Near-Future/Sci-Fi Settings, Societies, Cultures, Histories

Good day everyone!

I was looking through both science fiction threads and I couldn't find one that focused on the discussion of the above title. As the name implies, this thread is for the designing and creation of near future/sci-fi settings, societies, cultures, history and more! Talk about the planets that are colonized, the peoples and cultures that inhabit them, whether they be humans or extraterrestrial or interdimensional. Fluff out the history that made what your world is today or what it will become.

Some quick pointers before we set out, though hopefully they will prove unnecessary:

•Hard or soft sci-fi is perfectly acceptable, though it may help to specify whether your setting is a hard one or a soft one if you're going to ask for help, since it helps people tailor their responses.

•Also note the difference in terms of near future or far future. Is the time set 25 Minutes into the Future or is it as far as 40K? Is the setting kept on Earth or is it in another galaxy? Is it on a paralleled world different yet similar to our own? Is our viewpoint from humans? Is it entirely extraterrestrial?

•When providing a critique of a design or concept, please ensure it is constructive criticism. Similarly, don't just say "That's cool/dumb/makes my head hurt" if you can help it - explain why it's cool/dumb/makes your head hurt. One of the goals of this thread is to explain the setting, refine society rules, flesh out cultures, include details on historical events, after all.

•Be polite/respectful etc.

If you actually want to figure out how these things would be implemented, check out:

•Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

•Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

To start us off, I've had this idea that I've been trying to get my head wrapped around so I have a foundation set:

I have this idea for a world, if I were to turn it into a game, tv show, etc. and its creation was for the purpose of alternate/historical scenarios involving different nations if they were ever involved in a conflict similar to our world. Another IP property helped give me the conception of this world, mainly the Ace Combat series with its modern world of Strangereal and the fictional world featured in the ARMA series.

The World itself, in terms of technology and society wise, is set similar to ours but 45-55 years ahead of ours but with some soft science-fictional aspects, i.e. droids, mechs, advanced green-technology, etc.

One idea I had was a modern nation on the mainland of a continent influenced by the United Kingdom. The country consists of a region that is half the size of Australia, located on a large continent in the southern hemisphere, and is a first world country.

The country, known as the Royal Marches, also owns a bunch of islands/a vast archipelago across a channel along its southern coasts that has historically been contested by two other powers: a collection of Scandinavian-influenced countries known as United Baltonia and the independent island nation of Rey, influenced by a hybridization of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

As of the present day, the new superpower of Sovalkia, an arctic country located in the southern hemisphere on a separate continent, has become more aggressive in terms of diplomacy and military expansion by annexing nearby independent nations via sabotaging political elections, assassinating key notable figures, and violating sovereign territories without any pushback by international powers from the northern hemisphere.

To stand on equal ground with Sovalkia and stop their expansion, United Baltonia has sought to annex the islands/archipelago chain that bridges the southern continent to the northern continent to control the flow of trade between the two worlds. For the Royal Marches, they are against such action because it believes those islands/archipelago are their territories on the grounds of historical ownership, or something similar to those reasons. For the independent nation of Rey, they argue that the islands/archipelago chain is their territory on the grounds of their majority of ethnic/cultural population living across the regions.

The imagery for this conflict, which I have yet to name, would be a scenario concerning if the countries of Northern Europe were drawn into a military conflict, with Russia involved played by the role of Sovalkia.

There's more to it, but I have to get back on shift, I'll see if I can add on it it.

Thank you in advance, and hopefully this thread will be helpful for everyone!

Also, I apologize for not linking any Tropes or other Threads! Life on an aircraft carrier isn't as fast-paced as your usual bandwidth allows =(

Edited by KproTM on Nov 19th 2018 at 8:51:51 AM

You probably will want to clarify what you mean by "near future" or the discussion is going to wander all over the place. On the other hand, if you dont want to limit the discussion in terms of time-frame (which could also work), then the thread title is confusing.

Also, what about the tech level? I find it interesting that you didn't even mention that in your description of your setting. Is it your intent to exclude fantasy settings here?

Also, you're stationed on an aircraft carrier? Cool.

Edited by DeMarquis on Nov 18th 2018 at 9:27:04 AM

Tech Level-wise, the setting is similar to our world but probably a half century ahead in terms of technology. The best references I could come up with to compare to are from the recent Ace Combat series, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Battlefield 2142.

