Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

[Clonus]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

I have certainly heard of the Fermi Paradox, but this is the first time I've heard it rephrased from "Where are they?" to "Why haven't they committed genocide on us?"

 

They would no more be committing genocide on us than we are committing genocide on the hypothetical tool using descendants of tree shrews who will never come into existence, because we already occupy that ecological niche. They would simply be here first. Thus, no us.

 

The point about paranoia raises the question: is it paranoia if they are really out to get you? And is it paranoid to be afraid of the paranoid?

 

Let me explain.

 

There are two situations here. Imagine that you and a another person were marooned, all alone on a tiny island.

 

Situation one is if you are a mentally ill paranoid person. Then you would try to kill the other because you are paranoid.

 

Situation two is if you are perfectly sane, but the other person is paranoid and is trying to kill you. In that case the safe route is also to kill the other person, to protect your own life. You've got to sleep sometime.

 

The only case when it does not make sense to kill the other if you are both sane and are 100% sure the other is sane.

 

That's a crazy person's rationale and it suffers from two problems. The first is, you aren't 100% sure that you CAN kill the other guy. What if you miss? What if there's a third party watching or liable to come around afterward who will figure out that you are a danger to everyone around you them included. You can very easily have increased your chance of getting whacked. Also of course it is unlikely that two independantly developed tool using species will be close enough in their level of technological sophistication that they CAN post a threat of annihilation to each other. The threat, if it exists, will be entirely one-sided, so the more advanced species has no justification for their paranoia in the first place.

[Doc]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Well, there is some controversy on that point.

 

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#killingstar

 

When we put our heads together and tried to list everything we could say with certainty about other civilizations, without having actually met them, all that we knew boiled down to three simple laws of alien behavior:

 

1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.

If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.

 

2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS.

No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.

 

3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.

 

But then these optimists make the jump: If we are wise enough to survive and not wipe ourselves out, we will be peaceful -- so peaceful that we will not wipe anybody else out, and as we are below on Earth, so other people will be above.

 

This is a non sequitur, because there is no guarantee that one follows the other, and for a very important reason: "They" are not part of our species.

 

Presumably there is some sort of inhibition against killing another member of our own species, because we have to work to overcome it...

 

But the rules do not apply to other species. Both humans and wolves lack inhibitions against killing chickens.

 

Humans kill other species all the time, even those with which we share the common bond of high intelligence. As you read this, hundreds of dolphins are being killed by tuna fishermen and drift netters. The killing goes on and on, and dolphins are not even a threat to us.

 

 

 

As near as we can tell, there is no inhibition against killing another species simply because it displays a high intelligence. So, as much as we love him, Carl Sagan's theory that if a species makes it to the top and does not blow itself apart, then it will be nice to other intelligent species is probably wrong. Once you admit interstellar species will not necessarily be nice to one another simply by virtue of having survived, then you open up this whole nightmare of relativistic civilizations exterminating one another.

 

It's an entirely new situation, emerging from the physical possibilities that will face any species that can overcome the natural interstellar quarantine of its solar system. The choices seem unforgiving, and the mind struggles to imagine circumstances under which an interstellar species might make contact without triggering the realization that it can't afford to be proven wrong in its fears.

 

Got that? We can't afford to wait to be proven wrong.

 

They won't come to get our resources or our knowledge or our women or even because they're just mean and want power over us. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival, even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk...

 

 

Well, even if a species has to learn cooperativeness to get out of its stellar system, that is only being cooperative with other members of its own species. There is no guarantee it will cooperate with members of a different species, like us.

 

As I quoted above:

 

 

The point about paranoia raises the question: is it paranoia if they are really out to get you? And is it paranoid to be afraid of the paranoid?

 

Let me explain.

 

There are two situations here. Imagine that you and a another person were marooned, all alone on a tiny island.

 

Situation one is if you are a mentally ill paranoid person. Then you would try to kill the other because you are paranoid.

