Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Duplicate:
The present year of 2021 is mostly adapted, but is still struggling with the long-term consequences.

No they aren't. They are in the process of total economic collapse with looming extinction. Indistinguishable duplicates of existing people with no new births means your population is getting older.
Edit: If you are willing to have the duplicates appear as infants, you can pretty much completely adapt with some sort of universal adoption service, but then you lose most of the features of "duplicates" - your much younger twins aren't really that much like you.

Scramble:

I like this one, but it *is* a Hell world. The immediate effects include stuff like mass death from starvation (or thirst, the pipes are cut, and if there are any adjacent blocks that are lower, your water table is draining out, so even if you have wells....) on most blocks, and lakes pouring over edges cut through the middle of them, unless they also get mysteriously indestructible walls. Long term effects include mass starvation even on the lucky blocks, because the crops don't grow in the new climate and rainfall patterns, and those lower level blocks getting flooded anyway even if nothing comes over or through the edges (by rainfall, for lack of drainage outflow). It'd be a pretty interesting adventure setting a century after the Apocalyspe though.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by malloyd

No they aren't. They are in the process of total economic collapse with looming extinction. Indistinguishable duplicates of existing people with no new births means your population is getting older.
Edit: If you are willing to have the duplicates appear as infants, you can pretty much completely adapt with some sort of universal adoption service, but then you lose most of the features of "duplicates" - your much younger twins aren't really that much like you.

I guess that's what I meant by "adapted, but still dealing with the long-term consequences." My point was that people aren't surprised anymore when they wake up next to themselves, and some kind of approach has been made to deal with the legal implications, even though the long-term problem with aging has yet to be dealt with.

To avoid the extinction problem, perhaps fertility has decreased by 50% and duplicates make up the remainder. Or, perhaps, aging has stopped, which would be its own major change. In fact....


Ageless:
In 1804, aging and reproduction both stopped working. Later surveys would peg the population at very close to, if not exactly, one thousand million. It seems that whenever someone is slain (people are mortal as ever, just unaging after the age of about 25), a child may be concieved to replace them, but never more than one billion people are allowed on the planet.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by PTTG

...
Ageless:
In 1804, aging and reproduction both stopped working. Later surveys would peg the population at very close to, if not exactly, one thousand million. It seems that whenever someone is slain (people are mortal as ever, just unaging after the age of about 25), a child may be concieved to replace them, but never more than one billion people are allowed on the planet.

Childless couples hope for disease, war, and disaster. Imagine if proximity to death increases odds of fertility. Loving potential parents take scheduled tours of danger zones.
Hotel Rwanda/California.

That's a comical horror if ever I heard one.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by malloyd

No they aren't. They are in the process of total economic collapse with looming extinction. Indistinguishable duplicates of existing people with no new births means your population is getting older.
Edit: If you are willing to have the duplicates appear as infants, you can pretty much completely adapt with some sort of universal adoption service, but then you lose most of the features of "duplicates" - your much younger twins aren't really that much like you.
...

Epigenetics can adapt and change only so much. There would be noticeable effects eventually. But how much is literally not knowable to us and our level of biological understanding.
It changes humanity into a parthenogenic species and those rarely last long. Of course that's over geological times. But what obliterates over that time period must have some kind of effect over short terms, right?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by malloyd

...
I like this one, but it *is* a Hell world. The immediate effects include stuff like mass death from starvation (or thirst, the pipes are cut, and if there are any adjacent blocks that are lower, your water table is draining out, so even if you have wells....) on most blocks, and lakes pouring over edges cut through the middle of them, unless they also get mysteriously indestructible walls. Long term effects include mass starvation even on the lucky blocks, because the crops don't grow in the new climate and rainfall patterns, and those lower level blocks getting flooded anyway even if nothing comes over or through the edges (by rainfall, for lack of drainage outflow). It'd be a pretty interesting adventure setting a century after the Apocalyspe though.

Shuffling two square kilometer sized units sounds FAR to tiny to do anything but kill nearly everything on earth. Far worse than the KT extinction, nearing the Permian, but certainly not nearly as bad as the great oxygen disaster.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by malloyd

No they aren't. They are in the process of total economic collapse with looming extinction. Indistinguishable duplicates of existing people with no new births means your population is getting older.
Edit: If you are willing to have the duplicates appear as infants, you can pretty much completely adapt with some sort of universal adoption service, but then you lose most of the features of "duplicates" - your much younger twins aren't really that much like you.

Try this twist, when someone duplicates, they become 3D6 years younger physiologically. If I, a 57 year old man duplicate, rolls dice, and becomes 12 years younger, you have two 45 year olds. If older duplicates tend to lose more years than younger folks, the system might be stable or only slowly moving toward doom.