A Space Apocolypse Discussion

[Jonas]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Your 1 in 10G obviously made the vaccines himself before he loosed death on the general populace. After all, his motives are not to be questioned. Just kidding.

What's the state of hydroponics and artificial environments? can they feed themselves without earth? If so, is earth even still relevant?

I think even on the moon and mars they have a better chance of containment and control than earth.

Off-world outposts should by all rights find containment pretty simple, then again logic also dictates that this sociopaths overall goal would be doomed to failure from the start for a number of unavoidable reasons. Not to mention at that level humans should be fairly easy to replace, using clones/robotics/androids just off the top of my head, so space slaving makes even less sense in the setting as stated so far.

Earth IS essential because "nutrient recycling" is the least efficient part of the life support cycle. If Earth was totally destroyed (by, for instance, a relitavistic attack), pretty much everyone else would eventually starve as rare nutrients disappeared. In theory, those biosphere services could be replaced, but the state of the art isn't there yet. Mars is the closest to providing full life support.

They can bio engineer cinematic performing super viruses and have built up space infrastructure but trace micro and macro nutrients we can synthesis now using far more primitive tech is beyond them? This also implies they have awesome propulsion tech since having to constantly infuse offworld locations would require a fair bit of lift capacity plus has dire long-term implications as each shipment offworld is a net drain of the total biomass on Earth. If you want a more Flash Gordon style space opera setting you'll be better off just going for it and not worrying about the details of 'why', provided you tell your players this right up front, since otherwise any justification for it is going to fall apart in fairly short order.