 

Situation two is if you are perfectly sane, but the other person is paranoid and is trying to kill you. In that case the safe route is also to kill the other person, to protect your own life. You've got to sleep sometime.

 

The only case when it does not make sense to kill the other if you are both sane and are 100% sure the other is sane.

 

When you replace the two people with two interstellar species, keep in mind that they are gambling with the existence of their entire species. What is the acceptable risk to run with your species existence? 50% chance of becoming extinct? 25%? 10%?

 

The only acceptable risk is 0%

 

This is a variation on the Prisoners Dilemma.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#prisonersdilemma

 

 

This all comes to a head with the addition of relativistic weapons (R-bombs). The trouble with them is that they are basically unstoppable. If they are moving faster than 90% c, you never see or detect them where they are now, only where they were. You would first detect them a few seconds before they hit and eliminated all life on your planet.

 

So if one species becomes aware of another interstellar species, the safe thing for species one to do is to commit genocide before the other species discovers them.

 

They would no more be committing genocide on us than we are committing genocide on the hypothetical tool using descendants of tree shrews who will never come into existence, because we already occupy that ecological niche. They would simply be here first. Thus, no us.

 

 

 

That's a crazy person's rationale and it suffers from two problems. The first is, you aren't 100% sure that you CAN kill the other guy. What if you miss? What if there's a third party watching or liable to come around afterward who will figure out that you are a danger to everyone around you them included. You can very easily have increased your chance of getting whacked. Also of course it is unlikely that two independantly developed tool using species will be close enough in their level of technological sophistication that they CAN post a threat of annihilation to each other. The threat, if it exists, will be entirely one-sided, so the more advanced species has no justification for their paranoia in the first place.

 

 

I don't agree with you on this, Nyraht (once again? ). First, two species aren't lost on a desert island, but in the vastness of (potentially) infinite space. Thus, as you wrote, there is no competition at all for anything (land, ressources, etc.). One can always go a little farter to find anything. Even by considering the additional cost of travelling farter and the "real" laws of physics, the ressources needed will probably be cheaper than the ones accaparated by war.

 

Second, it is impossible to get a 0% chance to extermination. Anything can happen and blow you in dust. another species is just one of those potential risks. Moreover, as Clonus mentionned, war itself is a great risk. One cannot be sure to exterminate every single being from another species in one shot. It is also probably as hard to even be assured that all the industrial, military and strike capabilities of the targeted species are all destroyed in one shot. What if the war goes on and on...?

 

There is also something I don't understand. In the other thread about tac nukes vs strategic warheads, we argued a lot about the possibility to attack without warning in space and you upholded the point that it is impossible to move a fleet so that it cannot be detected. Why is this that a fleet moving at .90c is detectable, while a r-bomb is not?

[Nyrath]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

I don't agree with you on this' date=' Nyraht (once again? ). First, two species aren't lost on a desert island, but in the vastness of (potentially) infinite space.[/quote']

Hey, don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.

 

The impression I get from reading the material is that, yes, space and resources are infinite; but if you knew there was a Death Adder snake in your bedroom, the fact that you have infinite other spaces in your house is not going to stop you from dealing with the snake before you go to bed.

 

 

Second, it is impossible to get a 0% chance to extermination. Anything can happen and blow you in dust. another species is just one of those potential risks. Moreover, as Clonus mentionned, war itself is a great risk. One cannot be sure to exterminate every single being from another species in one shot. It is also probably as hard to even be assured that all the industrial, military and strike capabilities of the targeted species are all destroyed in one shot. What if the war goes on and on...?

 

If you had read the material in the link

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#killingstar

you would have found those very same objections were raised.

 

In any event, the point is, can you be sure that the other alien race will make the same calculation? If they mistakenly decide that they can take you out in a preemptive strike, you will still be suffering from tens of billions of human beings dead, and at a severe disadvantage since some of your industrial, military, and strike capabilities will be destroyed and none of theirs will be.

 

Can you take that risk with the entire human race?

