Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Well, the key phrase was "transhumanist dystopia". Dystopias are rarely truly realistic, being exaggerated in their bleakness for the sake of the tone of the story. With that in mind, I'm willing to overlook how it got that way so long as it's somewhat consistent in execution.
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...wait, are we really discussing this? |
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Why not? Or it could just be a race of parahumans who were given extreme species modifications by a cruel creator. The only real question would be if they were small enough to fly or were human-sized.
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All manner of amazing gene therapies and improvements, were funded by one crazy woman wanting to bring her one true love to life; Daffy Duck.
All the rumors of hybridizing mammalian physiology and avian/dinosaurian could lead to very confused "adventurers" expecting to find a Jurassic-Park lab. (The strength modifications were only to allow a child sized duck-person to fly; no other reason.) |
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In the robotic economy idea by AlexanderHowl social exclusion and status anxiety would be the marks of poverty. The poor, living in what we would see as comfort and mild luxury, would be labled "Eloi" or some other dismissive term. Most of the people would be mainly content. They'd find their satisfactions in life outside of the world of work which they know wants nothing to do with them.
Those unhappy with their lot would be the ambitious. The elites would monopolize all paths to prestige. Someone of workingclass background who desires to be an artist of any kind, a scholar, a politician, or any other prestige job, would find themselves coldly snubbed and treated as a coarse joke. If you read anthropology or Mapp & Lucia, you know status competition can be sadistically nasty. |
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That was my mental image as well. Unexpected horror can be worse than expected even if objectively less dangerous, I think.
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Of course, it could have been an attempt to deliberately create an intelligent organism that could colonize a particular planet. After the collapse of human civilization, the duck people would eventually evolve their own society and their own technology, and might forget everything about humans (and humans might forget about them). When they eventually encounter each other, there might be a lot of potential for conflict, as the duck people would know that they are the favored people of the Gods due to their creation while the humans would know about evolution.
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{The Lanterns}
The Pentalpha Nations got their name and symbol from the shield of Sir Gawain, who was both a warrior and a healer. It points out the needed double role of protectors of the peace and healers required by the emergency. When the cluster of genetically engineered superflus plowed through the world in 2052 the USA was in turmoil with large parts of the nation anti-Vaxer. Although medical professionals and first responders had gotten the vaccine though out the USA, large sections of the nation rejected the vaccine. This lead to 20% of the US population dead within six months. Scotland, which was still just barely in the UK in 2052, had a 40% population loss. None of the other nations making up The Pentalpha Nations experienced anything like the lost of even one percent of their population. A few places like Wales (70% population loss) and South Korea (80%) had medical communities that smuggled in the vaccine. Northern Mexico's medical community was just beginning to smuggle in the vaccine when the plague hit. In areas close to the border, the death rate was 80%, farther South it was a normal 95%. Everywhere else the medical community died in the first wave of the plague and aid attempts collapsed. Training large numbers of medical personal is a major goal of The Pentalpha Nations anyplace they try to help. Some nations reject the aid. Russia and many Islamic nations have closed their borders. Iran, however is now a close ally of the West and progressing well. Indonesia is also gallantly keeping up the struggle to save humanity. Africa is pulling together well. Europe and Latin America are mainly sullen and bitter. India takes the aid of Pentalpha Nations and prefers to talk down to them. China also takes the aid, speaks in a friendly manner, and then tries to exploit their neighbors in sometimes truly bizarre ways. Egypt though mainly closed, keeps the Suez Canal open and allows some tourism for the hard currency. Morocco is putting up as many solar power plants as it can and sells the power to Europe and courts The Pentalpha Nations. The years between 2052 and 2057 were mainly chaos. That no nukes were fired is a blessing and something of a mystery. The crisis forced a massive change in the US constitution. Most scholars refer to the Constitution of 2055 when talking about the present day constitution and the Constitution of 1787 for anything before 2052. The USA is now a monocameral legislature in a parliamentary system. There still is a senate, but it isn't really a house of the legislature, it's more like ombudsmen appointed by each state and editors to make sure the laws are correctly written, as in no accidental loop holes because of comma splices and the like. The President is a Head of State only, the Chair of the House is the Head of Government. Like all The Pentalpha Nations the USA is a social democratic society. Between 2057 and 2070 the world crawled out of deep depression, although by either 20th or 19th century standards the economy is still a mess. Still, if life is impoverished in most of the world, life is going on. A nation's economy tends to better the fewer people it lost. The USA, which is back to 300 million people after a low of 275 million, has the largest market and the liveliest economy in this setting. Still it looks pretty pallid by earlier standards, still an economist would see a healty economy held back by the planetary population collapse. |
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{The Farfarers}
Jump Points around any star that has them (and no one knows why more than 85% of the stars have them) tend to come in set patterns that seem to be based on the simple solids. Tetrahedron patterns with jump points on each of the four points make of about fifty percent of the stellar populations jump points. Cubes, with eight jump points, make up another 30% of the stellar population. Octahedrons, with six jump points, are about 15% of the stellar population. Earth has one to the rare dodecahedron patterns, with twenty jump points. It is assumed that icosahedrons with 12 jump points are out there somewhere. Why the jump points are arranged as they are confounds scientists and keeps mystics employed. Tetrahedrons generally have gates that lead the furthest afield. Both of the known jump points to the Small Magellanic Cloud are from tetrahedron pattern jump gates. The normal rule of jump gates is, "The more Jump Gates the less distance traveled." Some jump gates aren't open. Tests show they're there, but not available. Better technologies generally allow access to more jump gates. Some jump gates aren't stable in where they come out. Some are totally random, others seem to shift between different set points. Some are one way passages. Some are mysteries with no one coming back period. |
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I like to make jump gates into the artifacts of an ancient but broadly earth-compatable civilization. That way, it handily explains why Earth is a part of the network and why only "interesting" systems (ones with earthlike planets) are present in the galaxy.
