[Kitten4u Only With A Long Name]

Computers and Technology

In the last fifty years, computers have become an important part of society. It's rare for a family to not have at least one computer, and cell phones are so common that the government has set up automatic text messages every time someone makes a purchase to help prevent people from buying things with stolen credit cards. With the dramatic increase in use, the demand for improvements has been high.

Computers have gotten smaller, to the point that they can easily fit in the palm of someone's hand, and that has been useful for the crowded city. Now people don't need to reserve entire rooms in buildings to hold their systems, so that space can be used for something else. However, there's been a limit to how small computers can get, and it's dependent on the displays. People want their displays big, and that has made progress with further shrinking computers slow to a crawl. People have been looking into projected displays and the like to hopefully make computers even smaller. Other incremental improvements are being developed too, such as better cables for faster internet speeds, and trying to make them near indestructible so they don't break when dropped.

The other big area has been computer security. As computers became a regular part of society, the amount of people that could actually use them increased, and thus the amount of people that want to use them for nefarious things also increased. With the increased use of computer networks, securing the physical computers only does so much anymore. It's described as a never ending race between the security specialists and the hackers. The moment security is patched up and back doors are patched, someone will find a way around it and tell everyone, which means it needs to be patched again, but someone finds a way around than and then... The biggest difference between New Sumatra in the real world is that the security specialists are less concerned about inconveniencing their users. It's for the good of everyone, they can deal with slower page loads and a few extra clicks.

That's not to say that no one cares about the users though. Researchers have been working with psychologists and sociology experts to find the optimal way to build web pages and applications. Figuring out how they should be structured, where people are most likely to look, how to properly lead the eye so everything's as user friendly as possible, all of these things have been discussed so that the user will always do what the designer expects when they use their software.

[Kitten4u Only With A Long Name]

Space

Fifty years or so ago, people were worried that New Sumatra was reaching capacity and that it wouldn't be able to support anymore people. At the time, the population was still steadily growing, but the city's ability to produce food was plateauing, and there wasn't anymore room to build more apartments or ways to get more food to support the growing population. The wasteland proved nigh impossible to traverse, and attempts to find new usable land had failed. Thus, people started looking to space. Perhaps it would be possible to colonize the moon or a nearby planet. Anything would have worked at the time. Thus, the space program was started.

At first, it was just a lot of high powered telescopes to scout out what might be out there. There was no telling what might be out there, or if the effects of the wasteland applied to space too, so they played it fairly safe. Unfortunately, what they found were lifeless planets, a planet with an atmosphere of poisonous gas, and several huge balls of gas that looked solid but really weren't. The dream quickly died and people started looking for other solutions to the overpopulation problem. With that problem largely solved, very few resources went into space program and it stagnated. They have yet to even launch an unmanned probe into space, let alone try to get someone to the moon.

With the sudden increase in resources, some scientists are hopeful that the space program can pick up again but aren't holding their breath. One of their goals is to launch a simple probe into space to maybe get a few pictures of the earth. People aren't sure what they'll see, but perhaps there are other pockets of life on the planet and maybe those will be visible from space.

[Kitten4u Only With A Long Name]

Magic

Magic has been a contentious point of research because of how annoying it's proved to research. Most of the physical world is predictable. If you put a mentos in a bottle of soda, it'll fizz in amusing ways. If you added magic into that, it might be amusing, it might do nothing, it might seriously explode and hurt everyone conduct the experiment, it might just turn the soda purple. Who knows? It could easily be different every time as magic just seems to do what it feels like. It's made several researchers consider it not worth the effort at all, especially considering how low powered magic in humans seems to be. Others have looked at Twilight Jungle and have seen that magic can be far more powerful and that, perhaps, it's possible for humans to harness that power.

Most of the research is done by surveyors, and considering most of them are fairly young and not scientists, it's about as chaotic as magic itself. The Surveying Association collects all the information given to them in order to try to paint a cohesive picture, and the researchers that are interested in researching magic collaborate with them. Given how little is known about magic, the primary goal is just figuring out how it works, with a secondary goal of figuring out why it seems to be so much more powerful in the creatures in the jungle than it is in humans.

Surveyors are paid for the information they provide, so most try to give at least a little. It includes things like monster descriptions, samples from weird plants and animals, drawings and sketches, and sometimes even their own bodies. Magic research involving people is still heavily controlled by the ethics committee, so such experiments tend to be safe for the surveyor and don't normally result in them being cut open.