Fall of Mankind

Within the backstory of my Sci-Fi story, humans were once on top of the universe, numerous Earthborn superpowers dominated the galaxies. However, something happened that caused humanity to squalor, for its armies to fall, for its empires to be erased, but i can’t really think of what would cause it.

SKREEEEEEEONK!

You should ask the opposite question: if humanity is maintaining an empire across galaxies or bigger, how do they do that? The bureaucracy alone would be a nightmare.

There’s no singular human empire, much like present-day humans, those empires were in rough coexistence with each other, though power struggles were obviously present among them.

SKREEEEEEEONK!

Hmm... Did humanity have access to FTL technology of any sort? If so, perhaps that failed, somehow—maybe the space-lanes collapsed, or the required phlebotinum ran out (and couldn't be synthesized), or an unexpected gravitational wave destabilised all warp drives—or some such thing. As a result, colonies were left stranded—and those that relied on imports, trade, or travellers suffered.

Another thought, building on devak's post, above, is that the sheer weight of bureaucracy—both within and between empires—resulted in those empires being slow to react. Thus, when some cunning and more-agile foe appeared, it managed to wipe out the armies of humanity before they could mobilise effectively.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Aug 28th 2021 at 11:29:49 AM

My Games & Writing

The question remains the same. if humanity maintained multiple empires, how did they do that?

The roman empire fell in the west because they stopped using their prior methods of incorporating conquered peoples in favor of mercenaries and alliances. Whereas the prior system built loyalty and a sense that even the conquered had a place in roman society, the new system did no such thing. Why did they switch a successful system? pressures to unify the empire (especially religiously) were a major cause of why it was undone, along with the rather high cost of the prior system when the empire had just gone through several crises.

So, what kept humanity afloat in the first place? FTL? supercomputers? Economic prosperity? A sense of national unity?

Edited by devak on Aug 28th 2021 at 11:49:56 AM

FTL is mandatory for any interstellar empire that wants to remain cohesive over more than 100 light-years or so. Even then, it's extremely challenging. Without FTL, any civilization is going to be more like a collection of isolated nations that occasionally gets messages from one another to keep up the illusion of being a single culture.

If the premise of "galactic empire" is to be taken at face value, we must assume both FTL travel and FTL communication. Indeed, this travel and communication would have to be near-instantaneous. Galaxies are unbelievably vast. For humans to span multiple galaxies... yeah, no. When you start running those numbers, it just gets ridiculous.

But let's take the premise at face value; after all, many sci-fi works have used it or something like it. To have such a civilization collapse all at once would seem to be unimaginably unlikely. Maybe a disease that's super hard to treat got spread around via starships? Some higher-order beings show up from another dimension and change the laws of physics so that the FTL no longer works?

Alan Dean Foster liked these sorts of ideas and incorporated them into his Humanx Commonwealth series. It features not one, but two Precursor-class species who vanished from the galaxy. The more recent beings got into a war with a competitor species and developed a virulent plague that wiped out both sides along with all other complex organic life across a vast swathe of the galaxy. The oldest species discovered a threat so immense that even their own science couldn't stop it and moved their entire civilization to another dimension.

I suppose my point is that, at the level you're talking about in which humanity is effectively a Type 3 civilization, there is no organic catastrophe that is likely to dismantle their civilization. It would have to be something really exotic and/or self-inflicted.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 28th 2021 at 11:17:51 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I second the disease suggestion. Basically, an intergalactic pandemic.

Hey devak, do you have a reference for your the idea that the Roman Empire fell due to a change in military recruitment policy? That's a new one I haven't heard before.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Eh?

FTL communication is not necessary, only FTL travel. Plenty of historical empires existed without long range communication but messengers.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That's is FTL communications still, just on the low end speed wise. The message is travelling faster than light, it's just using a courier boat or similar as it's transmission vector.

I know that, but I am not sure that Fighteer's post was also considering that.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Potato, potato. There must be a way to communicate FTL, whether that be via physical messengers or some sort of transmission. In the Humanx Commonwealth, which I cited earlier, ships travel through "space-plus", which lets them move many thousands of times the speed of light. Messages can be sent through "space-minus", which requires expensive installations and can't transmit matter, but is effectively instantaneous.

