15 KiB
Worldbuilding Challenge: A 12 Colonies ExPy [BST][RT]
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3zlbmy/worldbuilding_challenge_a_12_colonies_expy_bstrt/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2016-01-05T18:05:39
Post:
Writing fanfic is great and all, but the downside is that one cannot really profit or build on it.
My idea is to build a shared setting from which everyone can write stories and publish their own work and profit and so on.
So, let start with an expy of the 12 colonies. That setting got a lot of potential, but we can't use it. So the next best thing is to build something else.
Let start with the basic.
We got polytheist worshiping humans whose civilizations essentially started after they obtain FTL travel and spaceships, that developed independently of Earth.
They have this myth that Earth is somehow a missing member of their civilization, but everything else is unknown about that place.
Something external united them as a single polity. A slave rebellion? An alien attack?
However, it does not necessary follow that there is a Fall that destroy their spacefaring civilization.
Where do they live?
A double binary star system with lot of life breathing planets, allowing for human civilizations to develop.
As for licensing, I am thinking Creative Common Attribution or just going public domain. What do you guys think?
Comments:
u/Sparkwitch [+5] (32 minutes later)
I've always liked the idea of an interstellar civilization inside an ancient globular cluster. Arctic worlds lit by the full-moon glow of a thousand nearby dwarf stars. The dim glow of the Milky Way dominates every night sky for half the year.
Fleets of ancient colony ships, mining gas clouds and stellar winds for organic compounds. Nomad cultures, tribes within tribes, both unified and divided by their common needs. Maintaining and recycling both tech and resource, every higher element rare and waning.
The myth of Earth, then, is a story of some ancient spacefolding error that threw them afar, and the story of how each tribe scraped together a life in spite of it. Strange tales of warm planets so verdant you couldn't see the rocks for all the carbon compounds atop them, where heavy metals were so common they were a nuisance, and where natural ecosystems casually gathered enough phosphorus and potassium for everyone.
Post-apocalypse, as it were. Civilizations of that sort.
u/None [+2] (an hour later)
Sounded like it could be part of a larger setting, separate from the Colonies that I imagined.
There's human civilizations in the stars, even in separate galaxies that have memories of Earth, those their tales each differ.
Earth itself is undefined, though I imagine it to exist in the 20th and 21st century, unaware that there is already a human diaspora across the Milky Way, even to separate galaxies.
Got this idea from a nBSG fanfic.
u/None [+4] (an hour later)
The cosmos is a very lonely place.
There are quintillion of sun-like stars, and even more planets that orbit those stars.
Only a fraction of those planets are Earth-like, and still a smaller fraction with the correct condition for life to prosper.
Only a fraction of life-bearing planets will develop intelligent life as we know it, with civilizations, technologies, and science.
Only a fraction of those will survive the long crawl to a stellar civilization. Nuclear war or natural disaster is likely to kill them off.
But then there is the final test.
Faster than light travel is considered impossible.
Rather than pursuing the impossible dream, most surviving stellar civilizations focused on something else.
They exited the universe.
That is the great filter.
They exited the relatively barren universe for better pasture, for a universe fine-tuned to their specification for even more life.
It is better to ask ourselves in this galaxy how many intelligent species for the last million years, on a single hand, existed.
Fortunately, somebody decided to stick around. And in their travel between the galaxies, they noticed us, two hundred thousand years ago, just as we were rising up in our cradles.
Those bipedals were complete savages, possessing not even a civilization, let alone recorded history. We were still in the stone age. But there were potential.
So they decided to scatter humanity across distant sectors of our galaxy. Most failed. Those that succeeded left for their baby universes, once again concluding that FTL was impossible.
But one civilization in our galaxy stuck around, eventually ascending to a higher dimension. This was more unique, even rarer than manipulating the very fabric of reality to punch a hole to create the ideal universe.
Fifty thousand of years ago, they noticed Earth. Seeing our potentials, they decided on a long term experiment.
