To ayyy or not to ayyy

Modern reasonable estimates in the Drake Equation, based on everything science knows about the galaxy, put the number of civilizations that have Earth-like technological levels as being fairly high: there could be a "density" of such that is as high as one Earth-like civilization in every 2,000 lightyears.

The chance of developing any life at all, even if the life is only microbial, is even higher.

I.e., it's probably incorrect at this point in time to equate "hard" sci-fi with humans and Earth being the only source of life.

>and the Alcubierre drive has allowed humans to seek exoplanets for habitation/resources elses also.

Give me an FTL speed to work with and I'll be able to help you more. If I start in Sol and want to go to a star system that is 100 light years away, how long will that take?

>weebshit

They weren't always, kiddo

compromise: There are "genuine ayy lmaos", but they're actually humans from a distant future, who have abandoned their own and time traveled/multiverse-hopped/wormholed there way into your setting

>I.e., it's probably incorrect at this point in time to equate "hard" sci-fi with humans and Earth being the only source of life.

That's true. What I meant was that I can't really see a hard-scifi setting with humans and extraterrestials co-existing in harmony or intermingling with each other like the races on the Citadel in the Mass Effect series: we would simply be too different to understand each other or to comprehend our motives.

>If I start in Sol and want to go to a star system that is 100 light years away, how long will that take?

I'm not a scientist, Veeky Forums could probably answer you that.

I actually liked Interstellar more than I dare to admit in public, but only because of the soundtrack and the cute refrigeraterbots.

>I'm not a scientist, Veeky Forums could probably answer you that.

If you're going to have a sci-fi setting where FTL travel is possible, the absolute first thing you have to do is set down in unchanging stone how the FTL system works, including how fast it is. It's vitally important to practically every other aspect of your series.

>we would simply be too different to understand each other or to comprehend our motives.

I've never bought that. Motives are always going to be understandable; it'll probably come down to "want" or "need", the concepts of which are universal:
- I want resources
- I want space
- I want iPads
- And so on

Even "alien mindsets and priorities" probably isn't something that would weird out humans too much, since it's not like humans don't have experience encountering other groups of humans with completely different priorities. It tends to go...poorly...in our history, but presumably by the future we're more enlightened, or even if not, there's plenty of space to share and no one star system should be all that valuable compared to any other star system, excepting due to access to luxury goods.

Which, by the way, that's what your galactic economy is based around regardless of how FTL travel works. The control of luxury goods: Centauran jackalope meat, Tau Cetan firetulips, Phoenician dyes, and so on. Basically the same mineral resources (gold, iron, tungsten, etc.) can be found in any star system and even a single one - even the home system - will have more mineral resources than a civilization could ever consume in a million years of first-world gluttony, so the only thing that generates actual wealth is biospheres and the things that are part of those biospheres.

Basically it's the Opium Wars IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!!

I'm not that optimistic. Most people don't understand their very own behaviour or motives, much less the ones of others - even less those of other living things.

It's true we could have a very rudimentary understanding of an organisms wants or needs on a purely biological basis, but as for more personal motives, probably not.

If we can understand the Japanese, we can understand ayyys.

Soft science-fiction: Science is based on fiction
Hard science-fiction: Fiction is based on science

You can mix them in a kind of 2001 A Space Odyssey way

>implying we understand the Japanese

Not him, but if you want a look at how alien psyches could really be completely incomprehensible to us, take a look at Blindsight.

tl;dr: since the ayylmaos evolved under such a different environment to us, sapience (or indeed sentience) is nothing more than a glucose hog. They have needs, but they do not have wants - and they have no individuals with which you can negotiate, since they lack a sense of self. The overall payoff is that since the ayylmaos have no sapience, they seek out and acquire their needs without deriving pleasure from them; so anything that's given to them with no payoff is seen as a waste at best, and an attack at worse. Even saying "I come in peace" wastes processing power, and thus glucose - which is an attitude shared by pic related who, aside from a certain evolutionary mishap, would've been the apex species on Earth instead of us with our slow, energy-hogging sapience.

>Hard sci-fi
>Vampires
Fuck it, why not?
But wasn't the fact that humanity is capable of relating to and understanding each other the biggest factor in intelligence development?

