Random "hard" sci-fi question(s)

[Oxymoron]

Now that's interesting...


On that space-opera roleplay / space empire game I'm playing, the galaxy my empire is originating from is scheduled for an Apocalypse in less than a month (meaning, in short, that the galaxy will be erased). This has been prepared in roleplay for the last four to five month, culminating now in the displacement of my whole empire toward a new galaxy. A galaxy which itself is scheduled to end in less than 140 days (galaxies have a lifespan of 365 days, for gameplay reason).

My Empire knows that, and as a result has adopted the policy of not even trying to integrate into this new galaxy, and instead is focusing on the "next" migration.

Basically, my people is becoming adept at surfing from one doomed galaxy to another in order to survive. And it is not alone in doing that, as it is in an alliance with a number of other Empires from its original, home galaxy. And the thing is that together we're strong enough to crush the new galaxy we're in to a bloody pulp, even while being outnumbered almost ten-to-one... or at least that's what the locals believe and they leave us in peace, and even try to get into our good side.

Because the thing is, that galaxy is at war with itself, divided into three competing "families" (in the Mafia sense) of allied Empires. And while this war has already caused thousands of billions of casualties throughout the galaxy from of the use of weapons of destructive power so high as to boggle the mind (touching hundreds of planets in dozens of systems through the use of One. Single. Bomb.), it's still less bad than the mess we left behind us.

Because, you see, to be authorized to leave our Galaxy, God himself gave us an ultimatum. It was an all or nothing, a condition we had to all meet or noone would be allowed into the next galaxy. We would all be denied survival. Another Galaxy refused the deal, and God walled it, dooming it to extinction. We, on the other hand, took into our own hand to exterminate all of those who would doom us all by their refusal to meet God's demand.


So now we are, Harbingers of the Apocalypse, riding from Doomed Galaxies to Doomed Galaxies, with only our own survival in mind at the expense of all who would get in our way.

And we are only getting stronger.


Man, that's bleak...


It is a good thing, though, that to mitigate this the leader of our group of survivors cares genuinely not only for the survival of her own, but also to ensure that there is Peace where we are - or at least for us not to be the cause of the trouble as long as it can be avoided. She is, after all, a master at subjugating whoever she comes in contact with - why, she managed to unite our Galaxy, after all.

[Oxymoron]

The following happen in the hours before a Galaxy (named Eveil, "Awakening" in French) is erased from existence by the all-powerful God of the setting. Espoir ("Hope" in French) is the name of another galaxy, one which will survive this apocalypse.

---------------------------------


On the walls of the deserted Galactic Assembly, a lone graffiti :

last one out, turn off the light

***

On the old capital of the United Worlds' Federation...

Those who elected not to evacuate to Espoir gather around a fire in the cold night, telling each other their stories as they wait for the end.

Raising their head they can see the pearly white stars gleaming in the obsidian sky, the streets of the planetary capital being plunged in perfect darkness, as all the lights have been turned off, with the machines that made the world a living place.

In a few hours dawn will come. And Eveil will be erased from existence.

***

The same scene repeat, with minor variations, on all the old worlds of the Federation ; worlds now deserted by all but a few, back to their original states.

***

A man's voice, in the twilight of an old library.


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

-- T. S. Elliott, "The Hollow Men"


" This how our world end : not with a cry, nor anger, but with silent resignation. "

The sound of a book being closed can be heard.

" The time has come to meet our creator. "

***

In the sky the stars burn.

Eternal.

[Oxymoron]

What does it tell about your sci-fi universe when only 100,000 soldiers can take an heavily defended world inhabited by around 8 billion people in the span of a few hours / days, and death tolls counting in the billions are just another monday in the life of your Empire ?

[Oxymoron]

Also, in that game there's an option to "diplomatically" rally a world, by sending your diplomats on the planet. And depending on the difference between the average happiness level of your civilization and the happiness level of the planet, and on the number of diplomats you sent, the mission will or will not be a success.


... Standard operating procedure to "even the odds" is to launch orbital attacks on the population centers, with death tolls being around two and four billions dead on average, to lower the planet's happiness level.


Funnily enough, my own empire (which started as a mercenary company) find the practice barbaric, and prefer to attack with "kamikaze" ships (single-use) taking control of the planet's vital infrastructure (the aforementioned "100,000 soldiers").