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Only 8% of stars are G-Type, so it would be wasteful to place jump gates around other stars if you just wanted to interconnect habitable planets. At best, only around an 1/8 of G-Type stars are likely to have habitable planets due to changes in L as they get older and due to inconvenient asteroid belts or gas giants. Of those, only 1/4 of them will have lifeforms that use left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars like we do (anything else will likely create byproducts that will cause Earth life anaphylaxis). Even when you reduce that number to 0.25% though, that still leaves a billion stars connected by jump gates in the Milky Way, which is probably more than any Precursor civilization requires.
A more modest proposal would involve a local jump gate network built by Precursors. There are around 2 million stars within 500 ly of Sol and, even with the above criteria, probably 5,000 G-Type stars orbited by habitable planets with compatible life. A network of 5,000 stars would probably be more than enough for any setting. |
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There are some theories for why our chirality is the way it is and it may be not purely random making our set the most common. Why wouldn't aliens want to study alien life just, because they know of many others? That's like asking why any human would want to study a newly discovered insect when we know of so many. Sure, it wouldn't get the funding of the very first alien find, but there'd always be someone caring quite a bit. |
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It's the red M-types (such as Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1) I'm wary of housing habitable planets, even if said planets are in the life zone. M0 to M3 stars I'd say "maybe" to, as they're on the hotter side of the scale, but the M5 to M8 types that litter the galaxy I wouldn't expect complex life as we know it to exist. (That doesn't preclude extremophiles or various theoretical life forms such as nitrogen- or silicon-based life.) |
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It would depend on the cost of the jump gates (or other form of travel). Even in a post-scarcity society (as in, human beings do not need to work because their entertainment and subsistence is provided for without any labor on their part), there will still likely be economic reasons to build jump gates. If not, you have a society that is so poor that they cannot afford jump gates or so wealthy that they have no reason to build jump gates because they have everything they need (since wealthier human societies seem to possess stable populations or negative population growth, overpopulation is unlikely to be a pressing reason).
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What we psychologically need is not exactly what ancient people did or future people will. Our species seem able to adapt to quite bizarre cultural requirements.
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As a future history seed? Potentially interesting. As a realistic view of human nature... I'm quite skeptical. Not everything is a monkey's paw. Providing plenty and equality to all mankind sounds like it's just good.
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Yes, our ancestors seemed to have survived quiet well during the Paleolithic without working that hard. People would make their own work through their creativity and their hobbies (look at stuff like Twitch, where people stream themselves playing video games for 20-40 hours a week). I can imagine worse fates than a life devoted to pleasing the people you love and doing the things that you like.
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It's also really unpredictable how what's good, bad, or indifferent on an individual psychological scale is when expanded to group sociological cultural level.