The point is that you need extremely rapid communications to maintain a cohesive empire across tens of thousands of light-years. Once you accept that as a premise, you invent whatever phlebotinum you need to explain it. Having figured this out, it is then extremely hard to picture any natural event disrupting such a system. Natural events propagate at an absolute maximum of the speed of light, and we've already busted through that like it was made of tissue paper.

What are the worst imaginable things that the galaxy could throw at us? Supernovae? Pssh, trivial. Maybe a few systems get GRB'ed, but we've got millions more. The central black hole swallowing a big meal and going active for a few hundred years? We could send warnings to the farthest planets within a few days.

The part that really makes me wonder is the idea that humans are intergalactic. I feel like anyone writing that in their work lacks a fundamental appreciation of just how far apart galaxies are.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

If we have something along the lines of hyperspace in order to enable FTL travel, we could potentially suggest that natural disasters might occur in hyperspace too.

Now, since we don't see evidence of faster-than-light disasters at the moment, perhaps they're extremely rare, or perhaps they only affect things in and/or connected to hyperspace.

That last approach actually has an advantage, too: it allows for a disaster that takes out FTL (maybe it destroys all the hyperspace gateways and facilities, and renders new attempts unstable)—but without devastating much beyond.

Out of curiosity, what does "GRB" stand for?

My Games & Writing

Gamma ray burst. They are quite directional, though - unless a hyperspace portal happens to be in the path of one and the blast propagates to habitated worlds through it, I don't think it would work as an explanation.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Ah, thank you for that. ^_^

My Games & Writing

You know, I'll be honest. For all this talk of natural and artificial disasters afflicting a Type 3 civilization, I left out the most obvious and reliable cause of disaster in human affairs: politics.

Political schisms and collapses happen with far greater regularity than civilization-ending disasters. Maybe a Trump-like figure falls into power in the Galactic Council with an agenda of stopping immigration from that dirty Epsilon Sector. Maybe a Palpatine schemes his way into dictatorial control and a bunch of sectors rebel. Conspiracy theorists start a movement to oppose the scientific consensus that all this hyperspace travel is disrupting stellar life cycles.

These sorts of things are far, far more believable.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 29th 2021 at 11:46:13 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Politics is indeed easily overlooked in when brainstorming such things as these: there's perhaps an inclination towards big, flashy, sci-fi-driven causes, rather than familiar, mundane ones.

(And for what it's worth, I did suggest above the idea of slowness born of galactic-scale bureaucracy leaving a civilisation open to an external military threat, which runs on a related track.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Aug 29th 2021 at 6:06:18 PM

My Games & Writing

That why a contagious disease makes sense. It travels via the same FTL system the humans do.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I'm left wondering what sort of "external" threat could affect a civilization that controls an entire galaxy. In the Humanx Commonwealth that I referenced earlier, there's an extragalactic threat but it's not a bunch of rampaging invaders. Rather, it's an entity as big as a galaxy that consumes all matter and energy that it encounters. Think Galactus but non-sapient and on a scale that would make Marvel writers wet their pants.

This isn't the sort of thing that would disrupt a civilization as we've been discussing. It could certainly end it, but wouldn't leave it fractured into lots of little groups.

For all that we frequently discuss the absurdity of crossing interstellar space to invade an occupied planet in real life, invading a galaxy across intergalactic space would be orders of magnitude more absurd even in the softest sci-fi universes. Well, I hear the Lensman series (which I haven't read) escalated to this sort of thing as it went on.

You know what could do it... some sort of self-replicating threat. Not an invasion fleet, but the seeds of one that are planted and grow by themselves. If we think about the Borg in Star Trek, they can start with as little as a single ship and assimilate all life they encounter. If our galactic civilization's military forces aren't on the ball, this sort of thing could grow out of control before they are able to deal with it.

It's similar to the pandemic idea, but in a Grey Goo or Assimilation Plot sense. The risk isn't that it hits everywhere at once, but that it grows insidiously and rapidly becomes unstoppable.