 

There is also something I don't understand. In the other thread about tac nukes vs strategic warheads' date=' we argued a lot about the possibility to attack without warning in space and you upholded the point that it is impossible to move a fleet so that it cannot be detected. Why is this that a fleet moving at .90c is detectable, while a r-bomb is not?[/quote']

 

Please read what I wrote again I did not say it would not be detected. I said at 0.9c you will see it where it was, not where it is. Due to the geometry of the attack the incoming weapons will exhibit Apparent superluminal motion. The weapons are right behind the wavefront announcing their presence.

 

The example Dr. Pellegrino gave had Earth detecting the incoming weapons at time zero when the weapons were five light-months away (about 720 times the radius of the entire solar system, or 216,000 light-minutes). At time zero + five minutes the weapons will appear to be one light-minute away, having apparently traversing 216,000 light-minutes in five minutes at an apparent superluminal speed of 43,200 c.

 

A fraction of a second later, the weapons impact Earth, destroying all life to the depth of about a mile beneath the surface. You can read the effects at the link I posted.

 

Interception of the weapons is virtually impossible. You have about five minutes to react. The fact you see them where they were and not where they are makes it highly difficult to hit them. And even if you vaporize them, the cloud of vapor still has all the kinetic energy of the projectile, and will do exactly the same damage to Earth.

[nexus]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Lets assume for the purposes of this thread that no other races existed to take the logical step of extinguishing any other sapient life the instant the detected it.

[Nyrath]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Lets assume for the purposes of this thread that no other races existed to take the logical step of extinguishing any other sapient life the instant the detected it.

Fair enough.

[Basil]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Well' date=' even if a species has to learn cooperativeness to get out of its stellar system, that is only being cooperative with other members of its own species. There is no guarantee it will cooperate with members of a different species, like us.[/quote']

Cooperativeness is cooperativeness; species will make no more difference than hair-color, to a society that has learned, through utter necessity, to cooperate at the level needed to survive in space.

 

The point about paranoia raises the question: is it paranoia if they are really out to get you? And is it paranoid to be afraid of the paranoid?

 

Let me explain.

 

There are two situations here. Imagine that you and a another person were marooned, all alone on a tiny island.

 

Situation one is if you are a mentally ill paranoid person. Then you would try to kill the other because you are paranoid.

 

Situation two is if you are perfectly sane, but the other person is paranoid and is trying to kill you. In that case the safe route is also to kill the other person, to protect your own life. You've got to sleep sometime.

 

The only case when it does not make sense to kill the other if you are both sane and are 100% sure the other is sane.

First, remember we are talking about societies, not individuals. Not all reactions are comparable.

 

Second, any society that gets out of its "natal" stellar system is ipso facto not paranoid; if it were paranoid it would self destruct. Indeed, this is true of any society that fully settles its stellar system, or even gets well on the way to that state.

 

When you replace the two people with two interstellar species, keep in mind that they are gambling with the existence of their entire species. What is the acceptable risk to run with your species existence? 50% chance of becoming extinct? 25%? 10%?

 

The only acceptable risk is 0%

Any species that has settled its stellar system is going to be so near to ineradicable as makes no difference. Finding all the 'colonies' in the Oort Cloud is like finding a needle in 1,000,000,000 haystacks. Not practicable.

 

This all comes to a head with the addition of relativistic weapons (R-bombs). The trouble with them is that they are basically unstoppable. If they are moving faster than 90% c, you never see or detect them where they are now, only where they were. You would first detect them a few seconds before they hit and eliminated all life on your planet.

Again, a planetocentric viewpoint that is pretty much irrelevant. The important thing is all those 'colonies' out in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. The asteroid belt may also have a few settlements.

 

Remember, a star is a well, and most of the good stuff is on the rim. Jumping down into the well is a dumb idea, 99.99% of the time.

 

So if one species becomes aware of another interstellar species' date=' the safe thing for species one to do is to commit genocide before the other species discovers them.[/quote']

It is, however, not the PROFITABLE thing to do. And with a species being spread all across cubic parsecs of space, it is a f**king HARD thing to do. Too hard to be worth the bother, frankly.

