Cultural Outliers in Spaaaace!

[Astromancer]

Isolated groups can develope in extreme ways according to who founds the group. The early medieval Norse ate large amounts of fish. However the Norse Greenlanders seem to have eaten no fish at all! Both examination of trash middens and remains of the Greenlanders themselves show no evidence that the Greenlanders ever ate any seafood. Put aside the mystery of why it's a major cultural change however it occured. Closer to our time Quebec's population is based on only 5,000 immigrants from Western France. Whole books have been written, in French, about the cultural differences between France proper and Quebec.

The USA is an example of this. Look at the America of 1870 as compared to Britain at the same time. The differences are staggering. These differences persisted in spite of the constant comunication between Britain and America from 1607 onward.

The question for THS is simply, what outliers are being created in this setting and to what purposes? Given memetics the outliers are likely to be consciously choosen and molded. What kind of cultures are people trying to create?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Isolated groups can develope in extreme ways according to who founds the group. The early medieval Norse ate large amounts of fish. However the Norse Greenlanders seem to have eaten no fish at all! Both examination of trash middens and remains of the Greenlanders themselves show no evidence that the Greenlanders ever ate any seafood. Put aside the mystery of why it's a major cultural change however it occured. Closer to our time Quebec's population is based on only 5,000 immigrants from Western France. Whole books have been written, in French, about the cultural differences between France proper and Quebec.

The USA is an example of this. Look at the America of 1870 as compared to Britain at the same time. The differences are staggering. These differences persisted in spite of the constant comunication between Britain and America from 1607 onward.

The question for THS is simply, what outliers are being created in this setting and to what purposes? Given memetics the outliers are likely to be consciously choosen and molded. What kind of cultures are people trying to create?

Even with memetics and genegineering and programming, the Law of Unintended Consequences will kick in, the cultures they are trying to create will not be what they end up with.

It looks to me like there's a major war brewing in the THS2100 setting, one that will probably sharply reduce that burgeoning diversity. I'll wouldn't be surprised if the 'Red Trojans' are on track to be blasted out of existence before long, as well as chunks of the Duncanite societies of the Main Belt. But I suspect surviving chunks of the Duncanites would endure to be the core of new groups. Not Duncanite as such anymore, though.

As time passes, the Duncanites will eventually face a hard choice between their preferred anarchy and the necessity of organized competition with new arrivals from Earth. Even if the Greater War doesn't happen, that choice will befall the Duncanites. They've already got a government of a sort, a very peculiar government that happens to call itself Avatar Klusterkorp, but that won't be good enough later.

If the Greater War happens, I would look for the Duncanites to rapidly fracture into separate, independent groups, with their own governments and organizational bases.

In the outer System, Titan might be able to survive on its own, if the Greater War is delayed by a bit. With a good enough local tech base, the hydrocarbon-rich Titanian environment might be able to sustain a permanent independent colonial society. Such a society would be U.S. based, but rapidly diverge under alien conditions once contact was broken or reduced.

Such an independent Titan might form the 'anchor' that could enable a separate Gypsy Angel society to survive in the outer Solar System if the Greater War happens, too.

Triton is an unexploded bomb coming together. Occupied by robots controlled by infomorph programs that start out with a hostile bias. It's easy to imagine a real anti-human or anti-biological bent emerging out there, and it could grow into something dangerous over time, that far out and mostly unwatched and ignored.

Alternatively, the infomorph 'society', untethered from contact with biologicals and Earth-based culture, might simply gradually turn into something very very alien. Which might itself still be dangerous.

In either case, a Greater War might actually pass over Triton and leave it untouched, giving whatever is emerging there time to emerge.

[Astromancer]

Given that it's cannon in THS that people can be force grown in vats and programmed according to the wishes of whoever's running the vat, truely divergent cultures can be set up in months. Do you want to recreate the court of Old Cole the Splendid, a legendary Romao-Celtic king and ancestor of King Arthur, in space? It won't be that authentic but the inhabitants will believe in their story. Culures can be based on any theory, ideal, cultural recreation, or fancy, programmable into a vat.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

You can only do that with bioroids in THS. There is no force growth for humans.

Said bioroids can give birth to humans or parahumans. This is made possible through androwombs and other biotech tricks. Thus you can, if you have the cash, turn a private vision into a living culture in THS. Thus, themed cultures make logical sense in this setting.

Now one trick pony cultures won't stay stable in normal circumstances. But deep space isolation reinforced by memetic indoctrination isn't a normal circumstance.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Given that it's cannon in THS that people can be force grown in vats and programmed according to the wishes of whoever's running the vat, truely divergent cultures can be set up in months. Do you want to recreate the court of Old Cole the Splendid, a legendary Romao-Celtic king and ancestor of King Arthur, in space? It won't be that authentic but the inhabitants will believe in their story. Culures can be based on any theory, ideal, cultural recreation, or fancy, programmable into a vat.

To a point. A viable, functioning culture is a fantastically complicated thing, over a very short period of time, the new society will diverge and transform into something else, unless the creators of it were incredibly intelligent and wise and foresighted. Constant intervention to tweak it back to default could work for a while, but that's not really a new culture.

You could apply the same mental test to such a vat-born culture that you can to a work of fiction, asking the question "Would this situation play out in real life as it does in the author's work?" The programmers might intend 'x', but 'x' once made manifest would need to be viable to survive and stay 'x'.

[Astromancer]

I suppose most vat "born" cultures wouldn't last without radical transformation. But isolation can preserve many fragile things. It would justify a figure like Kirk or the Doctor waltzing in and knocking down a whole culture if it was only a fragile artifice to begin with.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Given that it's cannon in THS that people can be force grown in vats and programmed according to the wishes of whoever's running the vat, truely divergent cultures can be set up in months. Do you want to recreate the court of Old Cole the Splendid, a legendary Romao-Celtic king and ancestor of King Arthur, in space? It won't be that authentic but the inhabitants will believe in their story. Culures can be based on any theory, ideal, cultural recreation, or fancy, programmable into a vat.

You have to be willing to not just educate but genetically program individuals to behave in a manner compatible with said cultures. Real knightly cultures had individual knights who were fierce in the field and meek in the hall but the ascribed status and adulation of physical power tended to make for something far from that model to say the least.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

You have to be willing to not just educate but genetically program individuals to behave in a manner compatible with said cultures. Real knightly cultures had individual knights who were fierce in the field and meek in the hall but the ascribed status and adulation of physical power tended to make for something far from that model to say the least.

A failed attempt to create someone's ideal society would also make an interesting outliers in its own way. In many ways the USA is a series of failed Utopias that came together to form a fairly radical nation. Mine you, oligarchs and clergy, focused on retaining what they could of the older "utopias," have always pushed the nation as far right-ward as possible. Or at least that's on historical interpretation (I'm reading The Expanding Blaze, Jonathan Israel's new book).