Shark_Force wrote:so... your definition of "slowly advanced over time" is that they somehow completely halted progression entirely? it doesn't say they stopped. it doesn't even say where they slowed down at - for all we know they were at rifts golden age technology when they developed NEXUS (and in fact, that's the most likely thing to have happened, considering NEXUS has access to force fields, material science at least on par with, and probably better than, rifts earth, weapons technology surpassing rifts earth, flight technology at least equalling rifts earth, and definitely substantially superior AI and computers technology. not to mention apparent superior nanotechnological advances, too.
NEXUS is *far* more comparable to ARCHIE than it is to anything from our current level of technology. NEXUS military tech is pretty close to what you might see from Triax, though imo slightly beyond. the machine has nanobots that can turn a tin spoon into a combat drone capable of destroying a modern main battle tank within a single melee round, or a paperclip into a vibro-blade, more or less.
none of this suggests in any way that the world had modern earth tech in any way.
furthermore, the mere notion that they *could* have a space colony with millions of people pretty clearly tells us they were beyond our modern technology level. the level of effort involved in getting thousands or hundreds of thousands of people not only out of earth's gravity well but transporting them to another stellar system, which either must have had an earth-like planet (meaning no, they didn't go to the closest ones) or which must have been completely terraformed into an earth-like planet (did i mention this is not sounding like the sort of thing a civilization with modern technology could ever dream of pulling off?).
not to mention we know that gaia has access to massive levels of detailed information about extraterrestrial life forms, to the point where she can basically create them starting from base DNA, which means that humanity not only has gotten to other worlds, but those other worlds have colonies capable of at the very least doing some very in-depth genetic research and sending the information from said research back to earth... bearing in mind that for a single earth species (humans), it took 13 years to map our genome. 13 years. for one species which we had more or less full cooperation from (no need to capture or figure out basic needs of, for example, which is pretty important considering some of the species gaia unleashes in her preserves are not only capable of taking out a modern main battle tank like the spoon drone could, but could actually give a glitter boy a run for their money).
none of this even remotely suggests that humanity had stopped at a level of technology equivalent to modern earth.
Two points:
First: I'll give just a little bit of concession by saying that the introductory text of Splicers indicates that the colony's tech level is/was somewhere between that of real life Earth, and the fictional Earth of the Golden Age.
However, it doesn't at all imply that Earth's humans were at or above or anywhere near the level of technology employed by NEXUS in the present day. About the only thing that they had 'back then' on the Splicer world that we don't have now is hover-cars; WE have Androids in the present day, and WE have (in the infancy of the science for this particular creation) computing prototypes that are going to think more like biological brains than electronic ones.
(We even have a prototype from of data storage composed of biological materials.)
Second: I would remind the good Shark that just because the
colonizing entity has a Tech Level of X or Y or Z, this doesn't mean that the colonies (apparently left to fend for themselves in this setting for reasons as yet unknown) have to have the same tech level.
At the time of NEXUS's creation and during the first years of the rebellion, these people were still using coal-fired plants, propellant-fired weapons (i.e., real-world firearms), and modern-day (i.e., real-world) primitive fishing techniques, for heaven's sake!! (NEXUS is implied to have developed most if not all of the beyond-space-age, non-Splicer armaments present in the game setting.)
you some might think you're a 
but you're cool in book 
