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[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

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Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!

/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:

Plan out a new story
Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland

Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.

^(Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality)

Comments:

u/trekie140:

I have an idea for a rational take on the [Prime Directive](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlienNonInterferenceClause?from=Main.PrimeDirective) where aliens avoid contact with pre-singularity civilizations because it would cause an Outside Context Problem. If they uplifted a species, then the uplifts would just become an extension of the alien civilization instead of its own, and the aliens think diversity among the stars is better for everyone.

It could probably work as some combination of The Culture and Lensman, where the aliens covertly share the truth with a select few humans to protect Earth from invasion. The only problem is, does this plan really do more good than harm? Can it be argued that humans would be better off if aliens didn't share their science and technology with us until we achieved a singularity?

u/scruiser:

I think you could pull this off, if you managed to really sell the readers on the fact that the aliens think drastically different than us.  Like Baby-eaters/Super-Happies level of difference (check out that story, Three Worlds Collide, by Eliezer Yudokowsky if you haven't already).  The aliens really would be helping us by not intervening, because if they did, their morals values and psychological values would completely screw up ours.  In addition, the aliens can't really agree on a common moral code. (Maybe one race in the alliance of aliens thinks we should be modified to remove the sensation of pain as part of our uplift, maybe another race thinks we shouldn't regard toddlers as people because they are nonsapient, maybe a third thinks we should give fetuses the full rights of grown adults, a fourth race thinks painful death games should be encouraged if we have mind uploads).  The Prime Directive also acts as the best compromise on the fact that every alien race has different values and ethics, so letting them decided for themselves is the only consistently fair way of doing things.  If you can play up the cognitive differences of them as well, you could also work the idea that our creativity could help them (to give the human protagonists relevance).  

So... the hostile invading race might kill us, but at least they wouldn't leave us a warped caricature of ourselves.  The aliens want to help us, but all their good technology (mind uploads, immortality granting biotech, strong AI, cybernetic intelligence modification, etc.) would warp our values.  Just giving us weapons wouldn't be enough, without an upgrade to human rationality or a restructuring of our society, we would end up destroying ourselves (the alien races have AI that is really good at modeling and predicting this sort of thing).  Thus the human protagonists need to come up with a set of technology that will minimize the cultural impact on Earth culture while still letting Earth defend itself.

u/callmebrotherg:

> If you can play up the cognitive differences of them as well, you could also work the idea that our creativity could help them (to give the human protagonists relevance).

I like the other things that you're saying, but how is a species going to developed an interstellar civilization (let alone anything simpler) without creativity? Creativity seems strongly tied to intelligence.

u/scruiser:

I didn't quite explain my reasoning there.  Deconstruct what you mean by creativity.  I think creativity is a huge grab bag of different cognitive processes, cultural constructs, and life experience that lets humans come up with novel solutions to problems.  The Alien races each have their own "creativity" which can also generate novel solutions to problems, but if human "creativity" is different enough it might be able to generate ideas unique enough to be valuable even if the aliens will have thought of most of them one way or another.  It will require good writing and serious brainstorming and empathizing with how alien mindset might think to pull this off will enough to satisfy the /r/rational crowd though.

u/trekie140:

This is officially beyond any writing ability I could hope to have, but you have refined my idea so well I demand somebody tell a story with it. It's just too damn good to pass up. I hereby declare my story concept public domain for all to use as they will.

u/scruiser:

Now that you've pitched it, I kind of want to take a shot at it.  I haven't done any big writing projects before, just snippets, but this has got me motivated enough to at least do a few one-shots...  I don't actually have a good idea for a concise plot though.  I can think of plenty of alien races, but doing the human responses to them and avoiding "talking-heads" is a challenge... Maybe I could manage a few prolonged conversation: 

* secret first contact information package scaring human government people with its implications that every alien society has a few features we are likely to find immoral

* human ambassadors meeting the aliens representatives and being disturbed even more

* humans getting over themselves and brainstorming solutions with the alien representatives

* shock as the humans realize the hyper intelligent alien races each have weird cognitive blind-spots and/or strategies they overlook because of weird ethical hangups

* eureka moment of an idea, making that idea workable (the aliens are all smart enough to grasp an idea even if they can't necessarily think of it themselves)

* a brief scene implementing the solution and resolving the story

* 1st epilogue each alien race takes turns making their pitch at small samples of technology they might offer humans that would turn them to their way of thinking (not prime directive breaking, but using the aftermath of the crisis to skirt the line)

* 2nd epilogue scene, the human governments all vow to keep everything a secret and wait a few centuries for the human's singularity to render everything moot anyway.

