New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Can you keep this powder-keg from exploding?

Oh, my. That would be rather tricky. Of course, some players might want their characters to provide a spark, instead.

Originally Posted by Astromancer

It's the title of a sci fi novel. The point of the novel is the assumptions about who is teaching whom and what.

Ah. I probably shouldn't use it, then.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Ah. I probably shouldn't use it, then.

Don't worry, the phrase "Earthman's Burden" predates the novel. Although it's always missed by today's "woke" critics but there have always been Sci Fi fans that called their beloved genre on lazy duplications of tropes from older genres.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

In the 2020s, to deal with more brutal versions of the flu, a general flu vaccine was developed by the USA that attacked not the head of the protuberance that flu viruses use to rip open cells (the most quickly mutating feature of a flu virus) but the staff of the protuberance instead (the most genetically stable aspect of the flu virus). For various reasons, it was decided to make the vaccine function against Encephalitis as well.

The vaccine was created with the use of CRISPR and much of the world rejected the vaccine as a threat rather than a benefit. Still, America kept using the vaccine and helped in the development of other less comprehensive vaccines. And over the years people got used to these things.

From the creation of the vaccine onward all American schoolchildren going to public schools received the vaccine. By the time the children of the first generation to receive the vaccine had their own children going to school, it was noticed that the children of those who got the vaccine before puberty seemed to have far fewer issues with things like Autism, ADHD, and immune issues. These children also seemed to have good emotional intelligence (give them perk level empathy). But many people simply ignored these things or simply found them trivial, nice, but no big deal.

{Note: If you want to use Psi Powers in this setting, you can give the second generation Psi Perks that a person might reasonably not notice/understand they have. Like Shopper's Blessing or Good Neighbor. Anything that a person might simply put down to luck or simply assume they're just clever.}



More later I don't have time to finish this tonight.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Try this one...

In the 2020s, to deal with more brutal versions of the flu, a general flu vaccine was developed by the USA that attacked not the head of the protuberance that flu viruses use to rip open cells (the most quickly mutating feature of a flu virus) but the staff of the protuberance instead (the most genetically stable aspect of the flu virus). For various reasons, it was decided to make the vaccine function against Encephalitis as well.

The vaccine was created with the use of CRISPR and much of the world rejected the vaccine as a threat rather than a benefit. Still, America kept using the vaccine and helped in the development of other less comprehensive vaccines. And over the years people got used to these things.

From the creation of the vaccine onward all American schoolchildren going to public schools received the vaccine. By the time the children of the first generation to receive the vaccine had their own children going to school, it was noticed that the children of those who got the vaccine before puberty seemed to have far fewer issues with things like Autism, ADHD, and immune issues. These children also seemed to have good emotional intelligence (give them perk level empathy). But many people simply ignored these things or simply found them trivial, nice, but no big deal.

{Note: If you want to use Psi Powers in this setting, you can give the second generation Psi Perks that a person might reasonably not notice/understand they have. Like Shopper's Blessing or Good Neighbor. Anything that a person might simply put down to luck or simply assume they're just clever.}

However, the children of those second-generation vaccine recipients were astounding. From what could be deduced, the transformations involved Epigenetics and the encephalitis virus. It has been noticed that several encephalitis viruses that were thought harmless, had been damaging humanity for hundreds of millennia. Humanity had developed ways to resist the virus. Those who were able to fully resist the virus were among the most dynamic and amazing people in history. The total removal of the virus slowly turned off the epigenetic shield most of humanity depended on. Now with the third generation humanity finally gets to see what humans are really like.

The USA has announced that it intends to make the vaccine available to all humanity. But everyone knows that the next generation of Americans now in grade school will grow up to be the equals of the greatest people that ever lived. How do you deal with a nation of demigods?

Basically, America is going to be transformed into something far beyond what anybody can understand. The transformation of such a large nation would inherently alter the whole world in unpredictable ways. How does anyone deal with this?

Note: I left how America's children are being transformed intentionally vague. Maybe they become Slan typical sci-fi supermen. Sky-high intelligence, and olympic level physicality, with maybe Psi Powers. Perhaps the kids are Psions of some kind. Maybe they've got less commonplace gifts like superhuman emotional intelligence and godlike levels of Charisma.

Alternately you could go with a horror scenario like Village of the Damned or maybe take a page from the sequel Children of the Damned and make the children good-hearted but so strange that they terrify ordinary humans.

[YankeeGamer]

If the ordinary children are similar to the greatest of the past, what will the great ones be like?
It's possible that someone will try to launch a nuclear war to exterminate this menace to the "right way of life," as seen by whoever launches the war.

On a different note--are any of the apes in the same situation, where the vaccine will effectively uplift them?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

If the ordinary children are similar to the greatest of the past, what will the great ones be like?
It's possible that someone will try to launch a nuclear war to exterminate this menace to the "right way of life," as seen by whoever launches the war.

On a different note--are any of the apes in the same situation, where the vaccine will effectively uplift them?

Fear and panic are likely parts of the setting. So, yes, fear the crazy.

As to apes, I assume somebody will try. Let the results be terrifying.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

A standard trope of Sci-Fi is the Big Dumb Object, however, in the November/December 2020 Analog has an article by Gregory Benford & Larry Niven BIG SMART OBJECTS. One of the objects in the objects is a truly vast starship.

The two main components of this starship is a star (somewhat smaller than our sun) and a half Dyson Sphere. The half-sphere has a hole in the middle to allow the exhaust from the star to pass-through the half-sphere and the outer third of the rim is frozen. This leaves around a billion earth surfaces of inhabitable space.

I can see several scenarios to use with this ship.

One possibility is a coalition of species like Star Trek's Federation built the ship to escape a doomed galaxy for a more stable one. Picture a cross between The Book of the New Sun and Dying Earth. Remember, the magic spells in the first two Dying Earth books (The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld) were a technological set-up. In all the Dying Earth books the demons were extradimensional aliens. This pairs well with the strangeness of the Book of the New Sun setting.

If the ship is traveling at 0.1C and crossing a gap between the galaxies which is millions of Light Years wide, then the voyage will take longer than the dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

More Later.

[AlexanderHowl]

A star could not reach 0.1c due to the fact that a G-type star does not produce enough energy. A G-type star system masses around 2×10^30 kg, meaning that they would require a minimum of 9 × 10^44 J of kinetic energy to reach 0.1c. The G2V star produces 3.828×10^26 J/s, meaning that it would take 74.5 billion years to accumulate sufficient kinetic energy, assuming 100% efficiency.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

A star could not reach 0.1c due to the fact that a G-type star does not produce enough energy. A G-type star system masses around 2×10^30 kg, meaning that they would require a minimum of 9 × 10^44 J of kinetic energy to reach 0.1c. The G2V star produces 3.828×10^26 J/s, meaning that it would take 74.5 billion years to accumulate sufficient kinetic energy, assuming 100% efficiency.

A star wouldn't pull the half Dyson Sphere along behind it either. I'll need to read the full article to get the mechanism of how it works. But be assured Benford and Niven (who wrote the article) had a mechanism in mind. Why don't you go to your library, get the copy of Analog, and read it for yourself?

[AlexanderHowl]

I don't have to read it to know that that the math does not work using anything feasible or plausible. It probably uses matter conversion, vacuum energy, or some other sort of superscience to make the math work. Anyway, you would need superscience in the form of artificial gravity to keep everyone on the Dyson Sphere.