>human subspecies that's superior physically and intellectually
>predate on us, hide from light (sensibly) and can hibernate until populations forget about them
>right-angles short-circuit their brains
Eh, they're close enough that the genetically engineered replicas are referred to as vampires offhand.

>biggest factor in intelligence development
By our standards, yes - but our intelligence is gimped when we actually have to think with it. You do differential calculus far faster subconsciously (when, say catching a ball) than when you do it consciously (on paper) - the idea is that what if you just had raw processing power without the concept of "I" or "me" to weigh it down?

>it always ends up being an overwhelming mess when aliens and robots and synthetic organisms are stuffed into the setting
Well that can can be perfectly viable, you just kinda described Mass Ef-
>I'm intentionally trying not to make just another Mass Effect/Star Wars universe
Aaawwwwww...

>REMOVE QU
I just love the fact that the vast majority of people here got that reference.

I know I seem to be a broken record at that point, but a most excellent reference to see an interesting take on post-humankind and how different extraterrestrial being can be is Blind- Well fuck, looks like we're two broken records here.

Well, I mean, someone was going to post it

I have no idea why All Tomorrows and Quposting keeps coming up on Veeky Forums more and more, but I fucking love it

Neither do I, despite being part of it.
There may have been a thread or two recently that popularised it, so that may be it.
It's a good thing though. It's not pure speculative evolution (because of the Qu's intervention), but it's still a good read.
And anything that could draw the average fa/tg/uy toward sci-fi games is a good thing in my books

i don't get why the author of that picture assumes that mech couldn't fit someone man size in it. theres no frame of reference for how big it is.

I've never actually seen Interstellar, did I guess the twist by accident?

Dude, the ayy in your pic is wearing fucking non-humanoid wicker armor. Do you know how absolutely sweet that shit is?

That'd be a powerful evolutionary trait- until something unexpected happens. The "glucose-hogs" of sapience (that is, self-awareness and desire) seem to be directly linked with the ability to think laterally, solve novel multi-step problems, learn from previous generations instead of operating entirely by instinct, etc. The best you could have without that would be a fleshy killbot.

>we can understand the Japanese

But we can't...?

>The "glucose-hogs" of sapience (that is, self-awareness and desire)

Does self-awareness and cravings really waste 'that' much energy, as opposed to other even more primitive brain functions?

Hence why I put that phrase in quotes. Really, I think that Blindsight, while an interesting book, is flawed in its central premise (namely, "love, empathy, compassion, etc. are all maladaptive; so maladaptive, in fact, that it is impossible for anything with those traits to survive first contact with something that doesn't, as the so-superior second species will just wipe them out"). It's just the "sociopathy makes you an omnicompetent master manipulator genius" trope applied to species.

That image in general makes a lot of assumptions about scale when no reference is provided.

Not that the general sentiment that humanoid vehicles are a dumb idea due to the fact that walking is an enormously complex and extremely inefficient form of locomotion that will force the vehicle to make massive tradeoffs in terms of armament and armor while also giving it inferior performance compared to a conventional vehicle is incorrect.

Does it have a name?

>tfw you will never bro up with a neolithic starfish alien

Experience taught me (Stellaris) that the universe is a fucking mess, so goes nuts.

same, especially as the user who's probably posted All Tomorrows the most on Veeky Forums

>game has social '''''''research''''''

Tumblr in space? Sounds like a setting for cosmic horror.

Nah, they'd have a fit since the social research is primarily based on biology, with their specialized lab being a biolab, the associated production building being farms, having genetic engineering (which can apply behavioral traits), and so on.

Simple: have there be alien robots.

There used to be aliens. A long time ago. The problem is that the period of time when a species is intelligent and spacefaring is, cosmologically speaking, pretty short. Nothing last forever, not even interplanetary empires.

Between this short window, and the distances involved in space, even if two species were alive and in space at the same time they would likely never meet or know about each other.

When these races inevitably go extinct, its not uncommon for their machines to outlast them. If they developed AI (and most of them do, for some definition of AI) that AI goes on without them. Usually without the ability to meaningfully advance itself beyond the parameters its creators built it for, but since they are from the tail-end of the tech tree of their civilization usually a lot more advanced than anything humans have. Not always, though.

