Rearranging the setting.

[Astromancer]

Another fun possibility is to drop fictional characters into the setting. Try bringing in Spider Jerusalem who almost fits the setting or John Constantine who so doesn't fit. Having the PCs caught up in the wake of either of these characters would nearly flip the setting upside down.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Infomorph is a category that includes Ghosts, Fragments, Shadows, and all AIs in Transhuman Space AFAIK.

(Now, the spiritual successor Eclipse Phase uses the term very differently, denoting state rather than essence, but I'm not sure why an EP-like exclusion of ghost-hosted-by-bioshell be in play.)

Well, I don't suppose it would necessarily exclude it. But Diarmuid's personality was that of a human being, his mental capabilities were those of a human being, and his experience of his body was that of organic life. He never did any hopping about between bodies, for example. So I didn't immediately think of him as an example of the category.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

... Diarmuid's personality was that of a human being, his mental capabilities were those of a human being, and his experience of his body was that of organic life.

Presumably, he regarded his ghost/bioshell life as an extension of his original organic life, with the possibility of being recovered from backup after accidental death? That seems to be a fairly common way to treat it within THS.

I have an NPC in QRA who is a ghost who lives in a mainframe on board ship. He's a former professor of computer science who decided to try being software himself and is quite happy with it so far. He's fairly old, having been a wet-navy officer as a young man, then an academic, then re-joining the navy, for space service, after his uploading.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Those options don't join up. If it's detected 40 years in advance, it has to be in solar orbit, and the THS of 2100 can build a terrifying amount of hardware in a few years. Any asteroid too big to divert with that much time would already be known now, in 2020.

Honestly something too big to be diverted by anybody with a significant space capability and a decade of lead time is probably big enough it was discovered in the 19th century, if not before. You don't need much momentum change to avert a collision when you have years to work with. Civilization threating impacts really need to be either the size of small moons (in which case they are probably literally earth-shattering), or arriving within no more than a year or two warning, or a year or two after of the earliest possible moment the target world can invent nuclear tipped missiles with enough power to make escape velocity anyway.

Mind you for a lot of bodies this will be a "temporary" fix, arranging a near miss leaves the thing in an orbit that's still basically Earth-grazing and will probably hit the Earth sometime in the next few hundred millennia if you don't do some more work. But hopefully your grandchildren won't nuke themselves back to the stone age before fixing that.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Presumably, he regarded his ghost/bioshell life as an extension of his original organic life, with the possibility of being recovered from backup after accidental death? That seems to be a fairly common way to treat it within THS.

Actually, no. Diarmuid was a devout Catholic and believed that his original self was dead and, he hoped, in heaven; that he himself was soulless; and that to treat him as an actual person, knowing him to be a ghost in a shell, was the sin of idolatry.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, no. Diarmuid was a devout Catholic and believed that his original self was dead and, he hoped, in heaven; that he himself was soulless; and that to treat him as an actual person, knowing him to be a ghost in a shell, was the sin of idolatry.

OK, that's different. How did he feel he should be treated?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

OK, that's different. How did he feel he should be treated?

That was where it got complicated. He had been created by his church, apparently for some sort of covert activity. And that mostly required him to play the role of a human being. So there was an element of conflict there, I think.

In GURPS terms, "I am a soulless imitation of a human being" might be a Delusion. But in THS it seems more as if there's enough debate over the status of ghosts so that neither view is quite a Delusion.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That was where it got complicated. He had been created by his church, apparently for some sort of covert activity. And that mostly required him to play the role of a human being. So there was an element of conflict there, I think.

Yes - I think I might have difficulty distinguishing day-to-day between "treating everything that talks and displays evidence of a mind politely" and "treating him as a human being."

[AlexanderHowl]

What impact would reducing the overall utility of exowombs have on the THS setting? Let us say that sapient creatures suffer cognitive and psychological difficulties if they develop within an exowomb, so bioroids must be designed to grow from an embryo within a biological womb rather being constructed as a complete organism within an exowomb (we will assume for the sake of the argument that developing in an egg has similar consequences on sapient entities as using an exowomb). Do bioroids just become an exotic form of reproduction? Is there as much of a social stigma surrounding them?

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

so bioroids must be designed to grow from an embryo within a biological womb rather being constructed as a complete organism within an exowomb ... Do bioroids just become an exotic form of reproduction? Is there as much of a social stigma surrounding them?

I'm fairly sure that this setup deletes bioroids from the setting entirely. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that the setup even makes sense, as bioroids are built fully-formed in a tank and programmed by slinky.

For that matter, THS is very materialist; just gathering a few slinkies of a child in a womb should be sufficient. On the other hand, by the time the first bioroids are created, vat grown meat is a mature technology; surely they could just build a biological tank with sufficiently similar characteristics.