SF and a realistic "Long Night" scenario

[Arith Winterfell]

I'm currently making a shift from working on fantasy world creation/writing/game play (games like Skyrim) into Science Fiction genre (partly due to burn out over focusing so much on fantasy, but that stuff is for another post).

Right now I'm pondering the idea of the concept of a "Long Night" period where people in a sci-fi setting begin exploration again of space and various worlds creating an opportunity for players (or even readers if I turn this into larger fiction) to discover wonders and explore mysteries of "what happened to this place/people" as well as having "alien races" which are all the result of diverse human genetic engineering over time often born of various ideological, social, and political forces on different isolated worlds.

My problem is

1. How does one create a realistic setup for a long night scenario and how it would realistically begin and come to a close?

2. Additionally how far into the future would such a setting need to be. Ideally I want to divorce the setting from "real life" politics in the sense of recognizable countries and factions, while at the same time exploring the underpinnings in human psychological and social life that shapes things like politics today.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

1. How does one create a realistic setup for a long night scenario and how it would realistically begin and come to a close?

I recommend you don't devote much energy at all to how the long night happened. You'll note that very few science fiction stories set more than a few years into the future do devote a lot of effort to history, at least not the part between now and a couple generations before the plot happens. There's a couple good reasons for that. One is that it's often quite hard to do plausibly, but probably the more important one is it mostly *doesn't matter to the story*. What matters is how things are now, exactly how they got there isn't very important, and may very well be a distraction. If you were reading a modern political thriller and it launched into a long diversion about how the modern national system was shaped by the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, you'd probably wonder what sort of idiot editor let that stay in.

2. Additionally how far into the future would such a setting need to be. Ideally I want to divorce the setting from "real life" politics in the sense of recognizable countries and factions.

How divorced do you need? A good rule of thumb is two long lifetimes (less than 2 centuries) is plenty for specific political issues or *states* to be boring historical footnotes (nobody alive has met anybody who lived when they were current events, any stories are filtered through at least one layer of people who never had a stake in them) but nowhere near long enough for modern *nations*, in the sense of ethno-linguistic groups, not to still matter. If you want complete replacement of languages, races and religions, you really need several thousand years.

[Boomerang]

You could have an ark spaceship full of colonists arrive at a new planet to discover that certain exotic elements vital to space travel like technetium don't exist. It may require centuries for a new form of space travel to be invented using new elements.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I recommend you don't devote much energy at all to how the long night happened. You'll note that very few science fiction stories set more than a few years into the future do devote a lot of effort to history, at least not the part between now and a couple generations before the plot happens. There's a couple good reasons for that. One is that it's often quite hard to do plausibly, but probably the more important one is it mostly *doesn't matter to the story*. What matters is how things are now, exactly how they got there isn't very important, and may very well be a distraction. If you were reading a modern political thriller and it launched into a long diversion about how the modern national system was shaped by the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, you'd probably wonder what sort of idiot editor let that stay in.

On the other hand, Indiana Jones or Dan Brown won't shut up about history, because their plots largely turn on it. This seems to be true of the OP, because much of the story is "what happened to X?" Thus, in a sense, it's a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, and the story is as much an unraveling the mystery of the fall as well as exploring the results.

What I wouldn't worry about is making the fall "credible." You can dig up a dozen apocalyptic scenarios and go with any number of them. The truth is, civilization is actually much more fragile than people sometimes realize. We have this notion of the "arrow of progress," but the truth is that civilization didn't advance much for a very long period of time, and then we had a very lucky 500 years or so, and it could all come crashing down at any minute. Living in primitive poverty is the rule, not the exception.

So, you only really need to answer three questions: What triggered the fall, what kept people from rising again immediately, and why did we rise now? Bonus points if what triggered the fall is still out there. For example, what if there's a berserker race out there, something like the Reapers from Mass Effect, or the Wolves from Revelation Space, and they wait until a species reaches a certain point, then they trigger and knock them down several pegs. And perhaps that will happen again, unless he heroes solve the mystery, realize that this is not only what destroyed civilization, but that it will happen again unless they warn everyone and act against it. Then you have both an explanation, and a reason why it's immediately pertinent again.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

1. How does one create a realistic setup for a long night scenario and how it would realistically begin and come to a close?

The simplest explanation is to have a large enough gap between the first waves of STL colonisation, which spreads distinct populations out and cuts them off, and the discovery of FTL, which will bring those divergent civilisations back into contact.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

The simplest explanation is to have a large enough gap between the first waves of STL colonisation, which spreads distinct populations out and cuts them off, and the discovery of FTL, which will bring those divergent civilisations back into contact.

A variant of that I've always rather liked is the first generation of FTL didn't have really good control over temporal coordinates, so a lot of the first wave of ships arrived at their destinations well before they left. They may have left Earth only a few years ago, but they settled the worlds they went to anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years ago, giving them a long period of independent history before the fraction of ships whose drives did maintain good contact with "now" arrived to "rediscover" them.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

1. How does one create a realistic setup for a long night scenario and how it would realistically begin and come to a close?

2. Additionally how far into the future would such a setting need to be. Ideally I want to divorce the setting from "real life" politics in the sense of recognizable countries and factions, while at the same time exploring the underpinnings in human psychological and social life that shapes things like politics today.

