adr wrote:anywho i'm simultaneously writing up some overview of the backstory of my fanfiction
i wanna talk about a little bit of this here too
so one part of it is colony ships from future earth go to another star. the end result is:
1) the ppl who land on the planet lose all their tech and shit. a few thousand years later, they believe themselves to be native to the planet and there's no solid evidence discovered down there to contradict this (no ship wreckages, high tech artifacts, anything like that) for a long time.
2) there's no evidence left in planetary orbit, so the reborn civilization's space program doesn't hit hard evidence either
3) but there ARE other colonists from the expedition that still lived on in solar orbit, at like the L4 point with the sun or something like that. it is the discovery of them, a loooong time later, that finally proves the ancient astronaut theorists right
oh my god ANCIENT ALIENS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!11!!1!!!11!!11!11!111
so i had previously had some fun shit with creationism in there
(PS the creationists are kinda right, as they are descendants of genetically engineered ppl)
but now i have to work this in
NARRATOR: "Could this be the result of a natural process? Or, is it, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, due to deliberate terraforming performed ten thousand years ago?"
ARGUER 1: "So you say this is the result of an evilutationary process. Then, where are the intermediate species?"
ARGUER 2: "What the fuck makes you think there /would/ be any intermediate species? There ain't no record of that shit in the fossil record for anything, it seems to be more of a punctuated equilibrium with rapid change in the middle of long periods of not much changing."
ARGUER 1: "Rapid change == ancient alien terraforming efforts."
ARGUER 2: "Where's the evidence that these aliens even exist?"
ARGUER 1: "YOU AND ME!!!!!!!!!!"
ARGUER 2: "YOU'RE BEGGING THE QUESTION!!!!!!!!"
ARGUER 1: "I'LL BEG YOUR QUESTION!"
ARGUER 2: "wait what"
*cue porno music*
ANYWAY
so the thing is how to explain the collapse of civilization on the planet with the varied outcomes with the ppl in orbit? see if the planet was in trouble, surely the orbital folks would try to do something to help, they're all part of the same colonial expedition
before i was thinking it was a kind of political schism. so they *could* help but didn't want to. earthquakes are killing them all? fuck those assholes.
(and then later, the space peeps have some trouble, and now there are no more planet faction to help, even if they wanted to, which is why high technology mostly collapsed in there too)
and i still kinda like that, but if it was a schism, why would they go so far away to L4? high earth orbit is still pretty isolated yet close enough to grab materials if need be, and if they were planetary colonizers in the first place, they might not even have the fuel to burn on that trip anyway
but now i'm thinking it could be a navigational error. they didn't decelerate just right and missed the planet, thus falling into the other orbit accidentally without enough fuel to join the others (and similarly the others didn't have enough fuel to mount a rescue)
and then being ill prepared for this - they were planning to land - they had to just make due with what they had... and it didn't quite work out, which is why they fell.
but then the odd thing is finding survivors still living in there (stargate planets of a week in o'neill cylinders!) thousands of years later. if they were able to build habitats, they'd be able to build ships to rejoin the others.
so maybe the "fuck you" way is still the best to achieve all my goals. i just don't feel that it makes sense for all these civilizations to fall without *some* good reason, and fuck you falls kinda short for that in space.
maybe a solar storm, but if they were living in space, they'd have to be ready for that kind of thing anyway. but perhaps this sun is different than the sun they came from and they weren't ready for the specifics?
i've heard solar induced geomagnetic storms can fuck shit up on earth, so an unprepared space hab cluster getting clobbered just might cause enough devastation to plausible knock them all out at once, so they can't bail each other out
hmmm i kinda like it
MAN TO NATURE: "i control you"
NATURE TO MAN: "no you don't"
edit: actually i'm pretty sure i discussed
exactly this with jung a couple (maybe even three or four!) years ago, when the colonization thing first struck me, IIRC the solar storm thing was actually his idea back then. at the time though i don't think i embraced it - if i did, it would just be a "fact" already and i wouldn't be thinking so much about it now. but yeah i'm reconsidering it now
and i like it a lot this time