Don’t I recall correctly that in Dune, during the battle to take Arrakeen, Gurney rigs up something in their command center so that, after they leave, when the enemy troops come storming in in their shields that a laser is triggered and they’re all blown to smithereens?
I think the part you are thinking of goes like this:
Yeah, I got that part. What I didn’t get was the “decide mankind’s future” part. The KW would give the BG enormous power – but what did they want to do with that power? There is no hint that the BG themselves foresaw any great disaster from which they had to save humanity. Nor is there any hint they had any kind of grand program for improving humanity, as distinct from a few aristocratic lines. All I could figure was that the BG were like the Inner Party in Orwell’s 1984, seeking power purely for its own sake, for the rush of it.
I guess I need to reread the books – all I recall is that Paul, before he defeated the Corinnos and Harkonnens, foresaw the “wild, bloody jihad” – a wave of fanatical conquering Fremen sweeping across the Imperium – and vowed to stop it, and at the end realized there was no way he could. And then Dune Messiah begins with Paul secure on his throne and the jihad over and done with, its events pretty much glossed over, implying it wasn’t all that bad after all. But I don’t remember anything about the kralizek, not in any of the first four books. And dammit! I’m sure I would remember, if Herbert had been a proper storyteller! (Yeah, yeah, blame the messenger . . .)
(multitudinous)
The idea that fate is fate, but only if some prophet is capable of foreseeing it . . . Not so Newtonian, eh? More like Heisenbergian or Schrodingerian. No, actually I think the word I’m looking for is Horseshitian. Easier to swallow the creative hand-waving thermodynamics of the stillsuits.
Its been a while since I’ve read Dune but aren’t we told that, as is typical of deserts, that it gets cold at night on Arrakis and Fremen typically do most of their travelling after dark?
Anyway, the problem isn’t with the lack of evaporation leading to overheating. There’s an entire modern industry devoted to making synthetic clothing that help you evaporate moisture off of your body faster. You can go down to your local sporting good store and buy a set of Under Armour CoolMax T-shirts and underwear for $50 that’ll help keep you cool by wicking moisture off of your skin. Your sweat does its job because the wicking action is vaporization.
As I see it, the condensation energy problem is moot so long as the outside air temperature is cooler than your body temperature - and isn’t this the case at night on Arrakis? All you’d need is a non permeable barrier and the condensation will happen on its own. During the day, maybe a layer of fabric expands to hold the water when an efficient heat exchange on the outside condensation layer can’t take place? Or if the heat exchange takes place far enough away from your body where the radiant energy won’t get you. Maybe there are loose flaps that are a part of the system that allow the air/wind to do a part of the work?
BTW – if interstellar travel is impossible without the Spice, and the Spice comes only from Arrakis – how did humanity ever get off Earth in the first place?
I think you need the Spice to navigate space without the aid of computers. Presumably, humanity was pretty high tech before Herbert devolved the universe a little so his characters could play with knives.
Actually, the knives were a result of technological advances. The forcefields, called shields, used by nearly all armies and Houses block any object moving faster than the set speed. You could spray a shielded soldier with machine gun fire for hours and not even scratch him. But, a slowly moving knife can penetrate a shield and kill.
You mean, the Butlerian jihad and the destruction of all computers? I found that even harder to swallow than the stillsuits, etc. Outside the narrow limits of a cult like the Amish, when has any human society ever adopted a useful technology and then rejected it for moral or religious reasons? Luddites never win.
