Poniternity I: The Paradise Culture · 9:59pm Jul 23rd, 2015
Introduction
"Poniternity" is my shorthand for any story about the Poniverse set a millennium or more in the future, when the Ponies have culturally-merged with the other sapient races of the Earth, spread far beyond the Solar System and amalgamated with the many other sapient races of the Universe, reaching out toward other Galaxies and Universes. In the process, they have become immortal, massively-enhanced their minds and capabilities, and become what amounts to allies of the Cosmic Concepts (all Families) in protecting our Multiversal Bundle from invasion and Paradox. It is essentially the same thing as the "Transcendance" from my original science fiction, and indeed logically would meet and merge with the Human-originated Transcendance at some point.
The idea's rather hazy now, and the form I envisioned it in was the Poniverse as it might exist around YOH 11500 (that is to say, ten thousand years After Luna's Return). So I'll just discuss some of my ideas here, starting with The Paradise Culture.
I. The Paradise Culture
Following the Restoration of the World That Was Lost, the most benign and happy members of the harsher Pony culture of Equestria merged with the restored Ponies of Paradise to create a civilization run by the Paradise Entity and its many, many offspring for the benefit of those members of Ponykind who dwell within it. This is essentially an extremely polite ultratechnological anarcho-socialism in which superintelligent machine minds, like that of the Original Paradise Entity, devote small fractions of their vast intellects to running things and provide a world of endless play for the Ponies who dwell within it.
They have come to eschew planets as too random and natural, and instead dwell in vast artificial worlds equipped with FTL drives, arcologies they call the Carriages. They generate tremendous quantities of intellectual property which the controlling Entities trade with other civilizations for whatever the Culture is short of at any particular moment. Their vast mobile arcologies are capable of tremendous industrial productivity, and they have built some specialized Carriages which can dismantle whole planetary systems for raw materials, or convert them into Dysons to use the power of their stars.
The Paradise Culture is peaceful but not pacifistic, and maintains a signficant warfleet and various covert and special forces groups to deal with hostile civilizations or (the ultimate nightmare) an invasion by the Shadows. The Defense Carriages of the Paradise Culture are among the most powerful combatant units in the multiversal bundle, exceeded in fighting capability perhaps only by Luna's Chariots; they are much faster, maneuverable and more heavily-armed than the General Service Carriages.
They could be completely immortal, but most of them prefer to relinquish their biological forms after centuries or millennia, and be reborn from the memory banks of the Entities, able to access their former memories and personalities. Thus, they enjoy tremendous freedom and variety in their long, long lives.
This is, essentially Iain Banks' Culture, populated by Ponies and reimagined by someone who understands economic and information theory and hence that "post-scarcity" is meaningful only relative to a particular demanded good or service. As far as most of the Paradise Ponies are concerned, their Culture is post-scarcity.
This is less the case from the point of view of the Entities, or the very intelligent, immortal and powerful Ponies who aid them (such as Pinkie Pie herself). From their point of view, supply and demand still operate, and one has to go to work to bake the goods, even if the "goods" are now colossal star-traveling carriages and star-enveloping dysons.
Many of the other Pony civilizations view the Paradise Culture as far too hedonistic and the lives of its members as essentially frivolous and silly. Both the Entities and the Paradise Ponies themselves would point out that pleasure and good cheer are what Ponies strive for anyway: why should they not enjoy what they have achieved? Others point out that the Paradise Ponies are little more than the pets of the super-intelligent Entities, and those Ponies who have risen to Entity-like power (such as Pinkie and her sisters); against this, the Paradise Culture can justifiably point out that anypony can take on whatever level of intellect, power and responsibility they choose to handle: most just choose to enjoy their lives in endless leisure.
Well, this seems like it's going to be a very interesting blog series. I look forward to it.
by god, please make this a story, I love hard Sci-fi ponies and I find that there is not enough of those type of stories out there and that is frustrating me. with the qualities of your work so far that I have seen and the great blog post artificial on speculation of the far future of equinanity.
Hell if you do that I would offer to do the cover art for you are willing
you can look at my FIM fiction page art gallery or My Devientart page here if you are interested and pm when you got the chance.
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That's basically what 90% of Jordan's fic's continuity is based in. Just, you know, most of them haven't gone very far down the timeline.
/waves hands unhappily.
Hell, the bleeding Shadow War hinted everywhere isn't even written yet, besides the story-verse title.
Though I certainly wouldn't mind a collab with my own characters, a small bunch of near sociopathic isolationists obsessed with collecting knowledge, not getting nuked for using dark magic, and doing research.
Did you write more on this?
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Well, I wrote Poniternity II: The Coalescence of the Changelings. Just as "The Paradise Culture" was a homage to Iain Banks, the use of the term "Coalescence" to describe the Changelings is a homage to Stephen Baxter. Though the element I got most from Stephen Baxter's novel Coalescence was the idea of not-very-bright Hive Minds as coordinating agencies for the Hives.