When direct military aggression is considered by a group of ruthless bastards to be less barbaric than so-called "diplomatic conquests", you know there's something seriously fucked up somewhere.

[Oxymoron]

You know, I find I really like the Asimov concept of "Hyperfusion jumps".

It's basically technobabble to explain FTL, and the mechanism is roughly : "stay where you are, charge the hyperfusion drives for X amount of time, and when it's ready, click the launch button, and *poof* you got instantaneously slipped through hyperspace to your destination".

It's really elegant I find, and can make up for interesting intrigues. Example the Foundation Series :

A plot point is that the Foundation's ship doesn't have to take as long to compute the destination / charge the drives before each jump, giving it the ability to do series of jumps faster than any other ship in the galaxy - effectively making it faster without needing to have a much more powerful drive.

[Oxymoron]

This may be an interesting case study for energy weapons :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

TL;DR : guy get head bored through by a particle beam, survive with almost no sequels

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

From what litlte I know of them its not terribly suprising. I've read some arguments that PBW are overrated for doing damage (although they have the potential for that) and their main value in the SDI was for the ion-cannon like effects (which kinda surprised me because I thought the ion cannon stuff was shit. Live and learn.) But basically particle beams are way more penetrative than lasers (how penetrative is a bit variable depending on factors - 'alpha' radiation are a kind of particle moving at some fraction of lightspeed yet have shit penetration, but beta particles - electrons - are highly penetrating.) and will deposit their energy deeper inside the target rather than the 'drilling from the surface' of a laser. That basically seems to be what is described there, although there isn't much detail I can discern about the nature of the holes or burning

[Oxymoron]

Proton beam = hydrogen plasma jet thrown at relativistic speed.

To make an analogy, you know how the industry use high pressure water jets to cut steel plates which are more than a centimeter thick ? I think that's kind of the same mechanism at work here.

[Kryten]

It didn't actually drill a hole-the tissue around the entry and exits later peeled away due to the massive localised radiation poisoning. Chances are there wouldn't even have been any visible damage, before things started swelling.

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

Proton beam = hydrogen plasma jet thrown at relativistic speed.

To make an analogy, you know how the industry use high pressure water jets to cut steel plates which are more than a centimeter thick ? I think that's kind of the same mechanism at work here.

Well its not hard to make a particle beam do damage potentially - enough energy delivered quickly enough in a small enough area = small explosions inside the target, heating, etc. where did you hear that it was a hydrogen particle beam? I've not found any references to that.

It didn't actually drill a hole-the tissue around the entry and exits later peeled away due to the massive localised radiation poisoning. Chances are there wouldn't even have been any visible damage, before things started swelling.

WEll from the pictures I managed to dig up on the net it looks like there was at least some burning on the outside and back (the sources mention thermal damage to some degree as well, which isn't unheard of with radiation anyhow.) Thats the funny thing about PBs vs lasers, they don't have to make a hole ot neccesarily penetrate, because to a particle beam matter is rather porous anyhow.

I have found alot of oddities reported about the incident - much of the injury he did suffer seemed to be long term rather than immediate, but they oddly imply his tissues were 'burning' even months or years after, which strikes me as odd. I keep wondering if it was some sort of decay or degeneration (rather than combustion) that set in and did the damage.

[Oxymoron]

Hydrogen is a single proton orbited by a single electron.

A single proton without its orbiting electron is, in effect, hydrogen ion / plasma.

[Shroom Man 777]

in a sci-fi world where (possibly cloned) people have enhanced cybernetic brains connected to the net so their digital communications merges with thoughts and sensations

some bad guys or evil corporations or something or terrorizers,whatever, it's some plot device:

you can't hack the brain-nets directly but they create a biotech virus thing that infects the person and fucks up their cyberbrain

while they have fever dreams their cyberbrains start transmitting infective signals so your computer virus is spread by a real virus that physically biologically infects a cyberbrain but the real virus is artificially modified so aside from infecting DNAs, it also infects wetware and cybernetics and spreads digital infections

its a half-organic/half-cybernetic/half-genetic virusbomb

i'm thinking of some plot, vague, there's this subculture using pirated and self-made clone organs and clone bodies and stuff but against the law man, because corporations control the government so the corporations probably decide to engineer a virus that will specifically destroy pirated fake non-branded generic artificial organs and this will actually genocide all the poor people using cheap artificial parts but since they're guilty of ORGANIC PIRACY