Somebody needs to do a re-read. One of the characters, on his negotiating visit prior to the opening of hostilities, had a discussion on this exact topic. I can’t find my copy for a full quote, but both sides are in agreement that Earth could quite easily blast the fragile Moon colonies into nonexistence. (“One ship, six bombs.”) The point of that story (possibly the only really interesting point) was that the Loonies had one major advantage-all they wanted was to be left alone, whereas what the Lunar Authority & Earth’s planetary government wanted was for the Moon to continue their ongoing grain shipments. And it was virtually impossible for the Earth to apply the kind of measured force that would gain their objectives from their position … They could (a) give in, and trade with the Moon for the Lunar grain on equal terms (which would involve a temporary delay and a great increase in net costs), or (b) stubbornly refuse to negotiate, blast the colonies into dust, and … not get any grain for quite a while, until they could ship up sufficient new loads of convict workers, train them to work under Lunar conditions, rebuild the infrastructure, etc., etc.
The moral of the story: Winning a war is not a matter of which side is capable of directing overwhelming force at the other. It is a matter of which side is capable of directing sufficient force of the correct type to achieve the political goal behind the war. (Real-world example: why didn’t we just carpet-bomb Iraq & get out of there? Or hell, nuke it into the Stone Age, right?) And in spite of much of the pseudo-philosophical crap that litters this and others of Heinlein’s stories, this particular lesson is fairly well illustrated in this one.
Perhaps they had a multi-party government where the minority Luddite view was implemented through a coalition with several Armageddon leaning religious fanatic parties and parties representing horse and buggy salesmen? 
Actually, for a useful answer I would point out Greek and Roman civilization which was followed by the Dark Ages in Europe. Technology and scinece were most definitely rejected for religious reasons.
In modern times, some sects have banned even spelling science properly.
I’m not aware of any Roman technology that did not survive into the Byzantine Empire. Lots of technologies died out in the West – because of general social collapse, not because of any conscious rejection.
There was no scientific progress made in the Roman Empire after it turned Christian – but very little before. The idea of scientific research for its own sake had never existed outside the Greek world and had pretty much died out before the rise of the Romans.
Well, the stillsuits I can buy for the reasons I mentioned above. Come to think of it, I don’t think it would be that totally far out to come up with a working/poc model with present day tech using mostly off the shelf components.
But you’re absolutely on the money about things like the Butlerian Jihad. My problem with the Dune universe had less to do with the minor stuff than not being able to buy into several of the basic premises. I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief. Nonsense like the sandworms (how does anything that big not collapse under its own weight and die, much less move?) and Arrakis’ ecology kept ruining it for me.
Interesting story, though. 
You missed a really big part, and that was humanities messiah complex. One of the biggest problems of humanity was that people refused to think for themselves. They kept looking for some Mahdi to show them the way, tell them what to do, and lead them. Leto II saw that this would eventually lead them to destruction. So he used his power to “give them a lesson they would not soon forget”, with a horrible, suffocating and stagnating millennial long “peace”. Leto II wanted humanity to be utterly disgusted with centralized power so that we would be spread out and fragment enough so that no single force could ever threaten, or control, humanity again.
The Butlerian Jihad wasn’t really in response to computers as such. It was in response to the rise of A.I machines, and computers sort of got lumped in with that. Pretty much like the ones in the Matrix.
Basically, if you believe the Dune Encyclopedia, it was very much a religious Jihad where the core tenet was “You will not make a machine that thinks like a man”. But even though the crusade itself has “moral and religious” overtones, the original impetus were purel survival. It was us or the thinking machines. Nobody wanted to end up as energy batteries or fodder for biotech experiments or whatever.
I understand that the new series by Herbert fils takes more of a Saberhagen-Berserker view of the A.Is, but the outcome is the same - us or them.
Basically, at some stage humanity has come out of the Matrix and survived, or nearly gone that route and pulled back in time, and won’t be led down that path again (well, except for the “filthy IXians”). I mean, if Morpheus and Neo and co. had somehow managed to kill all the machines and didn’t have to have a treaty, do you think they’d have O.K.ed new A.I research on the grounds that “it won’t happen again”? Or even kept the seed of them around in the form of sophisticated almost-A.I machines? Of course not, they’d build a wall of tradition to ensure such horrors never ever happen again. That’s basically the Dune setting.