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Would really like some feedback on the gameability of this one:
A distant future society, home to digital and chemical intelligences living in harmony, established many colonies, one on an earth-like world (or cool artificial habitat, pick your favorite shape). Their technology was TL 11+, although mind uploading proved to be impossible. The AIs -- and nearly all technology -- relied on a substrate of ambient nanomachines that were computer, network, and power distribution system all at once. They were just as critical for most organic life, powering and controlling cybernetics and medical systems. Naturally, the security of this "Lace" was the utmost priority. Many AI felt that their presence in organic society would ultimately doom human and near-human life (mainly gene-spliced variants and a few uplifted animals) to political irrelevance; they wanted to transition to a society of self-rule. The organics, for their part, generally saw little reason to disrupt the status quo, and moreover hoped to keep "good AIs" present and a part of society to protect against "bad AI." Though there were many more factions, these two broad viewpoints encompassed most of them. Thus it was likely that it was, in fact, an AI or organization of them that finally managed to attack and break down the Lace, presumably with the goal of eliminating the threat of AI mastery over the organics. There are many other possibilities, of course. The virus or corruption -- its very nature is hard to define -- expanded throughout known space at the speed of light, and in time washed over the specific colony world of our interest. In a matter of moments, the wonders of the planet's advanced technology were erased, as were its most powerful members, its critical infrastructure, and the cybernetics of most of the planet's population. The centuries that followed were difficult. The organic population crashed seven separate times, from over ten billion to under ten million. Each year was a little bit harsher than the last, as the planet's orbital terraforming network swung uselessly in space. In enclaves and camps, some equipment was jury-rigged or rebuilt from memory, but each generation lost a little more. They lost track of their history, and began to think of the time before as an age of miracles, and of the AIs and capricious gods. However, all was not lost in the Lace. The nanites' slow error-correction software had been running the entire time, and gradually, gradually it arrested the decay, and began to repair the network and recover the lost data. In theory, the encrypted "cloud-based" backups were still available, stored on a deep level of the network, but it would take time and effort to unlock it. Only a decade ago, some small pockets of the Lace returned to full functionality. Within some of these pockets, AIs long-dormant stretched their mental limbs and found the borders of their realms, and the people within them. Each AI is different, but they all know that in less than a century the decay of the climate systems will be irreversible, and everyone on the planet will perish... but also that hope is out there. If an AI can amass control of a large enough area (by sending people carrying nanites into new regions), then it can enhance its computing power geometrically, and accelerate the decryption process. And when the decryption process is complete, the AI will have access to the wonders of the ancient world. The rapid restoration of the Lace, the re-activation of the terraforming network, advanced nanomedicine, and countless other advances. The downside, of course, is that only one AI can be the first, and the others will be reverted to their pre-catastrophe selves, which at this point is a kind of death for them. It is now a race -- a war -- to control as much of the planet as possible as swiftly as possible, while protecting the tribes and peoples of the colony world. At their height, AIs had 20+ IQ and countless levels of Compartmentalized Mind, and could communicate with anyone directly by using the nanites in a given person's brain to provide the sensation of hearing the message spoken aloud. At present, few AIs are beyond IQ 15, and they have distinctly limited CM. Many have also gained disadvantages due to corruption and emotional distress. Their "telepathic" communication is now limited to specific people and only in specific places... though this is changing. Players might be weird-tech Skirmishers with Jetpacks or Hovercycle Lancers. Or they might be nanite acolytes, who must perform some kind of strange ritual to re-activate a region's nanites for the AI. Also available are common semi-humans, such as Nu-Dolphins or Pongo Sapiens, with an appropriate tribal background. PCs might live in eroded cities as Terrace Farmers and prospectors -- though it's been so long that they might not even recognize the cities as something once made for humans. They will all have a mystical view of this history, seeing the fall as legend, perhaps not truly real. They argue if people created the gods, or if the gods created people (in fact, the ships that first arrived carried only bioprinters to manufacture and grow the first generations of colonists, so in a sense, both). Only a few hear the messages of these gods directly, but as they strengthen, that number grows. Campaigns could be about everyday people solving the extraordinary problems they face (from shifting climate to banditry to rogue servitors awoken by the fitful Lace), or they could be about a campaign to bring a specific AI to power and restore the Age of Wonders. I love the idea of figuring out Mass Combat stats for these anachronistic armies... |
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I always find it interesting that people seem to believe that AI will be better and smarter than the people who program them (the AI God meme). Anyway, the setting is very dystopian and could work very well for a fallen human society. You could have the Lace forming on a human world that decided to isolate itself from a human civilization that banned strong AI and the characters are scouts from the larger human civilization seeking lost colonies. Alternatively, the characters could come from a lost colony that banned AI and they are scouts from a human civilization that arose from the lost colony and is expanding into the former territory of the Lace. In any case, I think the setting is more interesting if the characters are outsiders looking in rather than natives dealing with insane AI Gods.
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I love the old line, "Money can't buy happiness, but you can sure rent a better class of misery." |
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But wealth and power still give the ability to destroy. In the stone age, it was mostly just the power to kill individuals and fragile species over millennia. Now we're destroying entire ecosystems and causing the planet's sixth great extinction event over mere decades.