Actually, do you want to try a collaborative project?  I could write alien perspectives and snippets and dialogue if you could manage to keep the human characters moving their side of the plot along?

u/chaosmosis:

You need a part where the humans have their own blind spots exploited. This does seem difficult for a human author to write about, in fairness.

u/Chronophilia:

"Human blind spots" would probably be blind spots of our civilisation as a whole. Things like the resources we waste on rent-seeking behaviours, the proxy tribal warfare that muddles important questions like "how fast is global warming happening", our frequent inability to plan beyond the next election let alone beyond a human lifespan, etc. As individuals we're aware of these problems, but that doesn't mean we can fix them.

I'm more worried that it would become a soapbox for the author's politics. Even my list above was already quite political, and that's a single paragraph instead of an entire book.

u/scruiser:

Conversely, all the Alien races might have went through various coordination failures as they developed their civilizations, its not so much that humans especially bad, its just that our own failure are weird compared to theirs and/or theirs are weird compared to ours.

Like races with individual sapient members may have tribalism, but our tribalism has a bunch of weird features.  Like the way tribalism can apply to small personal groups, sports teams, religions, states, and nations all at the same time in the same person is possibly weird.

Our governments' limited investment in science and technology even though we are so good at imagining its potential via science fiction might also be super weird.  Like some races may have had less imagination than us as they were developing technologies for the first time, but at least those races were smart enough to focus their society on developing the technologies they did imagine.

u/Chronophilia:

Okay, now I'm worried that the author(s) won't have the imagination to create a large number of mutually alien civilisations that all have different perspectives and different failure modes. There's a lot to consider!

u/scruiser:

I think I can handle a bunch of alien perspectives and dialogues.  Incorporating them into a story with a plot, and giving enough information about each race while avoiding bogging down the story in exposition sounds like the real challenge to me.

u/scruiser:

For a less civilization wide and more individual blind-spot... 

As humans, we have limited introspective control of our own thoughts.  Like think how much effort learning meditation requires just to be able voluntarily and willfully quite our own minds and become more aware of our own thoughts, much less reach any arbitrary mental state.  People can also have emotions that they consciously know are bad for them, but they can't help themselves.  Also, think how much human memories are prone to confabulation.

I am not saying every other alien race has perfect mental self control, but most of them could have developed better introspective awareness and control as they developed civilization, making humans one of the more limited races in this aspect (Several races were like us in this, they modded it out when they went through their singularity.  Only a few races actually currently have limits on their cognitive control close to as poor as humans... these races did think it an advantage in coming up with unexpected strategies, even if it is a major trade-off in raw intelligence).

u/trekie140:

I was vaguely envisioning this as like Green Lantern or Lensmen, a high concept sci-fi adventure with human superheroes chosen by aliens to represent and protect our species. Your idea of a secret think tank that makes contact with aliens is just as good, though, and you've put much more thought into this idea than I have. You're welcome to take a shot at it, and I'm glad you care about delivering interesting human characters and dialogue because that's a common issue I've found in stories here.

I'm willing to collaborate on this with you and others, but I'm really not a good writer. However, I am a very good editor for both style and substance so I'd be happy to do that. I'm not very experienced with rational fiction and am a bit more concerned with how a story makes me feel than how it makes me think. I love HPMOR for doing both very well, but hated Fine Structure for using interesting ideas for a plot and characters I simply didn't care about. I definitely prefer a compelling narrative over realism.

u/scruiser:

> I was vaguely envisioning this as like Green Lantern or Lensmen, a high concept sci-fi adventure with human superheroes chosen by aliens to represent and protect our species.

If you are aiming for soft-scifi, you could probably make your idea work just by giving each race hidden ~~magic~~ psychic (its sci-fi as long as you use the right labels) potential that is expressed uniquely for each race.

> However, I am a very good editor for both style and substance so I'd be happy to do that. 


Thanks!  I have a bunch of snippets in my head now, I will try to get some of them written down over the weekend.  If I actually start to pull them into a story, I will probably have trouble getting good narrative going (as opposed to a bunch of disjointed alien perspective and dialog with the aliens), so I might ask for help with that.  Are pms okay with you?  Either way I am thinking of asking for help in the next Worldbuilding Wednesday, if I get a good number of snippets churned out.

u/trekie140:

That is both everything I was thinking of and way beyond anything I was capable of imagining. The only difference I had with you was that I was thinking peaceful coexistence was only possible between post-singularity civilizations, otherwise the less advanced species would be destroyed or assimilated even unintentionally. The evil aliens are okay with that happening, but the good aliens want a primitive species completely unlike them to maintain their uniqueness.

This premise basically subverts the entire theme of Three Worlds Collide with the notion that coexistence between species is possible and preferable. It'd be like if the humans came across the baby-eaters before they'd invented interstellar travel and decided to both accept them and encourage their independent development. I was confused as to how to justify that, but your idea of novel creativity does that exactly how I wanted it to.

u/scruiser:

Keep in mind even the terms "good" and "evil" only loosely correspond to the aliens interests.  

