New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

It is the year 2300 AD, and the Earth has been turned into a biological reserve by the Sol Federation while 10 billion humans live in space habitats throughout the Sol System. With a population of only 200 million people, primarily hospitality staff for environmental tourism and scientific staff to maintain the environment, the Earth is the literal backwater of the Sol System, as its primary role to provide biological resources to renew the life support systems of the space habitats of the Sol System. While plenty of people have been calling for the terraforming of Mars and Venus over the centuries, it is just cheaper for the Sol Federation to maintain space habitats than spend hundreds of trillions of credits a year to create inferior versions of the Earth.

Since the Earth was abandoned in 2100 so that its biosphere could be repaired, there has been a resettlement movement pushing for the recolonization of Earth, though the majority of the citizens of the Sol Federation fear that such a movement would lead to the end of human civilization. If too many people lived within a friendly environment without having to be concerned about the constant need for maintenance and upkeep, the common perspective is that they will relive the horrors and the tragedies of the 20th century. Better that only a small population be allowed to live permanently on the Earth rather than to risk the return of the mistakes of the 20th century.

Over the previous century, the Sol Federation has been using its vast wealth to construct interstellar colony fleets in the Kuiper Belt. Each interstellar colony fleet is designed to carry a population of 100 million humans, plus sufficient terraforming materials, in nanostasis for its long journey to a star system dozens of light-years from the Sol System. When they reach their destination, the colonists will spend the majority of the time in nanostasis while their new home is terraformed over the course of a thousand years.

The first interstellar colony fleet is now finished and will leave the Kuiper Belt in a decade after it loads its cargo and passengers for the long journey to Epsilon Eridani to colonize an exoplanet orbiting that star. One interstellar colony fleet will leave every decade for the next thousand years, when the Sol Federation will have sent colonies to every terraformable world within 100 light years of the Sol System. Unfortunately, extremists among the people who support recolonizing the Earth are mobilizing to cripple or destroy the interstellar colony fleets, as they believe that the only home for humanity is the Earth.

Steal everything that isn't nailed down from Transhuman Space and you've got a basic set up for a thousand games. Just pure beauty Alexander.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Aliens would be alien. They could act or not act for reasons that make zero sense to us.
They could feel guilty for either being directly responsible or indirectly by way of not paying attention to the threat leading to the destruction of the solar system.
They could find humans or even dogs cute, and saving humans is just the collateral goal.
They could have ideological hatred for global extinctions regardless of how "unworthy" any particular species may seem.
They could feel nostalgia to their past primitive nature, or suffer from a form of the noble savage myth.
They could simply be using us as a lucky excuse to use their technology or predictive computations on moving ecosystems to terraformed worlds.

Those are just off the top of my head that makes sense to my human sensibilities.

Certainly. But the assumption that aliens would need any more reason to rescue us from a black hole than the US Navy needs to clean up a hurricane on Haiti is flawed. Certainly as you point out it is possible they have motives we cannot comprehend. But it is not necessary. Come to think of it much largesse whether done publicly or privately is motivated by scoring points with the Almighty, or making oneself feel less guilty about-whatever. Or looking good, or feeling good or basically something that has only indirect concern with those who are supposed to benefit. If in fact a rich or powerful person actually does benefit someone by such things it really doesn't matter does it?

The reasons you gave really are not to different then those of real philanthropists. It's true that some people do go over into the back country and end up scarred with disease and shaking with PTSD. Or sometimes murdered by bandits and not coming back at all but having an inspiring movie made about them. I have plenty of admiration for all the Raoul Wallenbergs and Father Damiens of the world; I just have no ambitions to be one. It is also true that many of us just fork over money and say,"Aren't I special". And what does that really matter? All that is not to be cynical: we are hardly being bad, when we act like that, we are just being us.

Does Bill Gates really care about people without water? I am willing to bet that he cares about them theoretically. He can't care about them like his children: they are just numbers to him. But he is interested in well-digging. Does that matter to someone who gets a well? Are his motives different from the ones you attributed to aliens?