So you have humans spreading out into space as the fresh faces new kids on the block, with their own cybernetics and AI in its infancy... to find that there is no one else. Just a bunch of space animals millions of years from evolving into intelligence, a bunch of dead worlds with ruins hundreds of thousands of years old, and the wandering machine ships and robot-cultivated garden worlds that are the last vestiges of long extinct civilizations.

Every spacefaring race starts off alone, and eventually dies alone. This time its us. And while humanity can tell itself that THEY will be different, odds are good that 800 thousand years from now, some curious aliens will venture into human space and find only the IBM-Spacebus, still making the rounds as mass transport between the once living worlds of Earth, mars, and the never completed dyson sphere that is slowly falling into Sol.

...

Soft Sci Fi with aliens is always more fun. Aspecially if you avoid Human Sucks/HFY stuff.

You speak my language.

Most realistic scifi setting tbqhwy.

And not a bad setting either - the ruins of ancient civilisations are always fun.

Shame the artist had a hissyfit over Don Trump

That doesn't exactly narrow it down any.

Leave /pol/ out of this thread.

>/pol/

DeviantArt + Facebook actually.

On AI, AI don't strictly require bodies and the stuff you throw bodies at doesn't need sophisticated AI housed in those bodies. You are totally justified to use AI and robots without making them another kind of person (which I think is the bigger problem with their presence in far future hard scifi).

On aliens, aliens will be fucking weird in mind as well as in body. You might get haplodiploid species with much greater selflessness and kin selection or asocial solipsist cannibals depending on their initial strategies for survival and reproduction. Again, you can use them for weirder shit than the funny looking people you get as RPG races.

Hominid "aliens" make more sense than anyone gives them credit for after sufficient periods of isolation and any relativistic time dilation shit you factor in. They're your best bet for something personlike but not bog standard human. They're likely to be xenophobic as hell across the board though. Colombian exchange scenarios (in disease, conquest, ecosystem disruption, etc.) are way more likely to occur than scifi typically imagines. And while mineral/element resources are drastically less scarce once you have space travel, unique organisms can be valuable and scarce as fuck.

A universe littered with civ remains from varied apocalypses is fun. Disease, runaway greenhouse effects, natural climate change, nuclear annihilation, etc. pose existential threats at many stages. Never mind that postcolonial genetic drift will drag this out and eventually produce many worlds with variations on the same civ all snuffed out different ways.

'Course once the hostile von neumann probes come into play that'll be a pretty common form of both AI and extinction events.

No one who ever brings up von neumann probes ever bother to come up with a reason why anyone would ever invest the massive amount of research and development required to design one, since they serve no functional purpose beyond being a scifi boogeyman. They don't even have any direct military application for all of the havok they cause, because all of the damage they do is incidental and effectively random.

You send out a shitload of them. Each of them terraforms a world, sends out another generation, and sends back one with resources/their location. Or you've got folks who can generate wormholes but must manually transport gates or some shit.

They're likely to wreck whatever ecosystem they enter hostile or not.

But why spend so much effort to terraform millions of planets you will literally never see when you can just pick and choose to terraform specific worlds you actually care about for a fraction of the cost and none of the risk?

The transport gate ones are even less likely to be von neunman based, because whats the point of having a vast interstellar wormhole network if EVERY FUCKING ONE leads to a floating cloud of rubble with the note saying "there was something worth coming all this way for here, we destroyed it to make the gate. Toodles."

>I.e., it's probably incorrect at this point in time to equate "hard" sci-fi with humans and Earth being the only source of life.

It's not really that, but the fact that even the lifetimes on hundred million year civilizations are basically eyeblinks in cosmological timescales, which coupled with the mind-boggling vastness of space means that it's highly unlikely for several civilizations to arise roughly simultaneously within the same region of space. You basically need FTL to go forth and meet aliens.

If you don't have FTL, you run into the problem that colonizing a sufficient volume of space for it to become likely to run into other civilizations will involve such vast timescales that at the end of it, we'd have transformed into something that isn't strictly human anymore. Essentially what you have in Orion's Arm, which incidentally is one of the very few science settings that take this into account at all.

And yeah, FTL more or less makes a setting soft sci-fi in my book. At least the sort of casual FTL that doesn't come hard-earned, like having to send dudes on a subluminal journey to build that wormhole network.

There's multiple variations on the formula, including ones that bring a starter population along so everything gets colonized immediately upon terraforming.