[Basil]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

They would no more be committing genocide on us than we are committing genocide on the hypothetical tool using descendants of tree shrews who will never come into existence' date=' because we already occupy that ecological niche. They would simply be here first. Thus, no us.[/quote']

That would require this "first race" to (A) come to be so much earlier than every other that it can fill the galaxy before anything else evolves sapience and ( can be bothered jumping down wells for what's more plentiful on the rim. I refer, of course, to the fact that planets, much less stars, are gravity-holes, and everything useful is most abundant in the Oort Cloud (and to a lesser extent the Kuiper Belt).

 

That's a crazy person's rationale and it suffers from two problems. The first is' date=' you aren't 100% sure that you CAN kill the other guy. What if you miss? What if there's a third party watching or liable to come around afterward who will figure out that you are a danger to everyone around you them included. You can very easily have increased your chance of getting whacked. Also of course it is unlikely that two independantly developed tool using species will be close enough in their level of technological sophistication that they CAN post a threat of annihilation to each other. The threat, if it exists, will be entirely one-sided, so the more advanced species has no justification for their paranoia in the first place.[/quote']

An excellent point. Rep to you. :thumbup:

[Basil]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Lets assume for the purposes of this thread that no other races existed to take the logical step of extinguishing any other sapient life the instant the detected it.

 

Oops, sorry I didn't see this before my other posts. OK, I'll let it drop.

[Spence]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

I've a fair number of Albedo Anthropomorphics issues, and a copy of the RPG based on it. It is one of the more realistic sci-fi universes where space combat is concerned; battles can take weeks to set up and tend to be over in seconds.

 

When the comics begin is some 200 years after the initial Awakening on Arras Chanka...

 

All 163 of the races began on a single world, the planet Arras Chanka, and all at the same time. There is no archaeological evidence of anything like a pre-history (as Nyrath noted), nor are there any meaningful genetic links between any of the intelligent species.

 

This brought about the development of space flight technologies (fusion propulsion and a Traveller-style jump drive). There have been three periods of colonization, the first two being launched from Arras Chanka (which moved colonies out to a 100 LY radius) and the third from various established colony worlds (which brings the total area of known-space out to some 200 LY).

 

Arrghhh...

 

Anyone know where a person can find the series these days.

 

I did a quick ebay search and could only find five hits.

[FireTiger]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Arrghhh...

 

Anyone know where a person can find the series these days.

 

I did a quick ebay search and could only find five hits.

 

It was published by Antarctic Press for awhile, I'm not sure what happened to the series after that. From what I can find the last issue was produced in 1996.

[Clonus]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

OK here's a thought. What if the robots deliberately erased their own knowledge of their own origins to spare themselves the guilt of having killed their makers?

[Spence]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

It was published by Antarctic Press for awhile' date=' I'm not sure what happened to the series after that. From what I can find the last issue was produced in 1996.[/quote']

 

11 years, that will make it difficult to find.

[Doc]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

OK here's a thought. What if the robots deliberately erased their own knowledge of their own origins to spare themselves the guilt of having killed their makers?

 

 

Sounds cool, only, though, if robots actually felt some guilt. Maybe, and that's the way I prefer them, they don't...

 

But anyway, even a robot society will probably have an incomplete collective historical memory. Even with a permanent hardware memory immune to data corruption, information will probably not be accessible or known to every individual. Some facts may be lost in the huge database Thus, I'd say that robot history would be as approximative than ours is now, wich alows for the genocide to have been "normally" forgotten. Anyway, that's the way I'd define this.

[Clonus]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

11 years' date=' that will make it difficult to find.[/quote']

 

Easier to buy the current RPG.

[Spence]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Easier to buy the current RPG.

 

Maybe, but I love to read a well written comic/manga. When I hear about a good well written comic, very rare in these days, I just want to get a copy and read it.