so sucks to be them

so you get diseased and your brain fucks up and your implanted brain computer and brain wifi will send infective signals to everyone else and infect them while you also physically spread germs

the physical virus is designed to infect the brain but encoded in the virus is some biodigital nano-shit that's meant to hack into the cybernetics


its like the Ghost in the Shell brainhacking, but I'm assuming that the wireless signals would be more secure and the cyberbrains and meatbrains have safety systems to prevent being fucked up by remote signals

so it necessitates a physically infective infection to actually directly fuck up the person's meat and brains from inside

[RyanThunder]

That's actually a pretty cool premise. Where would you go with it?

[evilsoup]

it could end with some corporate fucks clinking their glasses over a job well done as the bottom, redundant (too poor to buy shit, not needed for gruntwork now that there are cheap robots to do it) 10% of the population are wiped out, freeing up the slum areas to be redeveloped into boutique vinyards/spas (with cyberwine massages etc.)

Shroom have you read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and/or The Year of the Flood? The first is about a fuckup liberal arts type who is all envious of his high-flying genetic engineer friend in a corporate-dominated ecological-catastrophy shithole of a planet. They have games like thorns and roses, in which (IIRC) one player has to list human atrocities and extinct species, and the other has to balance things out with good things we've done.

The second is set in the same world, focusing on the God's Gardeners, a little eco-friendly hippy pacifist religion trying to survive in the same corporate-dominated world & waiting for the 'waterless flood'. If you haven't read these, go for Oryx and Crake first, since Year of the Flood has some spoilers for Oryx and Crake.

It doesn't do the cyber-brain iKidney 4 etc. stuff that you like to talk about, but I think you'd grok the general setting (and the books are very well-written, the characters are well-realised and so on)

[RyanThunder]

That'd be pretty unfortunate if he ended it that way.

Because that's a really shitty ending.

[evilsoup]

OK then
maybe superwikileaks finds the papertrail and gives it to the independent press, who release it in a timely but responsible manner which leads to a public outcry and the courts intervene and the corporation is forced to release a cure and then go to prison forever and the people realise 'my god what are we doing' and everyone forms workers co-operatives and everything is sunshine and happiness forever

[Shroom Man 777]

actually the original inception of the idea wasn't actually a corporate-made virus to kill poor people who pirate fake non-corporate post-organs

it was actually a poor terrorizer rebel bioweapon to attack and hack corporate PMCs whose enhancile interbrain battlenetworks are unhackable, necessitating a physical infective means to subvert individual minds and through that access the larger network and disrupt it

so it can either be a weapon for the megacorps or the ragtag rebels actually


ANYWAY

we were thinking that the nanobiocyberweapon ends up MUTATING and it starts infecting ANYONE, irregardless of whether their organs are pirated or corporate-branded

it spreads like wildfire, people are getting infected, their brains are scrambling, and the infection also goes digital and people are being infected wirelessly, etc.

BUT!

the virus is interconnecting all these minds to spread, and in accessing and scrambling each brain's total thought output, and in accumulating all of that... it becomes - guess what - self-aware

and it has access to all these thoughts and feelings and emotions. rather than become an evil AI, it actually becomes the ultimate empathic mind consciousness!

and these fever-dreaming people stop fevering. they fall into a slumber and dream, dreams beyond dreams, they all dream the same dream as all their minds interconnect

is it the beginning of a grand hivemind? the AI borne from these interconnections.... it keeps the individuals individuals yet also interlinks them. its a collective but it doesn't totally subsume the individuals

and the AI and the virus and stuff, which mutates, and which is now an empathic distributed consciousness, begins to make the infected... better. stronger. faster. minds in harmony with their fellow infected humans. empathic. without boundaries.

the infected wakeup, they are now mutants, and they are evolving into transhumans. into beings beyond the iBrains, beyond the post-organs.

The corporations and the general populace and the un-infected freak the fuck out. This is worse than a biodigital pandemic. Fucking hell. It's like the X-Men mutants. The corps send PMCs and fucking Sentinels to try to pacify this threat. Also, because they want to isolate the virus and control it, because everyone turning into an ultimate empathic interconnected ubermensch transhuman would CUT INTO THEIR PROFITS.