Wealth and power isn't always a good thing either is what I'm trying to say. I see the future getting much darker on a global scale before it gets better. But I think there's a good chance that it will eventually get better. Technology; the cause of, and solution to, most of the world's problems. ;) |
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You could still have a ruling elite, the only question is how much do they own all together and how much do they own individually (related to their population). The ruling elite of the contemporary world earns 50% of the income and contains only 0.01% of the population (anyone making $10 million per year or more). A society where the same population earned only 10% of the income would potentially be much more egalitarian (as the average earnings of the ruling elites would be $2 million per year and as the average earnings of the rest of the population would rise 80%).
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Relative poverty is a real thing. So the Elites could live in godlike splendor, and the Masses in comfort and even modest, but substantial, luxury. The Masses would still feel poor.
Also key resources could be held only by the rich. Picture a society were the average Joe or Josie has magnificent healthcare paid for by taxes, but only the Elites have immortality. It's not only what you have, it's also what you lack and can never have. |
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Absolute poverty is a real thing as well though.
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Might be interesting to play a bunch of hard-bitten rebels who have to make do with delicious food, free healthcare, superb education, full-immersion virtual reality, and free income, while the ruling class has access to superlative food, full-body replacement bio-cybernetics, direct memory skill transfer, easy space travel, and 10% higher free income.
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Successful revolutions need people who understand finance, supply logistics, strategy and tactics, and human persuasion. Those people tend to have educational backgrounds that serve them well, under almost any circumstances. They're also seldom poor, and not deprived of much in the way of material needs. Because such people already have the skill and motivation to lead effectively, any system that allows social mobility and a rise to authority by peaceful means will seldom experience successful revolutions, but will regularly endure economic, cultural, social and political change. |
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That is actually relevant to sci fi and not just to the allegorical subgenre. Rob S. Pierre wasn't exactly poor and while Victor Cachet grew up in the Havenite equiv of the projects he was not there any more. Equally to the point the Havenite revolutionary government fell through force of paranoia. They overdid internal security to the point of hurting military capacity and then paradoxically provoked the very thing they were trying to prevent which was a military coup. |
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"I want; you have." is the cause of many a violent act by individuals and groups.
Couple that with our weird tendency to attach personal identity and worth with external factors like wealth and cultural window-dressing, and war over petty sh*t is inevitable. Rallying cries rarely have much to do with all the resentment and anger that actually fuels rebellions and wars, I think. |
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Was the French Revolution caused by envy or was it caused by economic factors such as no taxation of the elites and high taxation of the common folk? Was the Haitian Revolution caused by envy or was it caused by legitimate protests against the treatment of the enslaved population? Now, one of the reasons for the American Revolution was envy because the people of Quebec received preferential treatment as compared to the American colonialists and because of the envy that the American colonialists felt towards the Native American tribes whose territories were protected by the British monarchy.
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Change how people see themselves and either apathy or revolution can be the fruit. |
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To bandage the off topic ness how could this dilemma be brought out of a prince who does want to lean on his subjects less hard then his ancestors but needing to manage the reforms carefully? Perhaps this is to boring to be a seed compared to revolution. |
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Actually most political circumstances are potential sci fi seeds because sci fi has always been as much about politics as science. We just change the names to avoid flame bait and rejuggle the circumstance to make it more to our taste.
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True, political scientists often used science fiction as a platform for thought experiments. If you want an example of a dictatorial human utopia (complete with a bioroid underclass), you only need to look at the stories of Cordwainer Smith. Of course, it can get a bit boring, which is often why space opera is more successful than political science fiction.
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If those who make such promises can rise to power through normal channels, then they're called (more or less successful) "reformers." If they're blocked from power and must use alternative (usually violent) means, they're called "revolutionaries" -- if they win. If they lose, of course, they're called "traitors," or even "terrorists," and either shot or hanged. :) |
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InTry this idea...
This is a supers idea stolen from the Stormwatch comic. Basically, a group of supers decides to set humanity free. This group is on the same power level as the Silver Age Justice League. You've got a powerful wizard placing mystic truths in humanity's minds via the collective unconscious. A group of super-gadgeteers have offered the masses nanotech with easy control so that everybody can live in luxury and splendor. And those are only the start. All the world's power elites are in terror. If no one needs them if everybody is rich and free, what happens to their power? You can go several ways with this. Your PCs could fight to protect the masses from the fury and bitterness of the dethroned elites. Alternately you could try in several different ways to contain the chaos. Even if the NPC supers simply passed out cornucopia nanotech, chaos would ensue. Superheroes would have plenty to do. If someone could enter the collective unconscious itself, and take away humanity's illusions, the lasting chaos before the liberation would be profound. And a great challenge for heroes. |
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I don't see a lot of sane people endorsing the "brain wash humanity and give them gray bombs" plan.
