Dystopian Society Of Immortals

Basically countless millennia into the future immortality will have been fact for as long as humans have had written language in the present. This has been achieved by way of consciousness transference, basically what were long ago human minds occupy sophisticated synthetic physical forms, coming in all shapes and sizes. Whenever someone's body has been totaled beyond repair (or they just get tired of it), their being will be stored in huge data storage facilities, awaiting a new body to be placed in.

Earth's population when mortality was abolished was around fifteen billon, so people are forced to exist in shifts (only five hundred thousand million may have a corporal existence at a time) no new children have been born since then, and civilization has grown stagnant. Much knowledge has been simply forgotten, including the principles behind the transfer of minds, it's all still there in various archives; everyone just can't be buggered to go look it up.

Nations no longer exist, being supplemented by Houses. Houses are huge city states, whose people are united by common interests, like the Soviet Union or Medieval Japan. Constant wars wage across the planet between the Houses.

In the year 400000 A.M (After Mortality), a man (or at least, a man at the time) decides to create two organic children, to study them...

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

Sounds...interesting, at least. The assumption that lack of aging -> horrible overpopulation and/or dystopia is a bit of a Berserk Button of mine; I'll just note that population curves are still exponential whether you've got natural death happening or not.

edited 21st Jan '12 12:05:23 PM by alethiophile

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Where is the Dystopia in this?

They've sort of gone very nutty, for one thing they have no sense of touch.

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

First, if they're all synthetic then the population limit is increased by several orders of magnitude, robots don't need food, just energy which has less infrastructure. There is no need for "rotations" if the population is just fifteen billion.

Second, many robots today have senses of touch, there's no reason why far future robots wouldn't.

Third, there's no way to know whether immortality would drive one insane until we've tried it. We should stop automatically assuming it will.

Fourth, there is nothing in your world that seems more dystopian than the current world.

Pretty much the only problem is the fact that every biological human is dead and replaced by a succession of robots who think that they were once biological, as well as every preceding robot that they received their initial memories from.

Uh...by 'billion' are you using the old british meaning here? Most of the civilized world takes 'billion' to mean 10⁹, i.e. a thousand million.

That aside, is there any reason in this setting why interplanetary or interstellar colonization was never attempted, in order to increase safety and breathing room?

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