You still bring materials from the crappiest systems you've gated to the systems you actually want to live in. Or still use the materials returning probes bring to your homeworld.

The gate one I'm not sure you're understanding. Gates are constructed on the homeworld and one end is physically brought elsewhere. You don't have to wreck shit to make the gate. You're just likely to ruin it for any prior occupants to make it habitable for yourself. Or strip it for resources.

>You do differential calculus far faster subconsciously (when, say catching a ball) than when you do it consciously (on paper)

Ooh! My dissertation is actually valuable here! tl;dr you don't actually do any complicated calculations when you try to e.g. catch a baseball. You actually do a super resource-light calculation where you try to minimize the perceived acceleration of the ball in the visual field basically. Our actual non-conscious processing work is much lighter and environmentally integrated than people have traditionally assumed

/autism

I think the concept exists, for the most part, to highlight a major problem with self-replicating machines; namely, that you're statistically guaranteed to have one go apeshit on you due to a replicating error.

I mean, it seems blindingly obvious not to build any given that consideration, but assuming that no one will also assumes that all all interstellar civilizations perfectly rational, infallible actors. Someone might create them with the full intention of restricting their proliferation, or recovering them after they've done their job, but fail to do that. Or you might have a genuinely genocidal type create a bunch of berserkers for the explicit purpose of sterilizing nascent civilizations. It's not outside the realm of possibility.

This. You can even have fun with how more advanced AI's would react to their masters having disappeared. Having some of them going on a quest to find pure genes to restart their creators race (a bit like Killy's quest in BLAME! but with a different goal) could be fun as well.
They could also be crazies who keep on expanding their ancestor's empire in their name, claiming one planet after another for a race that no longer exist. They would be like gods to the IA's.

It could also be an expeditionary force that comes from a race so far away that there's litterally no way to have any real infomation on what that race is or look like.
I really liked the BETA in Muv-Luv. They are essentially Tyranids, but enginered as ressource collecting monsters by a race that live incredibly far away and is so different from humans that their "ressource collectors" don't even recognize humans are sentient life.

Or just like he described : simply have most of them be clueless robots that keep on working in a lifeless empire.

>dude we'll all be dead before aliens meet us or they'll all be dead before we meet them too lmao
As playsible as it is it is a very depressive outlook on the galaxy. How would a galactic society work? Im in favor of the cliche that each species fills a niche

If we go for realism, then everyone and their neighbors are humans. All of them have several different ethnicities (unless they went all racial supremacy+a healthy helping of genocide at one point). So two possibilities arise :
1.A galactic society were multiple planets of a similar technology level got into contact with each other. It would essentially be a big alliance/association like UN/NATO to share knowledge, ressources and focus efforts in different directions. The biggest difference between citizens from every planets would be what's written on their passports and a few very unique cultures that might not have a rough equivalent on another planet.

2.One planet discover the others and has such has a huge technological advantage. The other planets would become weaker allies, puppet states or colonies depending on their technology level and capacity to negociate with the big guy.
Differences would be much more visible and the other planets would most likely have a strong cultural change where they adopt things from the big planet but adapt them to their own culture (a bit like Japan). So you could have a planet that would develop space medieval people, and another that would have Zeo-space prussians, etc.

>Colombian exchange scenarios (in disease, conquest, ecosystem disruption, etc.) are way more likely to occur than scifi typically imagines

Not to mention all the thousands of space STDs you'll get from, you know, going where no man has ever gone before.

They were created by Simon Roy.

Sweet.

>4b
Whoa man, this is a blue board

Maybe we normally WOULD all miss each other by millions of years, but the last great galactic power dicked around with the planets in our chunk of space to try and engineer it so that multiple races would come to fruition around the same time. They were alone, but the stacked the deck so we wouldn't be.

This also might explain any otherwise jarring similarities, like a common humanoid shape.

The question then becomes: what did they hope to accomplish by doing so? What was their plan for us?

Ancient precursors seeding the galaxy with humanoid species is pretty dank. I mean, it's the backstory for fucking Star Trek.

>what did they hope to accomplish by doing so? What was their plan for us?

Their plan, and what they hoped to accomplish, was that we wouldn't be all alone the way they were. And that's it.

Man, I love those aliens.