So things start fucking up I guess. The virus will spread, there will be pockets of infected-evolving-transhuman-mutants. But they will be marginalized and persecuted and feared. If they are allowed to spread, they will totally disrupt and usurp the hegemonic world structure of prefabricated post-organoid controlled corporate-manufactured branded mass produced humans that the powers that be control so easily and so well.

The distributed viral mind knows that it can't keep its eggs in one basket, so if there are infections in space colonies and ships and such, the transhumanoid mutants there go "fuck this" and ditch and go into deep space or wherever to continue to evolve. These splinter strains can attain godhood, or turn into horrors, or end up in event horizons where one won't need eyes where they're going, all sorts of zany shit. They can return ten thousand years later to bring forth their godhead.

While on Earth? Who knows. It can be ambiguous. The interconnected evolving mutants will be shamanic, or at least they will have shaman leaders, because you need shamans to go into THE WEIRDING WAY and interconnect with all these minds in this ever-spreading branching out SOULTREE that the viral empathy has created. Maybe there can be a MUA'DIB, one who can effortlessly and controlledly subsume himself into the collective unconscious and steer the paths of fate and such.

The end will be ambiguous and involve an acid trip.

[RyanThunder]

OK then
maybe superwikileaks finds the papertrail and gives it to the independent press, who release it in a timely but responsible manner which leads to a public outcry and the courts intervene and the corporation is forced to release a cure and then go to prison forever and the people realise 'my god what are we doing' and everyone forms workers co-operatives and everything is sunshine and happiness forever

Or something more interesting than "welp, bad guise win lol" happens. Like what Shroom just described there.

[Shroom Man 777]

the terrible thing when you go to fucked up weird high ideas like this is that it becomes uncontainable and too huge

[Shroom Man 777]

note that i am bouncing these ideas with some comrades

including my collaborator in Jaded Chronicles

At the end of the story, antagonist leaps towards the hero, who has already become enlightened, and she/she slices his throat. the hero while dying says: "Too late, one cannot kill me... because...

- Because, someone else with the voice of the hero continues, to kill the Boddhisattva, you would have to also have killed me... "And each hobo, each person speaks now with the voice of the hero: "I am the collective man. He who shows the way "

Reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Plunge in the sand of planet: "I am the Earth which awaits the seed!" the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. Water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire

holy shit it infects the entire planet yes

the rebels somehow gain more metaphysical powers while the uninfected corporates stay uninfected

but how?

it turns out the virus has viroided the ecosystem!

then the transhumans turn blue and fucking tall and stab the powersuits with giant spears (this line is in jest!)

or maybe it could all be a dream
a dream yet to come
or a dream far gone

it BECOMES a dream. the infection gains critical mass, it starts spreading thought-signals. and even the uninfected get affected

even if their brains are unplugged and sealed. you end up with an alan moore thing. THE APOCALYPSE. the REVELATION. old humanity's preconceptions, their outdated ideas, the world as they see it in their brains, it is destroyed and overriden with this magnificent explosion of collective empathy and transubstantiation. it is the INSTRUMENTALITY. the SINGULARITY!!!

in a way this is immortality. minds transubstantiate and become fluid. no longer restrained to mere physical limits and no longer restrained to singular selves or beings. thoughts and memories, the perception of reality as seen by the heart of the mind and the eye, this all becomes altered and transmuted as the DREAM SYNTHESIS takes place. the results... we cannot know, for we ourselves are not shamans, or are not shamanic enough! it is a new beginning, a new reality, a world with no boundaries, the liberty we have won for ourselves, an outer heaven!



the analysis of the mind and humanity and shit
this is something independent of cyber and punk
cyber and punk has it
but it doesn't need cyber or punk
you end up stabbing into something fundamentally human
ALCHEMY, MYSTICISM, MAGIC

[Oxymoron]

these ideas

I like them.

[evilsoup]

this is so weird, my planned EPIC SCI-FI TRILOGY has almost the same thing but with aliens too
(OK and it's psychic rather than cybernetics, so not hard SF at all but lol whatever)

first humanity crystallises into a sort of hive-mind with shared hallucinations and shared emotions. The memories of people who have died can continue interacting with people in the shared hallucination -- sort of like the thing the Cylons had in nBSG -- where they fade into shadows of their former selves as people forget who they really were. The me who exists in my mind vs the me who exists in your mind and so on.