Soooo... what are some examples of that technology and what effect do you think they would have on the societies in your world?

Society wise, First World countries in this fictional world would have common access to technologies that we have only begun to take advantage of in our world, such as widespread 3D biotechnology, advanced NBI and ICBM in the field of information technology, and the use of artificial intelligence.

Here's a short list of the technologies that are common in this world:

-Vertical farming/Closed ecological systems

-Construction 3D printing/Four-dimensional printing/Claytronics

-Arcology/Domed cities

-Graphene/Conductive polymers/Fullerene/Nanomaterials: carbon nanotubes

-Holography/Screenless display

-Flexible electronics/Memristor

-Concentrated solar power/Artificial photosynthesis/Fusion power/Wireless energy transfer/Biofuels/Nantenna

-Civic technology/Cryptocurrency/Atomtronics/Ambient intelligence/Nanoradio/Software-defined radio

-Artificial general intelligence/Exascale computing/Quantum computing/Optical computing

-Body implants/Prosthesis/Life extension, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence/Nanomedicines/Virotherapy

-Miniaturized satellites/Fusion rocket technology/Nuclear photonic rocket/Propellant depots/Reusable launch systems/

-Mass driver/Space Elevator/Skyhook/Space fountain

Military wise, the current technology used by military forces in this world would encompass the experimental/early prototypes of our world today. Current generation technologies of this fictional world would include technologies such hypersonic weapons like rail gun turrets, powered exosuits, and . For experimental technologies, the First World countries of this fictional world are just delving into plasma force fields, armored mechsuits, and bio/cyber augmentations for the creation of super-soldiers.

Here's a short list of the technologies that are utilized by First World militaries:

-Amorphous metal/Magnetorheological fluid

-Metamaterials/Cloaking device/Stealth technology

-Exocortex/Neuroprosthetics/Brain-computer interface/Neuroinformatics

-Genetic engineering/Bioengineering

-Caseless ammunition

-Electromagnetic weapons/Electrothermal-chemical technology/Directed energy weapon/Railguns

-Powered exoskeletons/Jet pack or backpack helicopter/Powered mechsuits

-Unmanned vehicles/unmanned drones/Unmanned vessels/Droids

-Hoverbike/Hovertrain

-High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellite/High-Altitude Platform Station

-Advanced Cyberwarfare

Edited by KproTM on Nov 21st 2018 at 8:06:19 AM

I'd like to add the continents and the short-trope descriptions of said continents of my world to better get a basis for the pseudo-parallel world I thought up as a concept. The way I envisioned and came up with this world is based off of "what ifs" and alternate scenarios that could have been if significant events in our world turned out differently. While this world is fictional, certain key characters, places, and events from our world may appear in my fictional world, but nonetheless this is a completely alternate world in its own right. Note that names are subject to change as I track through ideas. For the continents I have:

Ubertania

Influenced by Scandinavia(Northern Europe), Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and a majority of Russia. This continent is located in the Western and Southern hemisphere, with Andalum far off to its northeast across the Southern Sea. Homo neanderthals lasted much longer in this world than in our world, and thus almost 37% of the population have compatible Neanderthal in their DNA. During the medieval period, Norse paganism was able to spread like wildfire between different tribes of the regions similar to how Greek mythology was adopted by the Romans. Was later Hijacked by Jesus, became a fourth aspect of the Abrahamic Faith alongside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this world, Nazi-Fascism did not occur, though in its place a rise in an extreme version of Populism did result in an outbreak of a Second World War. For Red October, the White Army won, the Tsar family remained in a place of power, the Cossacks went from Texas Ranger expies to independent military powers, yet all-in-all the region proceeded in the same vein as a modern-day Russian Federation. Notable fictional nations include the Sovalkian Federation, United Baltonia, and Delkania.

Andalum

Influenced by Western and Southern Europe. This minor continent is located between Ubertania and Maghreb. Notable fictional nations include the Royal Marches, the Ciriane Imperium, and the Ebrian Federation. Description TBA.

