Political Thriller By Committee

[torquill]

I've been turning this puzzle over in my mind for about three or four months, but as I finally get to the point where I'm going to have to write the scene, I find myself still at a loss. So, dear readers, I pose to you the following hypothetical:

The setting: two neighboring countries, with a long border. A war of several years ended in a mutual treaty about thirty years ago, but there's enough residual bad feeling that while travel and currency between the two is accepted, they're still wary of each other. Tech level of about ten to fifteen years ago. Both have some flavor of democracy, nobody's really evil or power-mad here.

The spark: A scientific genius comes out of a clear blue sky and offers one of the countries technical help on any one project they desire. The project must not be a weapon, or something that could easily be converted to one (such as developments ostensibly for use in missile defense). It must be an existing project, using that country's development labs. It could be mechanical engineering, code-breaking, computer tech, surveillance gadgets, you name it.

If you were that country, what type of project would you aim that genius at? What do you think would be a really good thing to have a breakthrough on?

It doesn't have to mean "this is the only logical thing", just "this sounds good". I'm looking for a handful of possibilities. :)

Comments

[foogod.livejournal.com]

I agree with dicedork that energy technology would probably be a biggie.. With a tech level of 10-15 years ago, I'd say specifically either improving fission economics/safety or getting some sort of feasible fusion generation (note: if they're where we were 10-15 years ago, fusion may seem really promising, but even with the help of a super-genius who knows exactly what to do would probably take decades or longer to actually get something working, so I'm not sure whether you're looking for something that will actually be accomplished within the timeframe of your story).

If the people there are clairvoyant, they'd probably choose battery technology, but as I recall 10-15 years ago nobody in our world was really looking at that as being as big a thing as it really turned out to be later.

It also depends a bit on how hawkish the country is and exactly where one puts the boundaries for "weaponness".. for example, covert intelligence gathering technology (spy satellites, etc) might be a choice if that's an option. (If that's not an option, then general space development technology (ways of getting things into orbit, reducing satellite costs, improving weather satellite capabilities, etc) might be a good choice, since it's arguably a valid non-military-oriented technology that would still have potential military side-benefits)

Something like quantum computing might be a good choice as well. I believe that's about the timeframe people were just starting to think of that as a possibility and working on trying to make it work, and it could convey a huge potential advantage (both for intelligence/defense and for civilian applications) to anyone who was able to develop it first.

I'd also say it would probably depend a lot on other factors you haven't mentioned, such as resource availability, economic issues, etc. Obviously, if they're one of the primary oil-producing regions on the planet, energy technology is probably fairly low on their list, but if they've got a substantial trade imbalance, they might be more interested in improving general manufacturing technologies and such, to give themselves an economic edge..

One tricky issue with a lot of potential projects is that, as a government presented with a potentially great advantage over other countries in the form of this scientist, you'd want to work on some technology that, once created, could also be contained as an advantage specifically for your country, which means most general technologies aren't that useful (since they'd have to be made available to the general industrial world to be useful, but that would make them pretty quickly become known/adopted by other countries as well. You'd want either something that's already fairly tightly regulated or only done by the government (such as nuclear power) or something so resource intensive it'd be very costly for others to perform similar experiments without the knowledge you have (such as space launch technology).

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

Well, there are at least two votes now for some sort of energy tech, but the idea of quantum computing sounds like it would be the sort of thing where a genius could come in, shift the way in which people think about the mechanics of it with just a few equations in a few days, and change the whole ballgame. Maybe I'll throw that in as a bonus, to just cement the genius-ness. ;)

I suspect I can work in an energy supply imbalance easily, whether they're using oil or hydroelectrics or whatever, such that a new means of generating energy independent of their neighbor would be hugely appealing on several levels. It would be a means of strengthening national security that didn't involve risking lives, it would help with manufacturing and farming, and it wouldn't be a prompt for renewed hostilities even if discovered. It wouldn't even be necessary to keep the technology strictly to themselves, as even if the other country got it, that wouldn't negate the overall advantage of energy independence.

To be honest, this is all a backdrop for a larger unrelated plot, so I don't have a full profile for the countries involved... think about how far Stargate or Doctor Who tended to go into international politics in the places they visited, and you've got the picture. Which also means that I don't have to fully justify what the government picks and why, just give a plausible surface explanation and move on. Sometimes it's nice not to do massive worldbuilding a la Tolkien.

Thanks for the lengthy feedback.