 

sigh....

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

OK here's a thought. What if the robots deliberately erased their own knowledge of their own origins to spare themselves the guilt of having killed their makers?

 

I've got a short story up on my shelf somewhere with a robot society that was never aware of humans. The AI on a human warship became fed up with humans' irrationality and pasted its crew with a super-high-G maneuver, then crashed itself on a rocky planet, built some sapient robots and got a society going, then destroyed itself so it would never leak the existence of humanity and destroy its perfect world.

[Doc]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

I've got a short story up on my shelf somewhere with a robot society that was never aware of humans. The AI on a human warship became fed up with humans' irrationality and pasted its crew with a super-high-G maneuver' date=' then crashed itself on a rocky planet, built some sapient robots and got a society going, then destroyed itself so it would never leak the existence of humanity and destroy its perfect world.[/quote']

 

Cool...

[Mister E]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

They won't come to get our resources or our knowledge or our women or even because they're just mean and want power over us. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival' date=' even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk... [/quote']

 

Regarding "species death" and survival:

 

In a future setting of uplifted animals and artificial intelligences (virtual origins?), the exploded concept of species causes me to question how different alien life must be from terrestrial. Surely unique... most likely vastly more (or less) advanced... but also composed of wildly different beings from wildly different settings that are likely to be as strange as the actual aliens.

 

For instance: how different is a cyborg T-rex uplift from an AI-Earth? ... both of which being conceptually terrestrial...

 

 

 

Plus, (because of the whole speed of light business) wouldn't it be more likely that when one ancient alien interstellar hyper-culture meets another, that it would necessarily happen at some point far from either species' homeworld? ... and that this would give both hyper-cultures a great deal of time to deal with the crisis even if it did start with a paranoid genecidal first-contact encounter?

 

 

 

Or not. Besides... without actual aliens, the terrestrials are aliens, and they each need their own survival strategy in order to live long enough to someday meet some REAL aliens.

 

 

 

Also, killing off aliens as soon as you see them sounds like some kind of automated response to me, which could possibly be beyond the control of the species doing it. What if unbeknownst to humanity, at light speed, beyond our ability to intercept (or even discover) we were killing off potential alien friends with our 'light-speed-shadow'?

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Funny how a "kernel" of an idea became such a "major" discussion -- but I guess that's the "general" way of things.

[Cancer]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

No other sapient species in a galaxy is a perfectly valid possibility. That's the small-N limit of the Drake Equation. If N is small enough, it can easily work out that the existing sapient race is the first one.

[Spence]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

No other sapient species in a galaxy is a perfectly valid possibility. That's the small-N limit of the Drake Equation. If N is small enough' date=' it can easily work out that the existing sapient race is the first one.[/quote']

 

Personally I like the "only known intelligence is human" type games. It eliminates the “prosthetic of the week” aliens that plagued ST. And, later on down the line once the game has gotten it’s stride, if you allow the discovery of non-human ruins or a possible non-human contact, it can really make the game interesting/exciting.

 

First Contact when there are already a bizzilion aliens running around is meh….

 

First Contact, that actually is First Contact can be a really cool game….

[Cancer]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

If humans were the first, colonized all the Galaxy they could, and have since died out, and now another species has reached interstellar capacity, then...

 

You're probably best setting this campaign about 10^9 after the present. The arguments that go into the Fermi paradox suggest that once the process gets started, the time to colonize the entire Galaxy is on the order of 10^8 years or less.

 

You have to posit a reason why humans died out. Do what you want there. There are astrophysical things that could (if they work the way we think they work) sterilize a portion of the Galaxy (no more than a few percent, I think, but...). You can also posit that the (variable) radiation environment caused by the central black hole renders the innermost 5 kiloparsecs (or 1, or 3, or whatever number you want) of the Galaxy uninhabitable in the long term. Now, if humans were wiped out by the radiation blast of a beamed neutron star merger, that means that all the big human population centers were fairly close together (no more than 100 parsecs from edge to edge). May not be adequate for your needs. If you want humans to have colonized the whole galaxy and then died out, you'll need a different extinction mechanism.