In their study of physics, they had discovered that a form of FTL was possible, in spite of all their expectation. It didn't violate causality or cause time travel. What if their long lost unascended cousins were gifted FTL travel and spaceships? Where would they go?
Thus, they begun the long process of scattering humanity in isolated sector of our galaxy and to different galaxies beyond the local cluster across fifty thousand years up until several thousand of years ago.
Earth, our homeworld, was the unfortunate control sample.
u/narfanator [+2] (7 hours later)
I've done lots of world-building before for civilization-RPGs (play either the entire civilization, or leaders of/within it) - in that they're universes designed to "have room" for other people to make their own stories - and there's a few things that, I think, made the Secret Sauce (not all are necessary):
Empty, flexibly isolated habitable areas. This is where your "players" put their creations in way that doesn't require joint development, but that also allows for as-desired contact situations. Typically, if you can cause a historical diaspora, you can get this.
Something Weird. The one time we tried doing "hard-SF" it didn't work nearly as well as everything else. If you're not breaking from the real world - on a physics level or historical level - you're heavily restricted the stories that are basically "speculative history". This can be something that's actually hard made easy (see: Nexus, Daemon, Ready Player One), or it can be totally out there (re: "magic" universe). Regardless, you need hard things made easy, and then that's what people investigate.
Hidden History: AKA, that every fantasy universe has an ancient, collapsed civilization that left valuable wreckage. Also see Mass Effect and Larry Niven's Known Space. You know you've done it right when wars are fought over history books - not writing them, but access to them.
Work backwards from the type of story you want to tell. You can have anything from a story sketch (say, youthful hero's journey heavily featuring rationality) to a "vibe" (I want quasi-benevolent trickster gremlins! or, I want steam-powered blimps!) and then alternate working backwards to figure out what you'd need to cause some element of that with working forwards to determine other consequences of those historical points. See "Set in Stone" for an excellent example this process.
Good examples that are google'able that I can think of for places for inspiration for this:
- Larry Niven's Known Space
- Asimov's Robot City
- Sufficiently Advanced RPG (http://suffadv.wikidot.com/) (disclosure: I've contributed to this setting!)
- Singularity Sky
- Child of Fortune
The other setting that comes to mind is Yudkowsky's "Bayesian Conspiracy" setting, although I don't know if that can be used for anything beyond parables and fables.
From my perspective, the trick is to create someplace interesting and investigable that isn't just some simple important realization that ends up functioning like the Word of Power. If you can summarize an understanding that gives you immense worldly power in a paragraph, that's not going to be good for very many stories.
u/narfanator [+3] (7 hours later)
Thinking on it more, a more fundamental key bit of this kind of fiction - and very importantly, much of what Rationalist stories are about - is that people are wrong about things. Stories about recovery of past glory is - to an extent - people being wrong about what is possible, or how things can be done. Stories about Something Different can be interesting - or told again and again, or longer than short story - because the people's understanding of the Difference is wrong.
So as you think on this, you might want to make sure that there's room in the story and setting for people to wrong about the nature of things - from reality to history. I don't think you need to know what the correct story is - actually, I think it would be a detriment - I think you need to make sure that each an every part of the character's understanding can be wrong, regardless of whether it is.
In other words, take any explanation and history you come up with, and fit it into this sentence: "People think X is true, but they're wrong.".
However, this may bias you towards stories wherein the protagonist is more right than anyone else (aka, stories about how most people are wrong), and I'm worried about the resultant reader bias that would create. I mean, the MRA movements can be described as "people who view themselves as heroes because they understand that feminism is wrong." On the other hand, the feminist movement can be described as "the establishment is wrong about gender."