Unfortunately there are WAY to many realistic long night scenarios available. Just look at all the real long nights there have been. It is far easier to wreck a civilization then to create one. An interstellar long night might be harder to accomplish; once an interstellar civilization is established it might be less contagious to local troubles. On the other hand the reverse might be true.

As for divorcing the setting from real world politics all that is needed is a little historical insight. One suggestion is to take ideas from events so far away in time and space that the players will never have heard of it and will only have intellectual interest once they learn. Then muddle up the issue by remaking names and changing customs. For instance have a Balkanized Deathworld full of savages ruled by a High King with two Emperors competing for the High King's favor because his planet is a spot on a trade route. And oh yes, the High King is not Muslim or if he is it is an obscure sect no one ever heard of except you. And the inhabitants of the planet are not called Pathans and the planet is not Afghanistan and the two Emperors are not the Viceroy and the Czar. Defenitely not, who could doubt it?

Or a convoy of ships is fleeing from a catastrophe and lands on a planet. The leader of the convoy is not named Aeneas.

Or a general who is not named Belisarius is trying to conquer a planet which is not Italy in the name of a ruler who is not named Justinian.

Or a King who is not named Arthur is being cuckolded by a military officer who is not named Lancelot.

Or so on. There are plenty of resources that can be mixed and matched. Furthermore some themes appear in human history so many times that you can take them without being a copy of any one event, culture, or political faction. For instance how many times has one brother murdered another to get a throne? How many times has a feud been impossible to stop without losing face for the tribe who first proposes peace?

[Gedrin]

I'll give a few plausible "Long Night" scenarios.

1: STL colonization ships are launched at numerous targets. They're all outfitted with everything they think a colony might need, with all the experts all the tools. Of course, the nearest feedback on these ships, plans, tools, and combinations of experts is a long way off. Each colony, to varying degrees, encounters trials and tribulations that eat away at their resources, retarding development in one way or another, taking a long time to reach an industrial base capable of building new ships.

2: STL colonization ships are launched at numerous targets. All the potential colonies are very far away. There's no tech collapse. Colonies function as expected, but they can't talk to each other. The distances and speeds involved are enough to put a hundreds of years between them all.

3: FTL colonization via a massive "projector" or "gateway". The one way device is so large and so expensive to operate, that it counts as a superproject for all of Sol system. The resources needed to project anything are so large that most systems recieve only one or two rounds of shipments. Even one way regular communication is impractical. Numerous colonies are sent until the project becomes economically/politically/physically impractical. At that point, no one can communicate without generational lag.

4: Galactic Disaster Scenarios. Too numerous to count, but they all fall into "something bad happens and travel/communication stops".

5: Slow FTL or STL colonization, but beyond a certain point, calculations and assumptions about travel are not valid. Travel may be fast, but not fast enough that full scale scouting is possible. Colonies go off course and just get lost. Many die. Some find worlds of varying quality. While interstellar travel is possible, it's not at all reliable, becoming more trouble than it's worth to the systems able to build ships.

6: Political/Social Colonization. A world for every lifestyle and belief. STL colonization is driven by the desire to export problematic groups and escape the dominant culture. Generally, the groups are happy to avoid each other. Between the general isolation, and the voluntary removal of different points of view and ways of looking at the world technical development is retarded across the human sphere. Messages in a Bottle are occasionally sent/received, but are often considered threats to the political/social order or just news from relatives you'd rather not see. As a bonus(?) you get very StarTrek worlds, where the whole place/subrace has a particular belief system.

[PTTG]

7. Technological Disaster Scenarios. Just as a refinement, while a cosmic-ray burst that sterilizes most of the galaxy is one thing, there's also room for smaller disasters that mainly reduce the tech level.

Say that the computers in this setting were mainly built on graphine or whatever. Maybe there's a bunch of graphine or whatever polluting the ocean. Someone makes a bacteria or nanomachine that breaks down graphine (or whatever it is) into a stable molecule. Of course it won't destroy computers, because "x".

X doesn't happen.

The result is that all of the digitally recorded information in the FLT sphere is lost, and a lot of the other information is destroyed in the economic collapse. Well-managed, it might balance out at only a TL or three lost, (presuming very careful managing), or it might snowball into a total technological collapse down to TL 1 or 2. For a while, anyway.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gedrin

3: FTL colonization via a massive "projector" or "gateway". The one way device is so large and so expensive to operate, that it counts as a superproject for all of Sol system. The resources needed to project anything are so large that most systems recieve only one or two rounds of shipments. Even one way regular communication is impractical. Numerous colonies are sent until the project becomes economically/politically/physically impractical. At that point, no one can communicate without generational lag.

Any sort of gateway/projector-based interstellar travel scheme lends itself well to a Long Night scenario - destruction of a central hub, running out of the exotic matter that powers it, unexpected degradation, purposeful sabotage, etc - all of these can shut down the networks. You could even have some external threat* cause inhabitants to seal off/destroy their own gateways to insure the threat can't get through to them. Depending on the scenario, the Long Night could end when someone figures out how to fix/reactivate/replace the gates, or when an alternative method of FTL travel is invented.

*If you don't want actual aliens in your campaign, this could be something manmade - overly-aggressive Von Neumann probes, a belligerent military, or even toxic memes. Some options might still be relevant (reopening a gateway to a civilization that has been converted into nothing but the aggressive Von Neumann probes could end poorly), but most won't be aside from some myths and legends based on them.