 

You get to make a decision about the tech level achieved by humans. This is likely to have very far-reaching consequences, but let me get at the one that comes to me now. Could they move planets within or even between star systems, without destroying them? Could they interfere with normal stellar evolution in a significant way? If the answer to both of those is no, then chances are that the big human-inhabited planets ... the ones most resembling Earth in all ways ... are effectively all destroyed.

 

(Why? All stars increase in luminosity as they age. The Sun is about 40% more luminous now than it was right after it formed; the change has been steady. But that increase in luminosity causes the planets in the system to warm up. In effect, the "Habitable Zone" moves outward in the star system over long times. I have read some interesting arguments that Venus used to be in the Sun's habitable zone, but about 0.8 Gyr ago the inner edge of the HZ slipped beyond Venus; its oceans boiled away, the water photodissociated and the hydrogen escaped to space, and because the oceans were no longer there holding the oceanic crust cold and rigid, the entire oceanic portion of Venus melted through. All the planetary CO2 got into the atmosphere (where it still is now) making for its present runaway greenhouse situation; at the higher temperature the composition of important fractions of the continental rocks change also, so the continents also go volcanic more or less together, and in a few tens of millions of years the entire planet was repaved by a massive volcanic episode. And, if you think about it, all signs of life are destroyed: even the rocks that are the fossils get buried and heavily metamorphosed in the volcanic event, effectively destroying the information that any life ever existed there. Oh, and the estimates for the time needed for this to happen to Earth are another 0.5 to 1 Gyr.)

 

Now, that would mean that the big treasure boxes of old humanity would be gone, but some lesser treasure boxes ... less-favored colonies around low-mass stars (low mass stars evolve MUCH slower than higher-mass stars) ... might still exist in places.

 

I think the most important choice in front of you now is deciding on humans' zenith technology. What that was defines what they could and could not do, what could have killed them off, and therefore what remnants they may have left behind.

[Doc]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

If humans were the first, colonized all the Galaxy they could, and have since died out, and now another species has reached interstellar capacity, then...

 

You're probably best setting this campaign about 10^9 after the present. The arguments that go into the Fermi paradox suggest that once the process gets started, the time to colonize the entire Galaxy is on the order of 10^8 years or less.

 

You have to posit a reason why humans died out. Do what you want there. There are astrophysical things that could (if they work the way we think they work) sterilize a portion of the Galaxy (no more than a few percent, I think, but...). You can also posit that the (variable) radiation environment caused by the central black hole renders the innermost 5 kiloparsecs (or 1, or 3, or whatever number you want) of the Galaxy uninhabitable in the long term. Now, if humans were wiped out by the radiation blast of a beamed neutron star merger, that means that all the big human population centers were fairly close together (no more than 100 parsecs from edge to edge). May not be adequate for your needs. If you want humans to have colonized the whole galaxy and then died out, you'll need a different extinction mechanism.

 

You get to make a decision about the tech level achieved by humans. This is likely to have very far-reaching consequences, but let me get at the one that comes to me now. Could they move planets within or even between star systems, without destroying them? Could they interfere with normal stellar evolution in a significant way? If the answer to both of those is no, then chances are that the big human-inhabited planets ... the ones most resembling Earth in all ways ... are effectively all destroyed.

(Why? All stars increase in luminosity as they age. The Sun is about 40% more luminous now than it was right after it formed; the change has been steady. But that increase in luminosity causes the planets in the system to warm up. In effect, the "Habitable Zone" moves outward in the star system over long times. I have read some interesting arguments that Venus used to be in the Sun's habitable zone, but about 0.8 Gyr ago the inner edge of the HZ slipped beyond Venus; its oceans boiled away, the water photodissociated and the hydrogen escaped to space, and because the oceans were no longer there holding the oceanic crust cold and rigid, the entire oceanic portion of Venus melted through. All the planetary CO2 got into the atmosphere (where it still is now) making for its present runaway greenhouse situation; at the higher temperature the composition of important fractions of the continental rocks change also, so the continents also go volcanic more or less together, and in a few tens of millions of years the entire planet was repaved by a massive volcanic episode. And, if you think about it, all signs of life are destroyed: even the rocks that are the fossils get buried and heavily metamorphosed in the volcanic event, effectively destroying the information that any life ever existed there. Oh, and the estimates for the time needed for this to happen to Earth are another 0.5 to 1 Gyr.)

