Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Given that it's cannon in THS that people can be force grown in vats and programmed according to the wishes of whoever's running the vat, truely divergent cultures can be set up in months. Do you want to recreate the court of Old Cole the Splendid, a legendary Romao-Celtic king and ancestor of King Arthur, in space? It won't be that authentic but the inhabitants will believe in their story. Culures can be based on any theory, ideal, cultural recreation, or fancy, programmable into a vat.
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To a point. A viable, functioning culture is a fantastically complicated thing, over a very short period of time, the new society will diverge and transform into something else, unless the creators of it were incredibly intelligent and wise and foresighted. Constant intervention to tweak it back to default could work for a while, but that's not really a new culture.
You could apply the same mental test to such a vat-born culture that you can to a work of fiction, asking the question "Would this situation play out in real life as it does in the author's work?" The programmers might intend 'x', but 'x' once made manifest would need to be viable to survive and stay 'x'.