Physical bodies become increasingly irrelevant as people can see things from others' perspectives -- and more than that: since everyone lives in a shared hallucination (laid over the real world), you can effectively go anywhere in the world and interact with the people there as if you were there, while actually being in your own home. I figure the combined subconscious would avoid people accidentally walking off of cliffs.

the first book would be about the formation of this world-mind and the increasingly panicked reaction to it by the world governments, up to nukes -- though there are also psychic attacks on the military installations to forcibly (and traumatically) bring the soldiers there into the world-mind, with the climax of the book being the leader of the super secret x-files men-in-black getting brought into the fold and shown all the people he's killed in trying to stop it (because they stay around as memory-ghosts); and as memories and feelings are stored (each member of the world-mind feels what the others are feeling), he feels the pain and fear that they felt as they were shot or burned or whatever

it's an apocalypse in the original sense of 'revelation'

anyway after that it turns out that there are aliens who have formed other world-minds -- some similar to humanity, but most others are obviously... alien -- but regardless of that, the slow process of communication between the various world-minds continues, with the very long-term thing being an eventual merging of all the life in the galaxy (and maybe in the end, the universe). I also have a bunch of Omega Point stuff planned -- God creates Itself, so in a sense it already exists, but also it is in the process of being formed by the gradual coming-together of life

there are some aliens that live exclusively in space, in regimented, really hierarchical societies (with rules about who has to bow to whom, and how low they have to bow, and etc. etc.) -- because reducing empathy and enforcing artificial structures are the only way they can avoid being swallowed up (as they see it) by the world-minds. I figure they kidnapped some people from the Earth before it all kicked off there, and the protag of the second book is the descendent of one of those humans, who ends up exploring the galaxy and eventually joins up with the world-minds/nascent galaxy-mind.

Then some other aliens -- who are all for TECHNOLOGY and COLD HARD FACTS and are terrified by all of this hippy mind-fuck hive-mind stuff -- from another galaxy declare war on the world-minds, because they see them as a threat. The same reaction as the governments of Earth to the world-mind forming there, it is driven by paranoia and fear, but it is written larger -- whole planets incinerated, and the survivors flooded with ghosts and memories and pain, with the psychic backwash of the agony of the people (humans and dozens of kinds of aliens) who are burned alive by the death-rays crippling the response of the world-minds

The only way to protect against the existential, individuality-destroying threat of the world-minds is to wipe it out entirely, and so that is what these alien technocrats try to do.

In counter-attack, the world-minds try to forcibly induct the Andromidans into their psychic fold, with some success -- but the Andromidans will burn their own worlds, such is their fear. Some people try to commune with the God (that is creating itself through the world-minds and the nascent galaxy-mind) at the centre of the galaxy (but doesn't need a space-ship), but it is to the world-minds as they are to a given individual, and transcendent to boot -- to it, all of this has already happened, and is currently happening, and will happen in the future.

I'm not sure how to actually end it, though I do know that someone gets sent back in time to be the original seed around which Earth's world-mind crystallised. Probably the aliens see the error of their ways and join the galaxy-mind.

[Oxymoron]

I didn't know whether to put this in the videogame thread or the "Analyzing Fiction" thread, so I'll put this here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0

[Oxymoron]

So I had a bit of funtime with some sci-fi concepts on that Rp thing...

Context : in an humorous conversation between various rulers, members of an alliance, one ruler jockingly point out that one the rulers, a dog-shaped robot, is the only non-human in the group.

This is my ruler's reaction (her name's Sati) :


----------

" Technically speaking, I think we hardly count as 'human' anymore... "

Another Sati come through the door into the room, continuing the sentence of the first.

" ... Given the level of biogenetic and cybernetic modifications that we have underwent. "

The two women encounter each other face to face, holding their hands ; both dissolving in a few seconds in a cloud of pale pink, the cloud re-composing itself in a single and unique Sati.

" Though I believe such considerations are, at this point, more philosophical than practical. "

----------

It is to be noted that her external appearance is that of a middle aged woman.


What's funny is that this character has had this ability since before she met everyone in that room, long ago, but this is literally the first time people have been made aware of her "innate" abilities. It comes out as "out of left field" when it was in fact part of her background and abilities all along.

[Oxymoron]

WRITING