I've been slack, have some fic · 12:34am Apr 11th, 2016
So I started writing a thing, and I talked to the bisexual monstrosity who cannot be contained some guy named Chuck about it, and he suggested I make it an anthology.
And then some really cool people started showing interest in the idea, and it seemed like a thing that I could actually do.
The premise after the break.
Some thousand years from now, humanity has spread out among the stars. The singularity came and went, artificial intelligence and automization dominate the workforce and afford a generous universal income, so that no human being who doesn't want to work is forced to.
Faster than Light travel is ubiquitous. The galaxy is largely populated in the few spots worth populating, and because mass interplanetary freight shipping is so prevalent, it's allowed entire planets to specialize into specific purposes.
Then false vacuum collapse happens and the universe transitions into a lower energy state.
The more complicated the technology, the more likely it simply doesn't exist within the confines of the new universal law. FTL is rendered impossible in seconds, complicated artificial intelligences crash and cannot reboot, instantaneous communication is bricked and suddenly...
Everyone is isolated.
Everyone in the wide, wide galaxy is stuck, and can once more feel just how incomprehensibly vast the universe is. Every tether has been cut, every outside connection. Imports and exports cease to be. Humanity, as a species, largely composed of people who had never worked a day in their life, is now violently thrust back into the necessity of labour.
What happens?
Would a world dedicated to the production of cars from raw materials, a planet designed from the foundry to the mill to the assembly line, have any need of farms? It'd just be a liability to have an EPA on such a planet after all.
What of families and long distance relationships? What of planets dedicated to retirement homes or the wealthy or slums? What happens when the system that enabled their very existence simply stops existing?
And can you sell me that idea in around four thousand words?
I'm putting a GDocs link to my own short in the comments section here, but that's basically the long and the short of it.
As promised
A fantastic concept as always.
Sounds sexy.
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Why are you linking a first draft of something that's obviously going to be changed when other authors have contributed their own, superior takes on your concept?
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Don't be a dick. It's more for posterity and proof that I'm actually writing at the moment than anything else. I mean, it does need some serious work, but I think that's a little too harsh about it.
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It sucks, and it's not going to fit the tone of any of the other contributors. Just scrap it.
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Go fuck yourself, I'll do something about it after I get the new Mare who Once Lived on the Moon chapter finished, since it's taking longer than even I anticipated. It'll get done.
Any fic about the fragility of a society built on a complex infrastructure of interlocking mechanisms is always fun in my book.
3861665 You three need to settle down and work on writing.
3861702 Are you blind? THERE ARE FOUR NUMBERS!
I've seen similar concepts, but I don't think I've run into the combination of complex technology failing with specialized planets angle before. Neat! It will be interesting to see who runs with the idea and where they go.
xcom soldiers for my character pool
3861665 All of you hush, he's awesome and you know it.
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Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait
Around four thousand words
Four Numbers
Is this part of some larger plan, Numberses? Are you all trying to manipulate us into a cruel fate, to play us like a fiddle?
Fie at you.
Sounds like a setting ripe for allegorical exploration of modern-day issues.
That is to say, sounds like good old-fashioned sci-fi.
I believe the Hyperion Cantos winds up doing something vaguely similar with the collapse of the farcaster network, though I don't recall how it turned out.
I keep forgetting to actually get on Skype and chat at you, but hopefully Chuck passed on my interest. We should talk about getting more ideas down into a sort of "series bible" authors can use to refer to common elements (and avoid rewriting the same story others are doing). This post is a good start -- the actual mechanism of the collapse makes a big difference for some of the story ideas I was thinking of.
We should also talk about my story ideas.
So you can use them for your own nefarious purposes?
So, opinions:
Okay, so people don't need to work. That means they have absolutely no need to really study and improve themselves/technology, leading to some major stagnation. What if instead you just say everyone gets a fixed pay whatever they do (enough for a comfortable life and it would allow maybe an interstellar vacation every two years), but if they want to pay for that new marble fountain in the garden, they need to work. Would give a bit more brainpower to work with.
Earth would be hit massively, but in the long run it would probably fare the best, simply because it is chock full of books which should keep working, so after the famine/wars/mass riots calm down (read:enough people die), it has a good chance of recovering. Cus I would guess most information is now lost on a lot of other planets.
What could be wrong... maybe simply electrons now go a different direction and due to everyone being lazy bums (and no communications to relay the information anyways) it would take a LOT of time figuring it out. Also you would have almost no tools to rework everything in a flipped direction.
I really like this guy.
Uh, wouldn't the universe as we know it simply cease to exist? Literally everything is transformed in some fashion, from my understanding of the phenomenon described.
Literally the entirety of the universe changes state, including all the particles. Doesn't that destroy everything? Or is the idea that when the universe transitions, it keeps a base level of what exists, just more esoteric forces (which apparently are the laws of physics that enable FTL and high technology in this universe) suddenly change into other, new forces?
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My explanation for this is quantum immortality: Absolutely, all but one universe in a googolplex would be eradicated by this. This is about that one universe in the infinite where the change is the absolute bare minimum.
Because otherwise there'd be no survivors to tell the tale.
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What she said! This sounds great!
The backstory to Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky contains a related incident in which the Zones of Thought place absolute limits on technology. Advanced societies run closer and closer to the limits, with smaller and smaller margins for error... which makes it very easy for a small perturbation to cause massive collapse. Only the intervention of the Qeng Ho fleet prevents disaster from overtaking an entire solar system in this scenario.
Also recommended: Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, in which the phase transition propagates at only half the speed of light.