>Imagine being a race of incredibly advanced beings with the capability of exploring everywhere in the Galaxy... and being all alone. Then imagine deciding to take your advanced technology and using it to create lifeforms shaped after you and then going into a long cryogenically-aided sleep, hoping your experiments will work. And then, imagine waking from that sleep and seeing your creations finding you, learning that your experiments succeeded. And then, instead of acting malevolently towards them, calling them your "children" and joining with them to see how the galaxy has progressed, because you left it for your "children" to have. Now that is the definition of a Benevolent Precursor.

"The Chase" gets a lot of flak for some reason I cannot even begin to conceive of. I loved it, personally.

youtube.com/watch?v=k-j69iVReEU

>You're wondering who we are; why we have done this; how it has come that I stand before you - the image of a being from so long ago.

>Life evolved in my planet before all others in this part of the galaxy. We left our world, explored the stars and found none like ourselves. Our civilization thrived for ages. But what is the life of one race, compared to the vast stretches of cosmic time? We knew that one day we would be gone, that nothing of us would survive.

>So, we left you. Our scientists seeded the primordial oceans of many worlds, where life was in its infancy. The seed codes directed your evolution toward a physical form resembling ours: this body you see before you, which is of course shaped as yours is shaped. For you *are* the end result. The seed codes also contain this message, which we scattered in fragments on many different worlds.

>It was our hope that you would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this message. And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled.

>You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish, that you, too, would know life and would keep alive our memory.

>There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other.

>Remember us.

Fuck.
You realize you spend too much time on this site when you star recognizing the same bait over and over.

Now I really want to see a setting where everyones killing each other in galactic war and these benevolent precursors come to find they caused that shit and try to stop it

Imagine how heart breaking it would be for them. To see sapient races fighting one another when all they ever wanted in the first place was just meet other sapients

>for hundreds of years, the finest minds from multiple races attempt to discover the plan the precursors had in mind by engineering the humanoid races
>it turns out there was no plan, they just didn't want the next galactic civilization to be lonely

>The best you could have without that would be a fleshy killbot.

Basically the aliens in that book, really. They've evolved to be quite advanced at it though.

way too damn depressing man

LINK DISSERTATION

>humans get fucked up and get turned into abominations the universe

What in the world

>fleshy killbot.

I'd prefer fleshy lovebots though

OP here, I'm probably just gonna make two separate settings, one being a cyberpunk-in-space setting and the other a more esoteric space-exploration setting with over-the-top, inhuman/oid aliens.

The prior setting is themed around the (artificial) evolution of mankind and the latter around mankind's place in the greater biocosmosphere.

When you get up to the big stage for space, its always depressing.

There's like half a dozen ways that all life on Earth could be annihilated by lightspeed-fast natural disasters. No malice or reason behind them, just bad luck that we were in the way of something going so fast that we would literally never see it coming. The only consolation is that it would happen so fast that in the time it took someone on the side of the Earth facing the problem to notice, the people on the side of the planet facing away from the event would already be dead. No pain, just surface of the planet wiped clean in less time then it took you to read the last word of this sentence.

Social research is mainly biology, military, colonization and psionics.

...

If it makes you feel any better, the current line of thought is that the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere are more than up to the challenge of diffusing a gamma-ray burst from even as close as a few parsecs away. The immediate effect at ground level would just be a few seconds of intense ultraviolet radiation. This could reach dangerous levels at the site of "impact", as it were, but it would not cause any kind of global catastrophe.

There would be some longer-term effects from the interaction with our atmosphere, such as several years of global cooling and some acid rain, but all in all it would be roughly like a bad but not civilization-ending impact event, only without the impact and associated effects direct effects (fireball, tsunami, Paris getting leveled, etc.).

So that's off the table, at least.

(And for the record, a nearby supernova would have basically the same effect as a gamma-ray burst - that is to say, it'd be kinda' bad, but the Earth is a tough little planet and can easily take it)

>bacterfag

lmao

Since Dinosaurs were around for the longest time and we're just accidentally wiped out, wouldn't that mean that's what the Precursors would look like?

We'd wind up in Space and you'd have to worry about not being stepped on by a !T-Rex in a Preyda suit or a family of !Brachiosaurus going school supply shopping?

>REMOVE QU
Glad to see a fellow Gravital on here

bumping for justice

Hildemar's Knots are the best though.