The point is not that aliens may not have impenetrable motives. The point is that you have not given any ("aren't humans cute" really does not differ much from "aren't starving foreign children cute"). For the obvious reason that if the motives are really impenetrable you cannot give them but that is beside the point. It is not a certainty that they will not have comprehensible motives any more than it is a certainty that they will not have similar physical organs. We after all do not assume that aliens have no desire to survive, ingest, reproduce, or whatever do we?

They may have impenetrable motives. They may have motives we recognize. They may have both. Maybe the last is most likely.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

You play people in a transhuman future who meet up in custom shells based off 20th/21st century pop culture characters to have pretend adventures.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

You play people in a transhuman future who meet up in custom shells based off 20th/21st century pop culture characters to have pretend adventures.

You have a Holodeck Malfunction of course.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Steal everything that isn't nailed down from Transhuman Space and you've got a basic set up for a thousand games. Just pure beauty Alexander.

Thank you, Astromancer.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

You have a Holodeck Malfunction of course.

Or a SAW style manipulator intentionally removing safety features while trapping the players in "the game".

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

If in fact the Third Imperium in Traveller heard that an alien world was about to be destroyed it would gather tremendous resources to conduct an evacuation and write off the sunk cost as good propaganda. That is a human majority civilizations. And it probably has enough places to dump DPs that may not be pleasant but at least are not being sucked by a black hole. Why should not at least some aliens do the same for the same reasons?

The third imperium displays the planet conundrum quite well: They're got oodles of resources, and tons of space, but would be hard pressed to find five empty garden planets. They'd end up distributing refuges into hundreds (or thousands, or Millions) of little camps all over the galaxy, in close proximity to their existing population.

Originally Posted by Apollonian

Anyway, clearly the best way to game this one out is as a bottle scenario - the aliens have decided for their own inscrutable reasons that the best way for the primitive humans to negotiate things out is with a one year deadline, with delegates from each nation kept under basically house arrest. The "house" in question is of course a luxury resort centered around super-villain style maps of the Earth and the destination worlds. Regular social events lubricate negotiations. There will, of course, be no underhanded deals, business, murders, affairs, betrayals, or surprises... Y'know. Big Brother: Fate of the World edition.

I think my PC's at least would be willing to play this out strait. Or attempt to.

Edit: The destination could be a Ringworld that's recently been vacated by a species that Ascended, and per their wishes is to be used as a nature preserve.

Finding them a home gets much easier if you allow artificial habitats. You could play an interesting game as the first people dropped off and charged with preparing the big new habitat for everyone else.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The point is not that aliens may not have impenetrable motives. The point is that you have not given any ("aren't humans cute" really does not differ much from "aren't starving foreign children cute"). For the obvious reason that if the motives are really impenetrable you cannot give them but that is beside the point. It is not a certainty that they will not have comprehensible motives any more than it is a certainty that they will not have similar physical organs. We, after all, do not assume that aliens have no desire to survive, ingest, reproduce, or whatever do we?

They may have impenetrable motives. They may have motives we recognize. They may have both. Maybe the last is most likely.

I gave the aliens a motive. They see us as worthy of study because we are linked to the "Faeries." The prevailing assumption on this Earth is that the use of the term is some kind of a misnomer. They, the aliens, are assumed to believe that we use the term "Faeries" to talk about/name the entities they are concerned with. Figuring out the motives of the Aliens and just what the "Faeries" are that the Aliens are talking about are also part of the game.

[ronwit]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I stole that idea and sold an article to Pyramid (the older webzine) rifting off that idea. "...And I Feel Fine." was the title.

I wondered if "...And I Feel Fine." was involved somehow. I love that article by the way. What if the aliens are really only interested in the "fairies", like the cetaceans from David Brin's GURPS:Uplift. Somebody says, shouldn't we move the humans too? This way we aren't the center of this but an afterthought. If this is being done by a coalition of aliens it could justify anything from one colony being given Clarkean "magic tech", to being dropped off with the contents of your pockets or having weird or horrifying experiments done to you before being dropped off. All at the same time.

[Flyndaran]

Experiments could be done to "improve" humanity to be more like the fairies seeing as how they come from the same planet and thus are related somehow. This is of course regardless of what the humans feel.

It could be like rescuing chimps and "uplfiting" them along with saving humans, in the aliens' minds at least.