Atlantia

A general mix of Mediterranean influence. This small island continent is located far off the coasts northeast of Andalum and southeast of Maghreb, yet close enough to the mainland to have historical and cultural effects. Their people are literally an offshoot of the human race to this day, their ethnic group being the only ones referred to not as Homo sapien, but as Homo dominus. Their acient civilization were also advanced in the practice of eugenics, whom they would experiment on their captured slaves from the mainland. They had an expansive dominion during the age of antiquity, their colonial city of Troy was sacked by the mainland Greeks, they annexed Carthage during the Punic Wars, and became locked in a cold war with the Roman Empire. Their cold war with the Roman Empire resulted in the formation of Orthodox Christianity, the Muslim takeover of Atlantia was the catalyst to the Renaissance, and they were one of the leading nations practicing imperialism abroad. Notable fictional nations include... well, just the Atlantean Congressional Republic.

Maghreb

Influenced by combining Africa and the Middle East into one continent. This continent is located in the Western and Northern hemispheres, with Andalum south separated by the Atlantean Sea. Imagine if the Persian Empire conquered all of Africa instead of attacking the Mediterranean states. Imagine African tribes of antiquity uplifted to have their own kingdoms and empires during the medieval times. Imagine if the Mongol Horde had never destroyed Baghdad and the Arab prosperity of that time flourished. Here you have a civilization of nations that have become some of the leading First World nations on the planet... doesn't stop them from trying to undermine each other that is. Notable fictional nations include Ossmania, Tyran, and the Confederacy of Judaea.

Columbia

Influenced by North America, minus Latin America, combined with Colonial Australia. This continent is located in the Eastern and Northern hemispheres, north of the equator opposite to Polynesia. Imagine if you will, the United States lost the civil war with the CSA, entered the Second World War which then instigated another civil war only this time the CSA was defeated, slavery was outlawed and instead legalized into indentured servitude, and Canada was annexed. In the modern-day, you have an American version of the Yugoslavia Wars, with multiple states proclaiming independence and fighting against one another. Notable fictional states include Cascadia, San Andreas, and Kodiak.

Polynesia

Influenced by a majority of Pacific Island nations, everything in the Polynesian Triangle, and Aboriginal Australia. This continent is located in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres, south of the equator opposite to Columbia. In this world the Pacific Islanders are much closer than our world's, and therefore advance much quicker in terms of historical interactions and participation. Notable fictional nations include Moarikai, New Muland, and Adriana.

Vespinia

Influenced by all of the Latin Americas, which comprises Central Latin America and South America. Located in the Eastern hemisphere as the southern opposite of Asios. Notable fictional nations include Isla Satanazes, Camaica, and Val Hidalgo. Description TBA.

Asios

Influenced by a portion of Asia-Pacific regions. Located in the Eastern hemisphere as the northern opposite of Vespinia. Notable fictional nations include Huxia, Dwaraka, and Karakar. Description TBA.

Edited by KproTM on Dec 22nd 2018 at 1:33:37 AM

I'm trying to think of a way to have a Post-Scarcity Economy that still uses money for most if not all of the no-longer-sarce commodities. Is that paradoxical?

PS: I hope this thread is appropriate for my question; I would've asked it in the Quick Questions thread of this subforum, but I suspect that it might result in a discussion too prolonged for said thread's standards.

Edited by MarqFJA on Sep 17th 2020 at 1:38:00 PM

So with this discussion, I can discuss my setting here and how it works? It be more convenient than starting individual threads for it.

That's the impression that I'm getting, though it seems that the thread's creator had abandoned/forgotten about it after their last post here from 2018.

Oh crap! I didn't notice this thread is already three years old at this point. We practically just necroed it.

My apologies. I just failed to look at the posting dates.

"I'm trying to think of a way to have a Post-Scarcity Economy that still uses money for most if not all of the no-longer-sarce commodities. Is that paradoxical?"

Well, logically, if supply of consumer products is very high, then the price will be very low but not necessarily free. So money will still be needed, although you won't need a lot of it.

"My apologies. I just failed to look at the posting dates."

Too late! You're caught here now! You might as well go ahead and describe your setting.

Well... My story setting isn't exactly near future, but rather, far future, as it takes place in an unspecified time thousands of years on a terraformed Venus. Not exactly the point of this thread unfortunately.

Even in a Star Trek style post-scarcity economy, you will need something like money, even if it's not used in the way we're accustomed to. This is true for the following (rough) reasons, and I'm sure De Marquis will step in with more detailed information.