Now, that would mean that the big treasure boxes of old humanity would be gone, but some lesser treasure boxes ... less-favored colonies around low-mass stars (low mass stars evolve MUCH slower than higher-mass stars) ... might still exist in places.

 

I think the most important choice in front of you now is deciding on humans' zenith technology. What that was defines what they could and could not do, what could have killed them off, and therefore what remnants they may have left behind.

 

If human kind has colonized the entire galaxy, the cause of extinction would probably be a "inner" one. To my knowledge, no astronomical event could possibly destroye life at the same time over the whole galaxy without destroying it outright (or transforming it a way we could regonize it anymore).

 

You'd better look for something of human scale. Was there a terrible epidemic? Maybe a species just has some natural lifespan it cannot overrun. Human beings could thus have been more and more sterile, a generation after another, to the point when no new generation was born. Or maybe human kind just evolved into some other species. This species could still exist with the other spaient beings, knowing, or without knowing, it is the remnent or the child of the human race.

[Cancer]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

If human kind has colonized the entire galaxy, the cause of extinction would probably be a "inner" one. To my knowledge, no astronomical event could possibly destroye life at the same time over the whole galaxy without destroying it outright (or transforming it a way we could regonize it anymore).

 

You'd better look for something of human scale. Was there a terrible epidemic? Maybe a species just has some natural lifespan it cannot overrun. Human beings could thus have been more and more sterile, a generation after another, to the point when no new generation was born. Or maybe human kind just evolved into some other species. This species could still exist with the other spaient beings, knowing, or without knowing, it is the remnent or the child of the human race.

I definitely agree with you there: there are few astrophysical events that could "sterilize" an entire galaxy without wrecking the galaxy along with it.

 

Even with this decision, though, technology has something to say about the means of extinction. The efficacy of quarantine measures (the oldest countermeasure against plague) varies greatly depending upon whether the transit time between landing points is shorter than the sojourn time of the disease, and whether there is a mode of long-distance communications faster than ship travel.

[Spence]

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea

 

Personally, unless humans play a direct role, IMO there is no need to overthink the back story.

 

What is the time gap between the disappearance of humans and the rise of the fuzzies?

 

If it is more than 10,000 years the point is basically moot, unless the PC’s are a team dedicated to researching the “ancients” that is.

 

The odds are that unless there were major build sites on the fuzzy world, there wouldn’t be any real traces in atmosphere that couldn’t be explained away anyway.

 

A more important question to answer would be, just how far can the fuzzies travel?

 

In their Solar System only?

Within 10 LY’s

Within 100 LY’s etc.

 

If the distance is relatively short, then there is no reason (unless you want too) to have them discover any traces even in space.

 

If the fuzzies have real far movers and can span the Galaxy, they could still never stumble across anything. It’s a big universe.

 

The long and the short is, for the PC in-game, a detailed back history extending 1000’s of years into the past is pretty much never seen/used fluff. Unless you are tying a key plot point to it. Then 99% is fluff except the piece you need. A general vague overview is all you really need.

 

In this case, if it were me I would write a half page timeline/synopsis of the end of humanity to the rise of the fuzzies giving the most detail to the immediate (last 100 years or so) history of the fuzzies. I would build the first session to be a “discover the alien artifacts” one and then shape the back story to compliment the PC’s and their skills/purposes.

 

Most of the things that will actually prove useful will be current builds, not old timelines.

 

Just my 2 cents.