SF and a realistic "Long Night" scenario

[Infornific]

It's been noted that the the higher the Tech level the larger a population is required to maintain. So if a colony world is cut off, it's at risk of regressing down to the tech level it can support with local resources and having to build up from there. Here's a possible background history.

1. Earth develops some way to travel to the stars and starts colonizing other worlds. Initially, the Earth provides them with some support technology (computers and medicine seem logical choices) with the assumption that eventually the colonies will become self supporting. Support also included light genetic engineering to help colonists adopt to their new worlds.

2. Something happens to Earth - a war, a catastrophe, perhaps some kind of social revolution that leads to isolation. The various colonies are cut off and left to survive as best they can. None of them are advanced enough to maintain interstellar travel and all regress to a greater or lesser extent.

THE LONG NIGHT

3. Eventually, some worlds develop star travel again and start looking around to see what happened.

So you'd need to decide how the initial colonization went and what went wrong on Earth and developed stories

For example, the initial colonization was made via slower than light probes and then larger probes setting up Krasnikov tubes. Earth had a major war which among other things blew up the tubes and isolated the colonies from Earth and each other. Centuries later someone comes up with FTL travel and starts looking around.

Alternately, Earth could have turned isolationist like Shogun Japan. Or developed some kind of hive mind, gone through a soft singularity, etc.

Note the possibility of schizo tech - colonies might print out and preserve old technological knowledge against the time they can support it again and perhaps focus on what most concerns them. Or possibly they develop a fondness for books because of a painful history of losing knowledge trapped in broken down computers. There's a classic Poul Anderson story, "A Little Knowledge" where a relatively primitive alien species is eager for interstellar travel and using off world knowledge builds ships that mix mid-20th Century (fission power, vacuum tube computers) with FTL drives and anti-gravity. You could also have less sociable planets building ships just to play Space Viking with less advanced worlds.

[Daigoro]

Another option is to say we're in a Long Night now. The Vedas supposedly record visits of ancient aliens. Play this into us being an outpost of a star-spanning civilisation which we've now been cut off from, and are getting close to rediscovering.

[RyanW]

One idea I've toyed with was a collapse of the FTL network. Generally, this just isolated colonies, but major traffic hubs suffered additional fallout from the technobabble flooding out of multiple wormhole gates simultaneously. After X years, the technobabble has stabilized enough that FTL is again possible.

[Pomphis]

One idea was to have humans find a precursor stargate network and using it, the network collapsing after some time due to humans being unable to provide maintenance, and then some sort of FTL drive to be developed much later. (I wanted colonies to be so far apart that communication could not be maintained with radio/laser, so I did not want the first stage to operate with STL or slow FTL ships).

[ericthered]

Political breakdown is very much a possibility for long night scenarios. You have a series of devastating civil wars, followed by general unrest, and folks no longer trust anyone beyond a certain distance.

The other big possibility that comes to mind is disease. Yes, we've conquered most of disease -- for now. But what if we get a bacterium infection that's completely anti-biotic resistance? What if something as nasty as ebola was spread via coughing? It doesn't make much on the grand scale to make people start quarantining. And once that happens, you have the numeric splintering referred to above, and the culture drift that will eventually bring about long term political separation.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Another option is to say we're in a Long Night now. The Vedas supposedly record visits of ancient aliens. Play this into us being an outpost of a star-spanning civilisation which we've now been cut off from, and are getting close to rediscovering.

A close relative is the Ancient Aliens paradigm. Some precursor race visited earth 200 to 20,000 years ago, picked up populations of humans, and transported them throughout nearby space for their own reasons.

[David Johnston2]

Essentially the Long Night is a post-Apocalypse setting on a large scale. While it's inspired by the romanticized version of the post-Western Roman Empire situation in Europe, the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire didn't really lead to a lot of technological regression or retardation. They lost a few tricks, but the invaders weren' t that much less advanced than the people they conquering, and the collapse of social order was pretty localized. Within a few centuries while the new order might be more fragmented and chaotic, it was producing technological advancements that outstripped the old age, no matter how they looked back on it as a "golden age". Other cultures have fallen harder and more completely.

If the fall of Earth's rival nations or the Galactic Federation or whatever involves a lot of use of weapons of mass destruction, and most of their information is stored in volatile media, an interstellar collapse of civilization can hit a lot harder. But if there's one, just one, heavily developed and populated world that remains untouched by orbital bombardment and takes an interest in expansion afterward, technology won't regress much and it will simply fill the vacuum. Multiple local will produce multiple rival star nations. But if say, the rebellious colonies rise up and destroy the core, but the core sends out a revenge attack to ensure that none of them will profit from their perfidy, leaving no untouched target, you could end up with a real Long Night. Real long, and real dark.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by RyanW

One idea I've toyed with was a collapse of the FTL network. Generally, this just isolated colonies, but major traffic hubs suffered additional fallout from the technobabble flooding out of multiple wormhole gates simultaneously. After X years, the technobabble has stabilized enough that FTL is again possible.

An interstellar long night kind of needs to explain a loss of interstellar travel, and going direct to the FTL rules rather than trying to explain why everyone everywhere loses it by other means may be simpler.

Of course, it may migrate your apocalypse into the 'magical catastrophe' category rather than societal breakdown or other more grounded types.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Other cultures have fallen harder and more completely.

The examples that come to mind are all environmentally related: the society just ceased to be viable because its agricultural base vanished. I'm trying to extrapolate that to an interstellar level, and its hard.

I've run a game in which a war forced the evacuation of earth. The various colonies didn't hook up again until the war was past (it was an alien faction fighting another alien faction and earth got swept up in the crossfire). Its not the most "realistic" of long nights, but I didn't have to do any contriving: I actually built the setting based on the war and evacuation, and found a nice little side setting that popped up 50 years after the main setting. Its not an overly long night, but changing some parameters can give you that.

[starslayer]

I'm going to spin it another, way more positive way, ascension.

95%+ of mankind moves on:
They ascend to a new state of being
They evolve into stellar entities
They leave on a grand adventure to another universe all together
They leave this galaxy for the next one via a 'one time only' massive endeavor.
They all upload into becoming part of a singular cybermind, etc.

The story is about the descendants of the future-equivalent of the mennonite/amish groups who eschewed technology and said no to the moving on. They were left behind by there own choice, continued to live, by choice, a hybrid TL 5/x society.

Over generations some people lost the faith, or just plain never had it, and left the communities, embracing technology, trying to recapture what was lost.

Over many many more generations they eventually rebuilt/reactivated/relearned at least a portion of what 'the old ones' knew, and they can finally move between planets again.

Now they've got a tonne of lore, the occasional marvel still working after all these centuries, some worlds that stayed in contact via FTL radio and untold worlds which have been lost altogether, potentially with there own technology-embracing societies splintered from there techno-phobic forebearers- and its time to rediscover what was lost!