• Even if basic needs are available to everyone without any currency changing hands, there must still be some kind of accounting to allocate production and prevent hoarding. If the food depot has 1 million tons of bulk food material, Joe can't walk away with the whole million tons, or there would be none left for Alice until another shipment arrives. Similarly, Joe shouldn't be allowed to come back ten times in one day for extra allotments. So there needs to be a way to track how much stuff each person gets at any given time to prevent supply distortions.
• There will still be scarce products in even the most utopian economy imaginable. While everyone can have transportation, entertainment, food, shelter, education, and so on, not everyone can have diamond wristwatches, Altairian caviar, personal spacecraft, a kilogram of antimatter, or whatever. The allocation of these products will require some way of deciding who can have them or use them, and that implies some method of determining merit or worth.
• There needs to be an incentive to do that form of work that is useful to society even with post-scarcity. That incentive would presumably take the form of the ability to obtain more than the baseline amounts of stuff or gain access to the scarce stuff. Otherwise, why would most people work at all? Again, this needs an accounting system , which is functionally money even if not expressed as such.
• If the distribution of resources is not managed perfectly (which is mathematically and sociologically impossible), there will always be people who have things they don't want and people who want things they don't have. Those people will seek to trade their goods and services, which will again require some means of determining value... i.e., money. If this money is not "legal", then you have black markets.

There's lots more, of course. I'm just touching the surface.

Edit: I should add that you can get around some of these issues by altering the nature of people or mind controlling them to want only exactly what they are allotted, but then you're into dsytopian fiction.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 18th 2020 at 12:28:42 PM

No, no, the far fature still within the thread's purview. It's titled "Near-Future/Sci-Fi" for a reason: sci-fi can take place in an alternate history version of the past or the present, or it can take place in a hypothetical vision of a future period (near or distant); however, not all near-future settings with fictional technologies/cultures/histories qualify as sci-fi.

That's very informative.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Jun 24th 2021 at 7:54:38 AM

If we're allowed to describe both near and far-future settings in this thread, then I might as well throw out my future setting idea. It's a Speculative Science future history that progresses from a relatively mundane near-future to a much more speculative (but hard sci-fi) distant future.

Basically, I want to have as many sci-fi tropes as possible in a diamond-hard setting, starting out modest in the beginning (Mind Control Devices, Brain Computer Interfaces, Super Soldiers, Designer Babies) and getting more wild by the end (Colonized Solar System, Casual Interplanetary Travel, Brain Uploading, Artificial Intelligence).

In regards to culture and society, I was thinking about the psychology of a race of Transhumans in Space engineered to be Asteroid Miners. They would be like Neo-Zen monks (to cope with the solitude, cramped conditions and slowness of their work) with a strong tendency towards self-sufficiency and libertarian philosophy (due to the no-margin-for-error conditions of deep space) — their funeral rites would involve the cannibalization of the dead, so as not to waste resources. What do you think?

I have an ongoing story of mine in a setting where Earth was hit by an extradimensional Alien Invasion (whom I can best describe as Borg on steroids) in 1998 and occupied for 20 years, until a planet-wide revolt in 2018 overthrow the Vichy Earth regime by exploiting the fact that the invasion forces left after the planet was pacified, leaving only a relatively small planetary garrison with reinforcements bottlenecked by their dimensional portals that were sabotaged and shut down worldwide a week into the uprising.

When the various resistance cells sat down afterwards to figure out where to go now, they agreed that restoring the pre-invasion national borders was pretty much pointless: there were no organized military forces left in the entire world, only guerrilla forces armed with salvaged guns and the occasional vehicle, so there would be nobody to enforce those borders against warlords. That and half of humanity died in the occupation and Earth barely had any non-alien industrial infrastructure left, so restoring the pre-invasion borders would leave over 90% of the resulting nation states unable to support themselves. Thus a One World Order was founded in 2020, emphasizing that freedom is pointless if one cannot hold on to it due to internal strife and external threats and that now, more than ever, is the time where unity must replace strife.

Not everyone was on board with the idea; in particular, many African and Middle Eastern factions refused to submit to foreign rule, beginning a persistent insurgency lasting well into the 2040s that kept the One World Order from being truly unified. Australia and South America also mostly joined up, while the entire North American continent was swallowed by a Negative Space Wedgie after the invasion and thus rendered a non-factor. The One World Order itself is a weird mix of authoritarian and democratic: local and regional authorities are elected while the top-level leadership (many of whom are secretly members of a Benevolent Conspiracy that existed since the height of the Cold War) isn't. While they do come down on anyone who speaks up against the government and keep the military in line with political officers outside the normal chain of command, they don't actively repress the populace because they've seen with their own eyes what a sufficiently large and angry mob can do and have no wish to be on the receiving end of that.

