View Single Post
Old 08-27-2019, 10:51 AM   #19
Prince Charon
 
Prince Charon's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Default Re: [Psionics] [Space] Psi Trek - Worldbuilding

Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
Let's consider the purpose of the genetics wars in the first place -- I believe they mainly serve to explain why no modern states are dominant parts of Earth politics, and to establish the end of modern economic systems.
Um, that wasn't my reasoning (as noted, I wanted to include a justification for a Safe-Tech future), but if they're devastating enough (the Post-Atomic Horror, with the possible addition of engineered diseases), that is certainly a plausible effect. Star Trek is a post-After The End setting (that is, one where an ATE scenario happened, and then humanity recovered), and I intend that Psi Trek is, as well. Depending on how the wars go, and when they take place, Earth may have off-world colonies that can help them recover, or the off-world colonies may be dying out as a result of being cut off from supplies they need to get from Earth.

The degree of devastation probably varies widely, but as I don't have ATE right now (and am short on funds), I don't intend to go into a lot of detail about that. The basic idea is that there are a few places where things are actually going fairly well at the local level, people are able to feed themselves and even have some luxuries, they have some regular trade between settlements, and they can almost pretend that The End of the World never happened. There are places that are like Bozeman in the ST: First Contact movie, which is not as good but still not horrible, and then there are places that look like Mad Max or the trial scene from Encounter at Farpoint, and so on, all the way down to places where basically everything is dead, and travelers go around them.

Whether humanity drags ourselves out of the hole on our own, or get aliens helping, is another matter that should probably be considered.

A thought on the 'young supermen' that the show didn't go into: The physical traits that they have in Space Seed don't do a good job of explaining how they seized power in a modern society. Strength and durability are really not enough. My current thinking is that the geneticists stumbled onto a combination of genes that gave the young supermen high levels of the Smooth Operator talent, and possibly a few others, at the cost of lots of nasty mental disadvantages. They might or might not be much smarter on average than normal humans, but the most effective of them are individually very smart - so, IQ 12 or higher for those individuals, with Smooth Operator 3 or 4. Probably a few other mental advantages, like Eidetic Memory and Lightning Calculator. Might post a suggested template later on.


Thoughts?
__________________
Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life.

"The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates."
-- Tacitus

Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.

Last edited by Prince Charon; 08-27-2019 at 10:55 AM.
Prince Charon is offline   Reply With Quote