If you’re taking “cyberbuffalo” to mean, “a normal water buffalo with cybernetic enhancements,” then their offspring would just be a normal water buffalo, and you’d need to take it to the cyborg factory to upgrade it. If you’re taking “cyberbuffalo” to mean “a fully mechanical water buffalo” that is also self-replicating, you could just make self-replicating tractors, and you’ve still got the same problem.
I would expect a ‘self-replicating tractor’ to look pretty much like a ‘cyberbuffalo’, with components that appear largely organic from a distance. If you needed to upgrade it you could download new apps from the local internet.
Most planetary colonies would need much more advanced technology than a self-replicating tractor though. Planets which have shirt-sleeve environments are almost certainly vanishingly rare. The very few planets that would be suitable for an agrarian lifestyle, with or without cyberbuffalo/self-repping-tractor assistance, would probably be nature reserves. Agriculture on such worlds would be prohibited as unethical.
\ REQUEST: cyberbuffalo \
has been denied.
This is the
\ ORDINAL NUMBER: fifth \
occurrence of a denial involving cyberbuffalo.
\ QUERY \ TerraForm™ Corporate would “like to know what the hell you’re on about.”
\ DIRECTIVE: get back to work \
\ DIRECTIVE: stop fantasizing about cyberbuffalo \
\ REQUEST: cyberbuffalo \
This is the
\ ORDINAL NUMBER: sixth \
and final request involving cyberbuffalo.
\ INFORMATIONAL \ Colony would like to inform TerraForm™ Corporate that we have captured and successfully contained LV-426 organism in all stages.
\ QUERY: Will cyberbuffalo be delivered on next supply ship or \
\ QUERY: where would you like said organisms released on Terra? \
\ DIRECTIVE: We’re not kidding. \
Because maximum efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of why humans choose to do stuff. Aesthetics, culture, religion all get to have a say too.
I just saw Dune: Part Two. They spend a lot of time showing how to hitch a ride on a giant sand worm, but they never show us how to get off.
From the books, I seem to recall it’s “Ride it until it passes out from exhaustion, then get off.”
“But Stilgar, our stop was 15 miles back.”
“Well, I told you to circle the block until we ran out of gas, but does Maud’dib listen? Of course not!”
That’s one way, but there’s a scene where the Fremen are in danger of being spotted and they have to dismount quickly. IIRC, the riders simply hook their way down the side and jump clear. The driver then pulls his hook and runs backwards along the worm as it dives, jumping clear as the last of it goes down. It described as fairly routine, but I would imagine injuries aren’t unheard of.
I imagine future world-building is hard. I like a mix of high and low tech too, but it has to make sense. Like if a group is living in grass huts but they have an old laser rifle, where did they get it? How do they charge it? Are laser weapons so ubiquitous, cheap, and effective that they no longer manufacture traditional firearms anymore? They are obviously not made in a region where people live in grass huts unless there is some sort of manufacturing facility nearby. Or if the rifle was imported from somewhere else, what other high tech stuff might they be looking to trade? And what do they trade for it?
And also, why is there a mishmash of old and new tech when in-universe technology hasn’t changed for millennia?
I think a lot depends on WHY there’s a mix of high/low tech. Was there a calamity such that previously widely-available items are no longer manufactured and thus only carefully kept heirlooms are still around? Is it a frontier/lost colony situation where those items are still made, but contact with the culture that made them is intermittent at best or non-existent at worst? Is it a class society where the item is easily obtained with enough money, but money is hard to come by?
All of these present different situations and different answers.
As for the charging question, that’s fairly easily hand-waved away - either an unobtainium battery or simple slow-solar charging - possibly by a panel in the stock.
People in the bush often have a cell phone as their very first telephone because a network of cell phone towers is easier to put in place over stringing copper to every hut.
Maybe they’re a laser-rifle-level tech, but they live in grass huts because that’s more sustainable. Or Og told them to. Or they just plain like it. Maybe their self-sustaining 3D rifle printer is hidden, somewhere else and they only fire it up when this rifle breaks.
I mean, we have reality TV shows dedicated to people building and living in off-grid log cabins and stuff like that, right now, as well as people living in grass huts with smart phones. “Primitive” is in the eye of the beholder.
Another good point that is often missed.
(Which brings up one of my bothers with some pop Sci-Fi, with the special example of Star Trek: In The Future, anyone else can have some sort of religio-spiritual beliefs… except Earth Humans, we’ve gotten over that.)
Or it’s a bootleg model made in a shop in a town in a part of the province with better access to parts and supplies. But, yeah, divergent levels of development and the coexistence of new and old should not be foreign to us.
In Star Trek, the forward view from the bridge is a big TV. We know this because various people the crew communicate with, appear on the big screen at the front, and the captain can order for the view of the object they are approaching to be magnified when necessary, or the view can be switched to show something else such as a ship pursuing them.
And yet, on occasions such as when they are accidentally flying into a star, or when a supernova is being viewed, the image on the screen is too bright to look at and it casts glaring light into the whole of the bridge, and the crew all have to shield their eyes.
Why would you design a big TV that can blind you?
That simple fix was sent to the same team responsible for seatbelts.
Which is also the team responsible for properly grounding all of the control panels so that they don’t spark if you look at them wrong.
Speaking of the Star Trek bridge- when they show Chekov and Sulu they’re always staring ahead and working the knobs and levers on their desks. They’re never sitting back, sipping a cup of space coffee. What could possibly require, in the course of a routine voyage, constant human correction that their super computer couldn’t do better?
Captain’s on deck, gotta look busy.
The screen is built into a transparent metal window, isn’t it?