I also had a wackier thought that I briefly touched on above: maybe all the mucking around in FTL causes some kind of intrinsic damage to the fabric of space-time or disrupts stars or something like that. Every time someone takes a trip at 1000x lightspeed, a nearby star ages by ten years, the constant saturation of gravitational shock waves makes accurately targeting trips more difficult, etc. So the FTL itself leads to a breakdown of the structures that allow the society to exist.

This could lead to a Precursors story in which humans discover the remains of an ancient civilization that destroyed itself with excessive use of FTL.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 29th 2021 at 1:51:53 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Regarding the external threat, well, there are lots of galaxies out there: perhaps there's another multi-galactic civilisation out there—but one that's more militaristic and less bureaucracy-bound.

Their goals could be a number of things: expansion, annihilation, removal of perceived threats, and other things besides.

I do also like your "replicating threat" idea, and your "hyperspace structural damage" idea; the latter is particularly interesting to me.

On a side-note, it's funny that you should mention that example from the Humanx Commonwealth: I'm working on something at the moment that's currently intended to have a similar sort of threat. However, I mention it primarily for the coincidence: the scale is rather smaller (several smallish solar systems), and the setting is fantasy, not sci-fi.

My Games & Writing

"You know what could do it... some sort of self-replicating threat..."

[Raises hand, bounces in seat]: "Ooh, Ooh, I know! A disease!"

See, the only way to protect one's own community from it is to shut down the starbase/gate/whatever they are using. And you know what that does? Fragments the civilization.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Maybe throw in a war to explain why their medical technology didn't stop it. Kinda like the Spanish Flu and WW 1.

I still have some trouble with the "extragalactic invaders" idea. A galaxy is so vast and has so many resources that even a Type 3 civilization could live there for a billion years or more, happily and productively. The idea of crossing the gulf to another galaxy at all, never mind to invade it, is mind-crushing.

Of course, here we come with the speculative fiction. In Alan Dean Foster's Design for Great-Day, humans and all the other sapient species of the Milky Way have merged into a collective mind that can send ships between galaxies about as casually as one would board an intercontinental flight. Of course, by that point they've grown beyond conquest and instead use their immense power to teach ethical lessons to less-developed and more warlike civilizations.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 29th 2021 at 10:07:53 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I can see a few potential reasons for an extragalactic invasion:

• Perhaps useful planets (perhaps specifically life-bearing ones) are rarer than we might think, and thus valuable resources for a civilisation of a scale so colossal that it spans galaxies.
• Perhaps it's a matter of principle: "There are other people there, and thus we must fight them:"
  • "Because we're massive xenophobes," or
  • "Because we believe that we should subjugate all other intelligent life," or
  • "Because we fear subjugation by them," etc. etc.
• Perhaps they're galactic-scale Planet Looters, chewing their way through everything, leaving resource-depleted husks in their wake and moving on to the next galaxy.

(And probably other things besides!)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Aug 30th 2021 at 9:29:46 PM

My Games & Writing

The problem is getting to the other galaxy. Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to us if you discount the Magellanic Clouds and a few other satellites, is over 2.5 million light-years away. That is 100 times farther than the distance between our Sun and the center of the Milky Way.

Let's say you invent a hyperspace engine that will let you go 100,000 times the speed of light. It would take three months to get from Earth to the galactic center at that speed. It would take 250 years to get to Andromeda at the same speed.

There are between 100 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. If a tenth of them have a planet that could be made habitable with technology, let's call it 20 billion planets that we could live on some day. If each planet can hold 10 billion people, the galaxy can support 200 quintillion humans. Would "governing" this many people even be a meaningful concept? How would one invade such a galaxy, or send an "invasion force" from it?

Let's say we start with 10 billion people in our solar system. We send out colony ships to two worlds, it takes 500 years for those worlds to get crowded enough to send out their own ships, rinse repeat. It would take just over 34 such doublings to inhabit every planet in the galaxy. 34 x 500 gives us 17,000 years. This seems really short (and makes a lot of assumptions), but even so it's a really good illustration of the time scales involved.

Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. Seriously, they don't.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 30th 2021 at 10:01:41 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Forget conquering galaxies. My antagonists conquer Entire Universes!!

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."