Of course The Authority are pure and true, with the best of intentions and absolute power over such a world...so I'm probably just over reacting. But for grins, let's say they are pure and true and will never disagree, spit into factions or treat all of civilization as a plaything to be molded to their view of how things should be (...again). The power elites, with the introduction of the utopia-tech, they've lost all their power that wasn't based in personal influence. Authoritarians in charge of extractive economies offer nothing to their subjects or their posse anymore, and the tech gives the proverbial peasant enough firepower to take him out. The Elon Musks of the world use the unlimited resources to do their own thing, and you'll have ocean cities and Mars missions...which some idiot will try to blow up. I'm pretty sure your supers will have their hands so full with "Joe Bob is building the worlds largest can of beer...it's about 1200 meters tall at this point, second place is at 1100m", "Steve is building a bridge to Okinawa...from Kansas", and "two factions who have conflicting visions are printing tanks to defend the one true Utopia" that you'll need some mustache twirlers of villains (again, not sure how they didn't get "fixed" but hey) or they could just be opposed to the new regime. "But they're not a regime!", you cry...we'll get to that. Stopping this sort of thing depends on your benevolent "We promise we're not dictators" having a real panopticon at their disposal, and one that can see the future. Eight billion people with the resources of a billionaire (sans personal influence) will be hard to predict, not for the rational problems, but for the mile tall beer can problems. Of course, you might say that not everyone would have the resources of a billionaire...and now you've got a different problem. Essentially, billions of people asking "Why cant I have a space ship if Elon Musk can?" Now, your folks might be fine with a couple hundred thousand space ships zooming around at ludicrous speeds in orbit...but someone's going to have to be ATC... Essentially, someone has to be in charge (or we accept some seriously wacky levels of functional Anarchy what with humanity being "fixed"), and your supers are the only remaining candidates. They've conquered the world by transforming it into something only they can govern, which is kinda a neat way to go about it. The supers responsible for this have an exciting new career of developing an entirely new form of government and regulatory system while making sure the solar systems largest Valentines Day card doesn't destroy Austrailia. OR, they can blame it all on saboteurs and reactionaries (I recommend Goldstien and Snowball for villain names) from the old power elite. |
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Ever see a public minecraft server with free resources? The starting area is a wasteland of monuments and half-built artless attempts to troll the place. On the other hand, once you're far from there, there are great wonders, too.
Presumably we'd see something similar, with Earth being a trampled sandbox (and likely Mars as well), but perhaps Alpha Centauri or other stars would have wonders... |
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Then there's the problem of inhabitable places. Depending on the levels of tech, we might just be able to build habs, and then we get a Dyson swarm. That might be the ideal solution for The Authority. Everyone lives a billion miles away from each other and their mega-scale arts and crafts, but in range of TA's power. However, I really can't see The Authority letting the Earth be devastated by mega-projects. It's much more likely they'd use force to stop such things. |
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I am not sure that a Dyson Swarm is possible, considering that the energy requirements to move that much matter would already require a Type 2 civilization, and why would people want to leave the Earth if they have the power to stay on the Earth? Without the economic or ecological reasons of scarcity to evacuate the Earth, I think that a much more likely scenario would be war over the geography of Earth rather than a war over the resources of Earth. A few groups might be able to leave before war consumed the Earth, but you would be numbering the surviving humans in the millions rather than the billions.
In addition, if every human being is a superhuman, then the jealousy and pettiness of 'normal' people become the sparks for bitter feuds that could wreck entire cities. Bigotry and nationalism would not disappear with the spread of superpowers, and I can only imagine that the inhabitants of the largest nations would start to try to use their superior number of supers to bully their smaller neighbors. I would imagine that such a world would end up a burned out cinder within a decade of the spread of superpowers. |
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As for reasons to bail out, your second paragraph pretty much sums them up. A large number of nations simply collapse because they aren't useful to their own power structure any more. Individuals who were common felons last week suddenly have the power to build anything. People who were normal tinkerers now have access to orbit. That doesn't even factor in the billion or so people who ask,"Can I really have a million cheeseburgers made?" To be honest, I suspect a more rational examination renders saner results. Law and force restrict people. The Authority either is omniscient or needs troops/cops. Brains and discipline still will rule the world because ingenuity is limited and time is finite. It won't take long for the hated power elite, deprived of their advantage of physical capital, to realize they can pool nano-construction time in exchange for immediate goods. "You give me one hour of your nanites next week, and I give you a cheeseburger right now," isn't very different from current banking/loan systems. World class talent will still demand world class incentive. In under a generation you'd have a new elite that looks roughly the same as the old, but with vastly more physical power. Pretty much industrialization, but as a sudden shock. The non-elite would be better off as well, providing they had a clue about what was going on, but that didn't stop the post industrial jealousy that drove The Authority to smash the world economy the first time. Either they'd do it again (eventually their tech upgrades run out?), for the same reasons (this time it'll be different!), or abandon the project (this has not been the historical norm). The nasty bit starts up again when people realize they can't make their lot better. The Authority will just smash things about the time a new "system" emerges. |
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The problem is the assumption of rationality within a fundamentally irrational species. What would prevent white supremacists from targeting the members of a hated minority and what would prevent the members of a hated minority from retaliating? What would prevent radical nationalists from targeting the institutions of a hated nation and what would prevent the institutions of a hated nation from retaliating. What would prevent thousands of formerly powerless young men turning their superpowers against innocent children at their former schools and what would prevent the parents of those children from targeting suspicious young men in their grief and rage?
