it has helped -- fully a third of the world's top athletes could conceivably qualify as "training-enhanced" (no inherent powers, but possessing enough metagenes that excessive conditioning results in borderline metahuman physical abilities).
Oh, and were there any "metahumans" before the twentieth century?
In any case, when it comes to arguing about historical figures, one historian's metahuman is usually another's extraordinary human. The frequency with which leaders such as Caesar, Alexander and Charlemagne have been assigned "enhanced charisma" or even mass mind control powers by fringe historians has somewhat discredited even legitimate efforts at "archaeological metabiology". As for more obvious powers (flight, power blasts, etc.), with the exception of some dubious Inquisition records, there appear to have been no metahumans of that level prior to the Metahuman Explosion of 1929. (Of course, there are always those who say every religious figure back to the first Pharoah had to have been "just" a metahuman; Christ is a favorite target, particularly among pre-Soviet Collapse Marxist-revisionist historians. (Although the Marxists had their own problems with even recognizing the more "spiritual" metagifts for a long time...)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.