10 KiB
Science fiction plot token bingo.
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Author: u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3fa4ed/science_fiction_plot_token_bingo/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-07-31T12:05:29
Post:
Trying to think of an in-world excuse for why everyone's holding the idiot ball and not munchkining their technology? If humans have starships, NOW how do you explain the Fermi Paradox? You're playing Science Fiction Plot Token Bingo!
Mental Block! Consciousness is an aberration, it's inefficient, advanced civilizations are quiet because they've evolved different goals. Or speed of light delays keep advanced races close to the core of their computer networks. Ancient aliens programmed humans not to think about such things.
Anthropic Principle! All universes with competent users of technology have already been destroyed. We're the first species to get this far.
Nerfed Physics! We're in the slow zone, AI is mysteriously impossible this close to the core of the galaxy.
Quarantine! Ancient elders have built a wall around the solar system. A future superintelligence keeps sending agents back to keep its timeline stable.
What other examples can people think of?
Comments:
u/None [+12] (7 hours later)
Humans are the ancient elders. The Fermi paradox fails to account for the fact that we're pretty early on in the universe's lifetime, and we really need heavier elements that come from the death of the first wave of stars in order to get complex chemistry, and there simply haven't been that many novas to enable planets with heavy elements to form. Earth is actually one of the earliest planets to have life and the earliest in our arm of the galaxy to gain intelligent life.
(We'll send out a fleet of probes at very fast sublight speeds. They'll reproduce, find terraformable planets, and seed the galaxy with our descendants.)
u/vilefeildmouseswager [+11] (12 hours later)
Humans are the ancient elders.
That thought always scares the piss out of me.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+5] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)
Makes a lot of sense of a lot of stories as well.
Story teller: And then the ancient precursor race left gigantic superweapons just scattered about willy-nilly.
Audience: What kind of monumental jackasses would do that?
Story teller: Humanity.
Audience: Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Bet they were going to take them down but then the meeting got tabled and the representative filibustered the bill.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+7] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
[the reason for this post]
And the reason the Goa'uld are incompetent is because competent interstellar war is a galactic existential threat. Oh, you mean an in-story reason? Um, "Anthropic Principle".
u/E-o_o-3 [+5] (11 hours later)
I think a more narratively satisfying reason is that the Goa'uld just aren't very smart or creative, are unable to harness human and most of their technology is parasitized from more advanced cultures, so they didn't actually know how any of it works and end up with very rigid, regimented uses.
A "Chimpanzees using guns" sort of scenario. One more plot token bingo idea. }
In the Goa'uld's case it's pretty easy to imagine. I mean, what with the genetic memory, the Goa'uld are basically one person copied over many times, and if they're not complete idiots it might be the benefit of millions of years.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (11 hours later)
Like the Pakled in Trek?
u/E-o_o-3 [+1] (12 hours later)
mustve missed that episode
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
u/DCarrier [+1] (16 hours later)
Oh, you mean an in-story reason? Um, "Anthropic Principle".
That's also the out-of-story reason, but it means something different. (Warning: TV Tropes.)
u/None [+5] (3 hours later)
Fear - Jesus fuck, what sad and violent God spit out these warmongering upright apes, and how are they still alive?! Like...nuclear power. The first significant thing they did with nuclear power was BLOW EACH OTHER UP. No. Fuck that shit. Leave them alone and hope they accidentally their planet before they start to spread.
u/None [+5] (5 hours later)
Goddamn species chauvinists. You know lots of us don't actually like living this way, right?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)
Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel. ^^
u/ArgentStonecutter [+5] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (6 hours later)
I really need rational explanations for smaller scale idiot balls too.
Like "You have a universal assembler that can build more universal assemblers... and you have versatile robots that can put together a railgun to launch your landing party back to space, and you're talking about splitting up your starship instead of building a new one?"
Like "You've survived and flourished in Earth orbit for 5000 years, but haven't bothered even trying to colonize the rest of the solar system?"
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (12 hours later)
"You have a universal assembler that can build more universal assemblers... and you have versatile robots that can put together a railgun to launch your landing party back to space, and you're talking about splitting up your starship instead of building a new one?"
Anything that can't be built by the universal assemblers from planetside materials will still be a problem. Most likely the fuel - antimatter's a bitch to make, but even if you're using uranium, that's not exactly common. Or it could be something annoyingly mundane: if your universal assemblers can't transmute elements, lead shielding will be hard to make.
Whatever the limiting factor is, it'll mean building a second ship is only possible if it takes something important away from the first one.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
Maybe, but the author spent half the book "showing the work" on the starship design, then skipped completely over this major plot point...
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (13 hours later)
Oh, it's a specific book? Should I ask what it is or am I better off not knowing?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 hours later)
Two specific books, actually. You're better off not knowing.
u/blockbaven [+3] (3 hours later)
The Prime Directive - Aliens conspire to intentionally avoid contact and interference with species under a certain level of development
u/ArgentStonecutter [+4] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (6 hours later)
That also covers "you've got a time machine and you're not using it as a perfect oracle?"
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+5] (7 hours later)
I'm writing a story for next week's challenge that indirectly answers this. :D
u/woodenWren [+2] (53 minutes later)
Seeds! The universe filled up 10 billion years ago. We're currently residing within a certain alien's territory as a long-term experiment that race is performing. They just need to stay out of our way.
Simulation! We're just a simulation running in some alien supercomputer (explaining why our universe apparently has a minimum resolution). They wouldn't need to simulate the (possibly infinite) universe either, just our light-cone.
Transcendence! We're on the verge of reaching a new plane of existence, where many aliens have gone before.
u/fljared [+1] United Federation of Planets (6 hours later)
Upper Limits! Anything with an IQ of 210 or higher gets blasted by a mysterious force, so intelligence explosions are impossible. Most of Humanity's AIs run at about 190 for safety, which is why they work alongside mankind instead of above them.
Sane Bans! Every other species was smart enough to ban GAI research of all kinds, which is why you meet biological and not papercliper type species!
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (12 hours later)
In my sci-fi universe, there's a horribly threatening, space warping, civilisation wrecking, star killing, superpredator species that lives in the interstellar medium. Even with FTL it kind of puts a damper on getting very far.
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (23 hours later)
Incompetent (or overly competent) legislators make things like strong AI or FTL or contacting other aliens impossible for the civilizations in question.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
If humans have starships, NOW how do you explain the Fermi Paradox?
Technology continues to increase. Interstellar travel isn't feasible without FTL. You run into the biodome problem with generation ships and your ecosystem becomes non-salvagable. You run into maintenance issues with sleeper ships, and never wake up.
So exploring other star systems can't work without FTL. And once you have FTL, the same principles immediately unlock an entirely new kind of universe you can access, a new way of existing, that is so much better in all ways that even the most backward religious conservative from any sentient species - perhaps them first if they have a concept of heaven - emmigrates.
After discovering FTL, your world goes dead overnight by mass mutual consent. None can resist the allure of what's on the other side, and they don't want to.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 days later)
u/Transfuturist [+0] Carthago delenda est. (5 hours later)
Personally, I love when Low Fantasy elements come into sci-fi settings. Which is to say, I really don't care for it.
It was okay in WALL-E and ET. Cowboys and Aliens was a particularly bad example, but it's a particularly bad example for just about anything you'd care to mention.