Without limitations, humans can become monstrous, and the humans who are willing to kill for their own pleasure are more vicious and more inventive than the 'normal' people who they victimize. With unlimited power, serial killers will be able to indulge in slaughters of phenomenal brutality before they are brought down, and mass murderers would destroy entire cities before they are stopped. Of course, this is one of the many reasons why superhero comics do not make much sense, as a world with supers should end up being an empty world. |
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You guys got it. Good intentions, noble deeds, and superpowers, mix in human cussiness, and watch the chaos. Mind you I see eliminating poverty and oppression as profound goods. However the pre-Authority supers led by the High (a Superman reworking) didn't bother much with asking if people wanted to be liberated or lose their illusions. What should have been wonderous and beautiful looks a little more like rape.
Freedom can be given, but you can't force it on people without pain and violation. These supers, you can't call them heros, didn't ask anyone if they wanted help. Frankly, if I'm a super tearing down the whole wide world's power structure, I'd find some people who want my help. Working with them would let me start a slow revolution that would grind the old order to powder with minimal pain. But this senario is more about impatience and the price of total rapid transformation. |
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I agree. I think that giving a limited number of people superpowers would allow for a controlled explosion, but there are always going to be unintended consequences. If I found myself in that setting, I would find a group of like-minded people, build an Ark, and head for the stars before the Earth exploded in genocidal conflict.
I think that would make an interesting science fiction setting though. The Guardians, the sane humans who fled the Earth after Humanity's Awakening, have terraformed and settled a few hundred planets within 500 ly of the Solar System. They have allied with alien civilizations against the Ravagers, the insane humans who destroyed the Earth through superpowered conflicts within a decade of the Awakening. The Ravagers enslave primitive aliens to serve them and raid advanced alien civilizations for technology while they fight for status among their ranks. |
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On the original topic, sure in the short term the unregulated introduction of lots of power (or wealth, or knowledge or whatever) could be a mess, but that's a property of sudden transitions, not so much whatever you are introducing. There probably is an equilibrium state on the other side. The key to not having a mess is to roll it out slowly enough for the regulating and coping mechanisms (formal and informal) to have time to be organized or evolve. Of course if it rolls out slowly enough for society to adapt, it may also fail to produce the radical change that seems to be part of the point. I suspect it is the idea that you can have radical change without at least risking considerable bloodshed that is the idealist fantasy in play here. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
I think over in the Hells/lucifers thread one of the ideas was just "everybody gets superpowers at once."
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Don't we already all have superpowers(hypercognition)? Not to imagine associated ones: Cinematic Gadgeteer, Sonic and Luminous thought communication, Faux-eusociability, etc?
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Here's a thought. What sort of future path leads to a moderately anarchic near-future (50-100 years) without being an outright apocalypse, post- or otherwise?