The "evil" aliens might think they are genuinely helping us (this also justifies why the story doesn't end in relativistic kill vehicles wiping out planets).  For example, conquest and enslavement was a common part of many ancient human cultures, and xenophobia and tribalism still are.  They might genuinely think a state of perpetual warfare and struggle would best actualize the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity, even if we don't realize it now.  Or for another example.... humans restrict sex and gender to precise roles.  This limits are happiness and pleasure.  We might object in the short term, but in the long-term we will thank them for changing us all to bisexual and gender-fluid with just one small retrovirus.

The "good" aliens might include a variety of races with biological characteristics we might find horrific (Babyeaters), customs that we find cruel or bizarre (I think it was on /r/hfy, an idea about a rat-like race that had dimorphic sexes with larger male-eating females, that developed civilization as the more intelligent and sapient males learned to band together to trap and rape the vicious and feral but still sapient females in order to reproduce), or just be completely alien to us (a race that reproduces asexually with no genders might find all of our sexual customs bizarre, or a hiveminded race like the Formics in Ender's game that have trouble with the idea of individual lifeforms being sapient).  We only call the "good" aliens good because they are more or less trying to live and let live, even if they find aspects of our biology or culture horrifying and we do to them likewise.

For the singularity, you could go with the common criticism of EY's claims as to why it is limited.  "Intelligence" is a mix of cognitive features, there is no single algorithm that results in general intelligence that can be enhanced.  Improving memory and processing speed in general improve intelligence, but even these things hit bottlenecks and limitations in the space of cognitive architectures.  The post singularity races are smart enough that their interactions with primitives are fundamentally unequal (how do you have a conversation as equals with beings that you can almost perfectly predict the responses of.  For most things, you could say exactly what is necessary get the results you want from the more primitive race, is it really a meaningful conversation?) but not so smart as to make the plot go away or the value of interaction with other species to go away.  (Think of the Entities in Worm for an extreme example, [Worm spoilers](#s "they had many extremely specialized intelligent sub-processes, but their overall mindset was limited, fixed on conflict, and even their perfect prediction capability was flawed, it was inefficient in terms of energy, not creative to avoid the need for the cycles in the first place, and it got the user killed looking too far into the future"))

u/vallar57:

I dont think so. If invasion is actually dangerous and of the kind the aliens can't deal with themselves, with their advanced tech and intel, then it's not the time to worry about damage the uplift can deal to culture: the invasion will deal way more damage and can forever lock earthlings in a xenophobic mindset.

u/scruiser:

I made a [CYOA](https://www.reddit.com/r/makeyourchoice/comments/4nrs66/rings_of_power_cyoa/) and posted it over on /r/makeyourchoice.  It wasn't rationalist or even particularly rational, so I didn't crosspost to this sub, but Wednesday Worldbuilding seems to be a general enough for it to fit.

The second comment from the top I list some feedback I asked for.  I am aiming to buff some of the weaker rings and to slightly nerf some of the more obviously OP rings in my second revision.  Also I am planning at more hints at the implied meta-plot [spoiler](#s "The giver of the rings is planning on the evilest One Ring user to dominate everything and everyone.  This is intended as bait for the Eldritch Abominations which will try to enter Earth because of the return of magic.  For the ring giver, it isn't really for the greater good so much as an entertaining way of stopping something potentially troublesome.  The ring giver is helpful, but only because of an inherent sense of fairness, and a belief it will make things more entertaining.")  Of course, this CYOA is meant to be open ended enough that the reader doesn't have to take this implied plot line as canon if they don't want to.  There are also hints leveraging the rings to uncover extinct or nearly extinct forms of magic in the past.  Finally, I was thinking of another page allowing for some minor bonuses and trade offs to the ring, to give the reader slightly more choices to customize their ring and the story they will tell themselves with it.

u/Dwood15:

Magicians nephew or the dragons ring. Dragons ring would be more interesting if the minimum size was smaller. And, those who steal from my 'hoard' would be corrupted? I think that would be cool.

u/boomfarmer:

I have a story that has distinct chunks based on the days of the calendar inside the story. Is it better to release the story: 

- in one go (~15k words),
- in chapters independent of the days, (aiming for same words per release)
- tied to Earth's calendar with only one day being released per day (variable words per day)

This is the same story as [my meteorology question](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4o7qu0/d_wednesday_worldbuilding_thread/d4ainnp), but a separate topic entirely.

u/scruiser:

I can read 15k words in one sitting, so its not too big for a single release if that is what you are thinking about.  However, I would actually recommend trying to select the release to give the readers time to think about each significant section on its own (so I guess the 2nd option), unless you are really set on the Calendar theme to the release, which does sound pretty interesting to be fair.  Do you have a beta?  Maybe you could compromise between the Calendar release and the chapter organized releases.  1 day per release might not be enough time if there are twists, or clues, or foreshadowing for the readers to figure out.  If there aren't any plot features like this that benefit from reader contemplation, no need to space out the releases.

u/alexanderwales:

It's best to release chapters in logical narrative chunks that hopefully either comprise a single complete arc of the story, or a single section of an arc. Since arcs tend to be fractal in nature, this can be difficult, but I would aim for chunks of no less than a thousand words, and ideally no greater than 10K words. I think in the past, writing serially, the longest chapter I ever posted was ~11K words, and there were never any complaints about length (there were numerous complaints going the opposite direction though). Aiming for a proper splitting of the narrative seems much more important than aiming for consistent length (to an extent).