The story itself begins in late 2041. By this time, humanity has not only rebuilt Earth but actually surpassed the pre-invasion civilization with the help of alien technology, developing interstellar travel and establishing over half a dozen (I haven't decided on the exact number) extrasolar colonies across Goldilocks planets within a radius of a 100 or so lightyears around Sol.

• FTL travel is wormhole-based and is not yet casual due to technological limitations: planetary gravity wells act as No Warping Zones, speed is limited to slightly less that 100 times the speed of light and a combination of hardware bulk and targeting complexity means that ship-carried FTL drives are infeasible, restricting the whole thing to waygates. FTL communication is also impossible beyond courier ships.
• Artificial Intelligence is a thing due to silicon-based computational technology having been almost entirely abandoned in favor of alien tech, which is a mixture of graphene-based on the low end (tablets are all over the place to the point of being school-issue) and quantum computing on the high end. Recent years have also seen success at developing a Wetware CPU specifically for housing AIs. Most AIs are bound to ground-based installations and are more like expert systems, but there are a few that have human-level emotions and cognitive capabilities.
• Major advances in robotics have been made due to alien material sciences, resulting in the rise of mecha as armored ground forces. It wasn't an easy transition, with the first model having outright been rejected from being adopted by the Confederate military due to being a Master of None unsteady and mechanically unreliable maintenance nightmare, but design paradigms were eventually refined into a Walking Tank operating as an open-terrain assault gun and a Mini-Mecha operating as an urban IFV. Currently underway R&D efforts are working on a Spider Tank replacement for the former and a proper Humongous Mecha designed for the tactical role of a space-use bomber/gunship, being too heavy to operate under gravity.
• The military is split into Army and Navy, operating planetside and in vacuum, respectively. Aerial warfare is split between the two, with the Army primarily focusing on close air support and the Navy primarily focusing on air superiority and orbital bombardment. Both utilize a mix of kinetic and missile armaments for warfare; directed particle beam weapons already exist, but not widely adopted because they aren't strictly superior to kinetics (beams have better armor penetration, but kinetics have far more brute-force killing power). There's considerable Jurisdiction Friction and Interservice Rivalry going on between the two, especially due to the Army being reliant on the Navy for transportation purposes.

Don't ask how they got back up so quickly, because I have no idea and the story is too far ahead for a rewrite.

The big question is, what kind of culture would this civilization have? Some major factors:

• The occupation resulted in the irreversible destruction of a significant portion of humanity's historical cultural heritage. Lots of art have been destroyed, lots of songs from the 20th century have no remaining master records left (family heirloom cassette mixtapes are a thing), many pre-invasion books are extremely rare and are only distributed as reprints. At least some technology that was in development at the time of the invasion has also become Lost Technology, with no surviving blueprints and everyone involved in the project having died in the meantime.
• Due to the fact that the alien invaders' ultimate intent with humanity was species-wide Unwilling Roboticization and made heavy use of brainwashed and cybernetically enhanced humans as general infantry troops for the occupation, there's significant societal backlash against cybernetics and transhumanism in general. It would be a major plot point later on that not only some scientists decided to go the other way and use genetic engineering instead, but the first prototype transhumans are already walking among the populace in secret. Although superior to baseline humans in many ways and having been created specifically to defend humanity as Super Soldiers, once their nature becomes public knowledge they face widespread racial discrimination, further strengthened when one of them decides to go the "benevolent dictator" route.
• To achieve their objective, the invaders also kept humanity sterile during the 20 years of occupation, a piece of their technology causing very early miscarriages in 100% of all pregnancies worldwide. As a consequence, humanity's global population was halved in that 20 years. Once the effect went away, there was a massive baby boom, but also a major generational/cultural disconnect between the pre-invasion and post-occupation generations, with the kids scoffing at the adults all having PTSD and the adults scoffing at the little shits only talking big because they have no idea what it was like.
• Xenophobia, however, is a minority opinion due to the fact that humanity walked away from the occupation with a client species who were basically interstellar refugees whom humanity unintentionally freed from slavery, resulting in them declaring Undying Loyalty and throwing in their lot with the locals during the occupation to earn their keep. They're primarily employed as skilled labor and technical/scientific/scholarly work, as they're physically similar to humanity but less individualistic (they have a species-wide psychic network sharing memories and sensory input and even use this mental collective as a Body Backup Drive for Born-Again Immortality).