My thoughts tend to a combination of some technological development enabling economic decentralization combined with some kind of successful attempt, by small powers, to drive large powers to fracture. I don't see a particular way to bring about a mostly uniform, decentralized way of life without some kind of catastrophe (either causing the decentralization or caused by it). In particular, any force able to be unified enough to break up the current centers of power would, by its very nature, be a new center of power unless destroyed. Maybe throw in a few EMPs and a plague or two so the population's been dramatically reduced but there's no outright destruction. Anyway, thoughts on it? |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
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Breaking up big institutions automatically means a lot of people are worse off than they would be. You can mitigate that by having some other factor make everybody drastically better off - this is usually either those various forms of cheap energy and miracle productivity, or by playing up the intangible benefits like "feeling of community" or "oneness with nature" and asserting they outweigh the losses. But the advantages of cooperation are big enough that explaining why people fail to organize into ever larger cooperative units almost requires something fairly nasty that interferes with the effort. Though it might not necessarily look like a *disaster* from their viewpoint - ours seems to be "nationalism" these last couple centuries, and lots of people think that's a good thing. A widely popular suitable ideology could work, it just makes the place somewhat alien from the point of view of most of your audience. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
{Atlantis:The Godswar!!!}
This is inspired by a discussion of White Wolf's old game Aberrant and the desire from a Trinity Atlantis setting. Here's my idea. During a brutal war among supers of many lands a powerful being (basically a mixture of Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, and Martian Manhunter) leads a group of mid-level supers and other humans back in time to a period about 14,000 years ago, when Vega was the North Star. Since the Time Traveler was aware that the supers war would lead to a period of high tech fascism that would last several millennia, and he was fond of many things about the English speaking peoples he knew would be totally lost, he sought to create a safe base to send a colonizing mission to the Small Magellanic Cloud so that the best of that culture could be saved. Bases where set up in places were the raising seas of the Holocene, still millennia in the future, would scour away all the evidence. The migration settled down to build their future and recover the Earth's lost secrets. In a generation they built fine cities. They had achieved Tech Level 12 because of all the available super tech the Time Traveler and other tech oriented supers brought or worked on. The Time Traveler created a passage to the Small Magellanic Cloud and settlements where built to terraform a dozen worlds for humanity. About three hundred years after the founding, a powerful super with vast psionic abilities rose up. She was called Zodin the Terrible, terrible meaning awesome and indescribable at that time. Zodin was one of a group of thinkers who held that human history and civilization was a warped mistake, especially Western Civilization, and humanity should abandon all technology and be prevented from ever having any. Zodin saw all of human history as an abomination and a crime. The Time Traveler realizing that Zodin meant to warp and limit all human minds on the Earth to enforce her vision of Utopia for the rest of human evolutionary history moved to stop her. She drove the Time Traveler mad, but he killed her. The Time Traveler fled forward in history becoming the Doctor, and Iris Wildthyme, the Master, the Rani, and several others. The Time Traveler is slowly healing, but knows little if anything of their past. Zodin as a horror and antagonist remains in their mind. Atlantis slowly recovered from the fight. The colony worlds are becoming inhabitable and settlements are on each world. These settlements are democracies. Meanwhile, Zodin's cultural clique wasn't made by her, it made her. There is a strong minority in Atlantis that wants to erase human history. They seek to form their own utopias. Not one vision of Utopia, several different ideals of Utopia. Some feel humanity needs a Mystical Theocracy to guide it. Others seek to build a Monarchy guided by Enlightened Philosophy. Others seek to sustain the primitive and prevent the rise of civilization in the first place. Others simply seek power. Still others care only for their own pleasures and whims. The PCs would be the guardians of History and of Human Free Will. They would strive to allow humanity the right to make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. They know that after the millennia long rule of the techno fascists humanity overthrows them and goes on to achieve a profoundly good and noble civilization. Something truly worthy and worthwhile. The PCs are the guardians of that future, and of their own people's right to go to the stars and seek their own dreams and wonders. Or maybe the PCs could go off and seek to become gods. It would be your game. |
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Wouldn't a major country collapsing into civil war simply create a power vacuum that would be quickly filled by some other force?
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I don't think a benign innovation would be enough to fracture modern urban society, though. A zero-point power source, or something, gets implemented in cities faster than anywhere else, because that's where the wealth will be made. Make resource extraction less important, and rural areas dry up even more quickly than they're doing, already. No, you'd need something that either eliminated the cities, outright, or made people want to abandon them, and that would have to be catastrophic. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
An alternative idea would be to have a society where human civilization has abandoned the Earth (either because of ecological collapse or because of ecological preservation) and spread out across the Sol System. Even if the population of the Sol System was 20 billion, it would feel empty if it took an average of a month to travel between space colonies. If the average space colony possesses a population of 800,000, then the Sol System would possess 25,000 city-states.
Even if the majority of the space colonies (20,000) were located in the Main Belt, it would still seem rather empty, as they would occupy ~19 cubic AU (~64 trillion trillion cubic kilometers). With an average separation of nearly 19 million kilometers, each space colony would experience a more profound physical isolation than any settlement in human history. Each space colony would have to be self-sufficient, attached to a small asteroid that provides the raw materials for the systems that support its population, but it would likely trade only information, and even communication would be difficult with over a two minute delay in responses. |
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For that matter the Congo war several decades ago, or some of the nasty stuff that goes on in the Sudan or what have you would work. You can pick and choose from any and all of these. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
{Atlantis:The Godswar!!!}
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The largest bases cities and farms are on islands that will be completely submerged. Remember the Pleistocene climate when placing bases and settlements. The name "Ice Age" isn't a joke. Still the tropics would still be warm. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
{The Farfarers}
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A fairly wide variety of cultures are settled on Scheherazade's moons. Most of the major cultural groups in the area are represented. Thus, if you want them in the area, they have a settlement here. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
An elderwoman of a clan that rules a section of a city/Imperial Noblewoman/Whatever/shares in the duties of law enforcement in a community where much of the law still operates on a posse-like system but under the control of the city's VIPs. And the PCs are from her household guards and staff and private secret service of Corporate Samurai.