Which kind of makes me want to ask the question: is there any story that's not about the protagonist being right about something that the antagonist is wrong about?
u/None [+2] (10 hours later)
While interesting, this is more of a post for generic post on writing worlds rather than any effort to build a world.
u/narfanator [+1] (a day later)
Yeah, I did go off a bit on my own tangent. In my defense, discuss a problem before committing to any given solution. In the topic's defense, there are some really good solutions presented!
u/narfanator [+2] (7 hours later)
Let's discuss the problem prior to suggesting solutions, as per rationalist arts!
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (22 hours later)
The means of transit is inherently destructive in direct proportion to how much space it covers divided by time it takes to cover it.
This is more or less my foundational rule for space opera.
If they have FTL they have the biggest baddest weapon of mass destruction you can possibly imagine. If you think you've engineered a mechanism where by the FTL is not a weapon of mass destruction you probably have not fully appreciated the secondary weapons it has allowed you to build.
u/None [+2] (23 hours later)
Please explain.
Though I am unaware of any mechanism that forbade a FTL spacecraft from carrying nukes or worse to rain down on a planet.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
So say we have the fairly innocuous and safe looking FTL in the form of a Tele-porter as we saw in BSG.
How are we going to deal with momentum?
If you conserve momentum, transporting yourself between two planetary orbits is extremely dangerous, and you also just found a cheap way to bombard anywhere on a planet with interplanetary speed ballistic missiles.
Okay lets get around that by saying you can change the properties of your momentum on arrival to 'sync' with a given destination then it just became even EASIER to drop something out of a teleport with a relative speed between it and a target arbitrarily high.
Um Okay, Maybe you just end up at momentum zero relative to a near by gravity well. Well you now just got a perpetual energy machine by jumping a big massive object to the top of a high place in a gravity well.
Um okay, let's say you have to fuel the energy difference between your starting position/momentum and your destination position/momentum.
Well now your starships carry around fuel stores that are needing to be sufficiently energy dense your probably looking at antimatter or something equivalent.
And we have not even begun to get into what happens if you just decide to FTL a chunk of a city into the sun. Or a chunk of the sun into a city.
This is without getting into anything like how horrific the ability to warp space time represents. I'd anticipate any civilization that has FTL capability is living under MAD diplomacy.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Eh, if you want to base a rational fic based on the physic implication, it would work, even though you have to immediately handwave the fact that FTL violate causality.
But not everyone wants to write a space opera consisting of only MAD options.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
True, the desire of what you want to write kind of trumps some stuff. Although it seems like it would be rather hard to write a space opera rationalist fic that also uses our physics and avoids a MAD option.
Unless you write a space opera with Slower Than Light Travel.
Which is really REALLY do-able and I wish I had more examples I could point at for it besides a good chunk of Alastair Reynolds' work and "When We Were Real" by William Barton.
FTL is not necessarily a requirement for the kinds of things space opera gets up too.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
On the other hand, you could just acknowledge this as part of your world and that the governments are NOT in war with each other to the degree that they use the FTL BOMB. they just have much smaller more civil wars.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
You just reminded me of stargates, which by itself can be insanely dangerous and a WMD in itself.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
One of the few series I've seen that give proper respect for the power of a FTL system.
u/narfanator [+2] (a day later)
This points out how good FTL can be as a source of the Something Different.
Maybe work backwards and forwards from the kinds of stories you want written to figure out what kind of FTL supports that?
u/Izeinwinter [+2] (a day later)
This is wrong. Trivially: FTL communication + upload + reembodiment are all possible. Closed time line curves self-sensor - any array of linkages that would permit have the weakest of it's links fail. FTL movement of spaceships is impossible. Heck, the known speed record for a sub-light spaceship that actually carried enough hardware to another system to open ftl coms was well below 10% light. You can talk to aliens when they discover ftl themselves. You can go visit if you are willing to trust said aliens with an uploaded copy of you. There is a freely available database maintained by a very stable alien species some 1640 million years of old recording, among other things, every attempt ever made to aggress via ftl com links and the appropriate defenses against every single one of those methods. This section of the data base hasn't been added to in a very long time.