The above is the "first era" of the setting, closing off with humanity being caught in the crossfire of a civil war between a kindred of Eldritch Abominations that are each anti-army, with the high-end ones being anti-planet. Specifically, one of the factions tricked the other into attacking humanity, humanity fought back and the two sides ended up exhausting each other before the third one came out of the woodwork and decapitated the other faction.

The "second era" arises in early 2043, when the aliens come back and humanity finds out the hard way that all the preparations they made for this in the intervening 24 years were nowhere near enough. Earth is glassed so badly that humanity now numbers only in the tens of millions, with Earth having pretty much no biosphere left. The whole thing goes down within a day and with FTL travel times between systems being measured in weeks, calling in reinforcements from the colonies was impossible.

As expected, this catastrophe is pretty much lightning out of a cloudless sky for the survivors. Everyone realized that they never stood a chance after all and the only reason why there's still anyone left is because 1) the government forcibly evicted millions of people from Earth to establish extrasolar colonies as a worst-case measure and 2) the aliens, having been out of contact with humanity for 24 years, don't know the number and location of those extrasolar colonies, so the only way to survive is to lay low and not get noticed.

As one can further expect, the sheer death toll was followed by skyrocketing suicide rates in the coming years, coupled with the general uncertainty of the One World Order violently balkanizing into two successor states, a junta of the One World Order's military leadership who took control of the outer colonies to restore order, the other a democratic federation of the wealthy and industrially developed inner systems dominated by corporate interests and corruption, along with an N.G.O. Superpower who are suckered into starting a war between the other two by internal conflict but eventually sort things out and become a fully space-based (ie. everyone lives on giant spaceships, no planetary settlements anywhere) post-scarcity utopia who declare independence as a shogunate (this is the benevolent dictatorship I mentioned earlier: the guy in charge is a Pro-Human Transhuman with genuinely benevolent intentions, but he still got his position via a military coup d'etat and his faction is very heavily armed, which naturally unnerves more than a few people). The exact state of Earth itself is up for grabs; for years I intended it to be completely uninhabitable for several centuries/millennia, but recently I begun entertaining the possibility of it being contested neutral ground everyone wants due to being the only planet in known space suitable for human life but due to limitations of FTL technology nobody can effectively power-project and thus hold on to.

A fourth state eventually emerges as a coalition of worlds Settling the Frontier trying to escape the federation's systemic corruption, fighting and winning a war of independence against their former home with assistance from the shogunate (the junta also offered to help but were turned down by the colonists who didn't want to be used for a proxy war). A few decades later the federation, increasingly suffering from an economic downturn caused by mass emigration, declares a war on the junta upon finding out that the latter are smuggling refugees through the border, only for nearly all of the federation's member systems to finally have enough of the capital system's BS and refuse to get involved, resulting in the capital system (Gliese 581) summarily getting stomped and annexed by the junta while the other members declare the dissolution of the federation and reform into a loose coalition. Everyone in-universe treats this resolution as the End of an Era - and in some ways it is, with the wormhole-based FTL technology having sufficiently advanced in the meantime to be used for interplanetary travel instead of interstellar only, opening a new golden age of trade and colonization.

As for the issue of First Contact, the first one that isn't non-violent takes place sometime in the early 2070s due to a freak Blind Jump accident by a shogunate liveship and finally gives an answer to the Drake Equation's question of "where is everyone?". The answer in question is that while there is life out there, it's actually so few and far between that most civilizations go extinct before ever making first contact with someone else and the majority of those who are currently around are even less advanced than humanity, who themselves are only out in space so early due to having gotten a head start.

Edited by amitakartok on Sep 21st 2020 at 8:24:57 PM

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Jun 24th 2021 at 7:54:53 AM

Consider the following scenario: On an Earth that had gone through a Third World War several decades ago and a highly destabilizing global catastrophe less than two decades ago, Real Robot-style Humongous Mecha of various stripes have come to form an essential component of modern militaries that is comparable to Wanzers in Front Mission; they haven't rendered tanks, attack helicopters and other "conventional" combat vehicles obsolete.