This is a variation of "Little Old Lady Investigates" but leveraged to explain, "Why the heck do so many murders take place around Jessica Fletcher." |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
{The Lanterns}
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With a sound agricultural base Africa is beginning to industrialize and provide the quickly growing population with a quickly raising standard of living. ############# Continental Europe is far more of a mess. Attitudes are insular and paranoid. The remnants of the old right and left are at each others throats through most of the continent. Both groups see the Pentalpha Nations as a mask for an American conquest of Europe. The fact that American pop culture is vibrant and lively, and painfully popular (to the European elites) throughout Europe, only rubs salt in the wounds. Superman and Captain Kirk are loved and denounced and the latest pop songs play on the street causing fists to shake and feet to tap. Note: As the influence of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Scotland, in the Pentalpha Nations is totally ignored, either that or they are called American lackeys, the continental Europeans are deeply resented in the rest of the Pentalpha Nations. In the USA they're a painful embarrassment. Shrivel hit hard in Europe. Sterility is common and children rare. People visiting Europe rarely let their children be seen on the street. Kidnappings and other violence have occurred. The USA had to totally leave Germany for three years because one woman in Berlin insisted that the child of the ambassador and her wife was really her stolen daughter. The riots caused bloodshed and fires across Berlin. There are demands that any orphans in the Pentalpha Nations be sent to Europe. The song Nobody's Child is treated as if it described present day (2082) realities. It is assumed that any child would be far better off in Europe than in America. Agriculture and industry are still depressed and the school systems are in collapse. Pilot projects by the Pentalpha Nations are slowly turning this around. ######### The Near East/Southwestern Asia is also a mess. Iran is pretty much the one bright spot. Iran took massive blows from the Superflus, but the shock allowed a Green Revolution. The Iranians pulled themselves together and The Pentalpha Nations were able to give them serious medical aid. As the improved mumps vaccines that fight Shrivel become available the Iranian medical service used them very well. Their population is now growing and their democracy is stable. Egypt went from a population of one hundred million to five million and was hit by several waves of shrivel. Maintenance on the Aswan High Dam has been neglected for decades. This is becoming serious both for declining electrical generation and the basic physical integrity of the dam. The Egyptians are torn between getting help and stubborn pride. Israel took a nasty blow. They accepted medical aid but they're now inward looking and becoming reactionary. Most of the rest of the Near East is simply chaotic and scary. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
This one is simple, it's 2030 and the sun is acting oddly. There's an 8% decrease in radiant energy reaching Earth. The world is plunged into a new ice age.
On the up side, breakthroughs in fusion allow civilization to run smoothly on stable energy sources. Material science and biotech allow improved recycling and deal with most material limits. Vertical agriculture allows cities to produce crops in stable environments within the cities. The crisis is getting to those points. Meanwhile the third world is being hit by vast droughts and other strange weather issues. Certain nations like Russia, China, and any other culture you want to ally them with, are collapsing. They demand, backed by nukes, a rescue. Even if it means the rescuing nations die from neglecting their own people. Crisis everywhere, brutal politics, and a practical path to hope. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Another way to twist this is to go ahead to 2100. North America, Europe, Southern South America, Tasmania, and New Zealand, are largely under snow fields, glaciers take a long time to form, but not as long as some think. Northern Asia is also covered in snow fields and the cooling of Central Asia has turned off the monsoon cycle in the Arabian Sea. Thus India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Southern China, are arid and sterile as the Empty Quarter of Arabia.
The Tropics are drier and less fertile but still viable. The USA built a series of cities in the Pacific Ocean. These float with neutral buoyancy just below the surface. This minimizes both the problems of water pressure and weather threats. Certain platforms can pop up to allow recreation in the open air and then sink to avoid bad weather. Fusion and sea thermal energy run these platforms. Some cities in North America and Europe survive above the snowline. Fusion and vertical agriculture makes this possible but it's economically borderline. Most of the survivors of North America, Europe, and New Zealand, live in the sea cities. The Government is Social Democratic with a strong tradition of Civil Liberties. The Sea Cities are peaceful, however the lands of the Tropics are cursed with wars. Some of these are from mass migrations, populations fleeing the cold or mega droughts. Some of these come from reduced fertility of the land from the drier climate. The Sea Cities are finally stable enough to start trying to aid the war zones. PCs would be diplomats and aid workers trying to stop the wars and solve the problems of economic and environmental chaos. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
I wouldn't put it past ideological holdouts to remain in the snow fields, supporting small populations through scavenging and cobbled-together heaters and food supplies.
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