The calendar gimmick seems neat though. (Edit: I mean gimmick in a value-neutral sense, not in a negative way.)

u/vallar57:

One fairly known evolutionist and a fantasy fan once said that the existence of multiple independently evolved, sentinent civilized species on the same planet is absolutely improbable, if not impossible.

So I'm thinking about a world that is populated by several such species, while fully adhering to that principle. High fantasy setting, of course.

The easy way would be just say they were created that way by Gods, but let's not go that way.

One solution would be to simply declare that magical practises are highly mutagenical by their nature, and simply having a different culture with a different magical tradition would quickly - in a span of a few hundreds years - turn a nation into species. Since only sentinent species with some civilization would be able to develop a magical traditon in the first place, the evolution process that took that species to sentience would remain singular.

The other way is to have different sources of those secies. The world I have in mind is a home for, so far, three of them: 
1) Native species
2) Interdimentional travellers, whose homeworld was connected to this one for exactly thirty years by a dimensional rift, which closed the same way it opened, unexpectedly. Thirty years were enough to build some colonies here, though. Ah, and that was about a millenia ago.
3) Elementals, living manifestations of magic and nature, who are exactly as sentient as the planet's magic users are - since they are reflections of their surrounding magicsphere. They always existed, even before the appearance of organic life on the planet, but only became capable of high thought when other species did so, and only in heavily populated regions.

Thoughts? Additional races for the second version? Thanks!

u/TennisMaster2:

I like the first.  If the mutagenicity is consistent across magical traditions, then you can have plotlines where one can tell by how inter-species someone is in which magics they're proficient, or two lovers separated by species who, together, vigorously practice the opposite magical tradition in order to converge at a shared state of sexual or reproductive compatibility.  It allows for more character agency.

u/artifex0:

I'd say you can definitely have closely related sentient races achieving civilization at the same time as a result of normal evolution.  Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived at the same time, after all, and both were sentient species who possessed basic culture and technology.  Neanderthals, of course, eventually died out, but I'm not sure what about the transition from the stone age to the bronze age you could point to as preventing the survival of more than one species in every possible world.  It's only one data point, after all- which can suggest a possibility, but not rule out alternatives.

u/vallar57:

I go by what a paleontologist and a rational writer Kirill Eskov wrote in 2000, when asked about having orks, elves, humans on the same world and how does it bode with biology.

Translation mine:
>As a scientist, I - alas! - I find it quite impossible: just recall how our beloved ancestors - Cro-Magnons - made a "Final Solution to the Neanderthal Question". 

And then he continued:
>But as a writer - I do not see anything special, why would they not, for example, have developed in the course of natural evolution in different, "parallel" worlds, and then meet? What was the term pan Sapkowski used - "the Conjunction of the Spheres"?

u/LiteralHeadCannon:

I've never really believed that it made sense to call Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis separate species.  We were apparently capable of breeding with one another, and many modern humans are descended from neanderthals.

u/artifex0:

That's true, but you have to agree that they were at least as dissimilar to us as, say, hobbits, or some depictions of elves and dwarves.

I think that there are a lot of potential fantasy races that you can justify with ordinary evolution.

u/LiteralHeadCannon:

How is "species" defined here?  Rather than being different species, humans, goblins, orcs, dwarves, elves, et cetera, could all simply be different races; fully capable of interbreeding.  Is this kind of variation within a species also implausible?

u/vallar57:

A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which two individuals are capable of reproducing fertile offspring, typically using sexual reproduction. While in many cases this definition is adequate, the difficulty of defining species is known as the species problem.

Simply having different races is perfectly fine, but not the point here.

u/alexanderwales:

I assume the objection is that they would compete with one another for the same niche, or that evolution of intelligence is so rare and civilization so fleeting that even two independently evolved species on the same planet would never have overlapping histories? If the argument is *improbability*, I've ever had a real problem with that, so long as it's a worldbuilding conceit and not used to resolve story conflicts.

Personally, I wish that more fantasy blended in scifi stuff like magical uplifting and gene-tinkering for their distinct races, but that doesn't seem like what you're going for.

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[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

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27 KiB

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