Note that setting that I'm describing isn't your typical post-apocalyptic world; the more developed countries had for the most part recovered from the Third World War and the global catastrophe to at least a semblance of normalcy, albeit now in a geopolitical environment where the various blocs that the governments had congregated into are locked into a multipolar cold war with the occasional brief violent clash. The USA didn't, for example, devolve into militaristic, authoritarian, illiberal democracy where civil rights and freedoms are heavily curtailed in the name of "national security".

Now, I'm trying to come with a plausible justification for the militaries occasionally training adolescents to serve as pilots for such mecha — or rather, a specific type of these mecha — as an odd practice that, while controversial, isn't opposed strongly enough for most governments to abolish it. Currently considering the following not-mutually-exclusive ideas.

1. The mechas require for their operation a direct interface between the pilot's brain and the onboard AI system, and the adult brain is too "set" in its structure to adapt properly, usually causing severe psychological trauma and even occasionally brain death; this necessiated that training begin from adolescence at the latest, when the brain still retains enough neural plasticity.

2. The mechas are limited in availability and so much better in performance (assuming that the pilot manages to unlock the mecha's full potential) compared to the "normal" mass-produced models, such that having even a single extra one on your side can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of a battle.

3. It's been observed that those adolescents determined to be neurologically suited for piloting the mechas are relatively rare and whose neurotypes ^note In the neurological sense of the way a brain is wired/configured. leave them vulnerable to developing any of a myriad of mental disorders; the aforementioned interfacing with the mecha AI provides a highly stabilizing influence if done on a regular basis, but attempts to exploit this by putting such pilots in a combat simulator (i.e. vidoe games) instead of actual combat drastically decreases the benefits (VR tech hasn't advanced enough to perfectly trick the human brain into believing that the environment around it is "real"), and while live simulated combat with training ammo works significantly better, a real life-or-death battle is exceptionally superlative in this regard.

As an aside, #3 has the bonus of adding an extra level of "grey vs. gray" to the controversy surrouding the practice, as now you also have to consider whether it's ethical to forbid such adolescents from mecha pilot training to "protect" them from the hazards of a real battlefield.

It lives again! This is the thread that just keeps getting necro'd.

Yeah, well, I don't see another thread that tackles sci-fi settings, societies, etc. I'm surprised that it's not active, to be honest.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 5th 2022 at 5:42:52 PM

Remind me, wasn't the question about adolescents already asked in another thread? Where I directed you at Wikipedia's page on child soldiers since it turns out there are plenty of reasons to use children

@Fighteer: "Even in a Star Trek style post-scarcity economy, you will need something like money, even if it's not used in the way we're accustomed to. This is true for the following (rough) reasons, and I'm sure De Marquis will step in with more detailed information."

Arrgh! And I didn't! What was wrong with you, two years ago me?

Yeah, and I responded to it, only for nobody else to follow up on that. I decided that it would be remiss of me to drag the discussion out in a thread that's intended for relatively short discussions for each question. My response has been incorporated into the phrasing of my question.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 5th 2022 at 12:33:36 PM

Consider the following scenario. The time setting is between 50 to 100 years from now.

Russia had undergone a somewhat bloody revolution about a decade beforehand that overthrew the post-Soviet oligarchy, and the new government's reforms ushered in a new era of political freedom and economic prosperity.

Meanwhile, the European Union has collapsed due to a combination of external and internal causes, and has been replaced by a more centralized superstate, the European Federation, which has actively shut out all of the countries east of Germany (which has absorbed Austria by now) and Italy that aren't the Scandinavian states, either blaming them for dragging down the old EU and causing its collapse with their persistently poor economic performance and political instability (the jury is up on how true these accusations are), or (in the case of formerly prosperous ones like the Baltic states) deeming them too stricken by recent disasters (both natural and man-made) for the newly formed EF to risk incorporating while it's still busy stabilizing its own tenuous economy. The other former Soviet republics are in similarly dire straits, if not having collapsed entirely.

This leaves the door for the Russian government to step in and court those countries with much needed aid, mutually beneficial deals and (in the case of failed states) humanitarian military interventions. Many of those countries' governments and populaces are of course suspicious at first, their cultural memory still remembering the traumas of oppression and exploitation by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, as well as the post-Soviet regime's many attempts at keeping them firmly in its sphere of influence (the Russo-Ukrainian War of the 2020s being still infamous). Sooner or later, however the new Russia earns the trust of those countries, and in the span of a couple of decades, the proposal of a supranational union between Russia and those countries is met with overwhelming support across the citizenries of those states.

How plausible is this scenario?