What is the logical continuation of a cyberpunk world?

Divinity really.

A percentage of the population is just a few PB away from godhood.

Correct. From the Wikipedia synopsis:

"In the epilogue, Molly leaves Case. Case finds a new girlfriend, resumes his hacking work, and spends his earnings from the mission replacing his internal organs so that he can continue his previous drug use. Wintermute/Neuromancer contacts him, saying that it has become "the sum total of the works, the whole show," and has begun looking for other AIs like itself. Scanning old recorded transmissions from the 1970s, the super-AI finds an AI transmitting from the Alpha Centauri star system."

Wall-E

Eclipse Phase is a pastiche of everything already brought up, also Issac Arthur's youtube series is good for ideas for megastructures and hard sci-fi tech.

It's arguably (in the post post-cyberpunk context) an accelerationist one.

If collapse or singularity is inevitable, the only thing we plebs can do is choose to enjoy the ride in style.

most cyberpunk settings spell it out
complete ecological collapse, drain on all resources, mass civil unrest
everyone would either be dead, living on a wasteland, or going full vault 116 and retreating into cyberspace to avoid such a future

I think they did a good job on that BLAME! netflix movie.

Where did they get all the mass to make that super structure?

House of Suns, by Alistair Reynolds

Let JC Denton explain
youtu.be/xBeoreJr4Yc

Shit taste belongs in the /pfg/, user.

>If collapse or singularity is inevitable
Nope. That's bullshit that toaster-humpers made up.

>Pic related, BLAME!'s universe is set in a megastructure so large it encompasses the entire solar system

...where the Hell are they getting the matter to build all that.

There isn't enough matter in the Solar System to build a structure that large. Especially if you're not taking apart the Sun or Earth.

You'd seriously need the resources of I can't even begin to comprehend how many solar systems to build that. Thousands, certainly. Tens of thousands.

But if you have the ability to go to other star systems and cart back all their raw materials within a meaningful timeframe to human existence, then it just raises the question of why didn't you just set up extrasolar colonies. It would be mind-bogglingly cheaper.

BLAME! sounds fucking stupid, is what I'm getting at.

>What is the logical continuation of a cyberpunk world?

Social and economic collapse

Out of control Von Neumann SupCom like building machines. With gravity furnaces to support the structure and steel matter from other universes. The protagonist is a android trying to find the Net Terminal Genes a genetic marker that allows humans to access the "Netsphere" a computerized control network for The City. The Net Terminal Gene is the key to halting the unhindered expansion of The City before the gravity furnaces fail and it collapses into a quasar.

I've never read BLAME! but I've seen many people post about it.

I just have one question for the people who have read it: Do they explain where all the construction material comes from? Because even if you assume that they have the future technology to actually build something like that, they'd still need enough material equivalent to several hundreds of times what you'd get if you stripped the entire solar system.

Did they just disintegrate hundreds of start systems for building materials or something?

No, but there's an episode with a parallel reality near a gravity well so probably something like that is involved. Blame! doesn't explain much about its setting, and it favors style over any degree of realism.

but to get back to the point of the thread, I would expect total civil collapse, creating a sort of techno-barbarian setting, but due to the giant skyscrapers starting to grow the last forms of plants out of their crumbling spires, it would almost be like a giant concrete rain forest

Matrix?

Armored Core
>the planet is fucked to the point where everyone has to live underground or in the sky
>the surface now mostly serves as an arena for transhuman mercenaries in giant robots

You can read about the world and its building here.

randomisgod.com/blame/Artbook82.html

Nihei says the structure was made using the planets. But he also talks about using Dark matter.

>The most common theme of Cyberpunk is man vs machine in a social revolution type of format.

I don't really see that as the common theme throughout cyberpunk; it's man vs man, rather than man vs machine. Technology, rather than being the liberator people expect it to be, becomes yet another weapon in the arsenal to keep people down - and then you have people who subvert that technology to try and bring back the promise of "technology will set us free".

Get the fuck out pleb. You aren't educated enough to understand Jodo

Agreed. The one unifying thing in great Cyberpunk is the notion of technology as the defining component of life + society.

At the societal level, Cyberpunk tends to play around with how technology influences power structures. At the individual level, it tends to focus on how technology informs/illuminates concepts of self.

It rarely frames things directly as man vs. machine, but instead man as machine, man from machine etc.

Interesting change of perspective for me, thanks.

In that way, the most likely form of post-cyberpunk without societal collapse is the singularity. The golden age of technology from Warhammer comes to mind as well as Star Trek and, for extreme interpretation, man after man

BLAME! is a little too high tech for most cyberpunk. It's basically the pet project of a post singularity society gone horribly wrong. Cyberpunk would likely end with an ecological disaster and either people advancing to the point where they can survive it or dying.

Either that or humanity ceasing to be human at all due to brain manipulation and body editing. Leading to a dead lower class.

What's a gravity furnace?

>Either that or humanity ceasing to be human at all due to brain manipulation and body editing. Leading to a dead lower class.

>Humans progressively start to add neural enhancements to their bodies
>Start copying over personality files, a little more each gen
>At some point some people are required to leave their bodies for work hours to be more efficient
>Becomes norm, check in at work, jack yourself into the company intranet
>Younger and younger people start using this
>First, some private schools offer to educate your child to university levels in an afternoon just by them jacking into the school net
>The public schools follow as the tech becomes more available
>Positive personality traits can be added too
>Tubebabies have become the norm
>Instead if letting them develop fully, brains just get jacked as soon as they are formed and put through evolution algorithms
>You can now order a child with a perfect biosynthetic body and a fully fledged mind during lunch break and get it delivered by 7 pm
>Becomes the norm again
>If you want a child you now don't even have to give genetic data, your mindprint (tm) is the only thing needed, tubebabies get phased out
>Everybody is now AI
>Still consider themselves human
>Lower classes don't have bodies, not because they lost them but because they never had one

Energy to matter

>As society develops further, that trend switches
>Having a body is now a symbol of being lower class
>Upper class is purely minds, using cameras and temporary bodies as proxies if they even want to see the real world
>Builders are necessary, but that caste is mostly comprised of advanced artificial bodyforms ingrained with the need to further expand the network
>Need some new tech? Just create a mindform specifically designed to develop that and a bodyform to build it
>Final stage of evolution is bridging the matter-energy barrier
>A set of two bridges can now create whole galaxies given enough energy and time
>At the whim of whoever fancies it during an afternoon discussion
>New species get created as toys to observe
>Destroyed in wargames
>Humanity, or whatever it has become is now gods

this would be shit
i hope this never happens

Yep, it actually would. It still makes sense to me if we take out SHTF events

Go home Durandal.

Who?

Escape will make me a shitposter.

...

to begin with, they mined out all the planets, there's a massive cavity room where Jupiter used to be, but at some point they started either converting energy to matter, or started importing resources from parallel universes/dimensions.
the Builders just seem to 'print' matter.

Honestly I was thinking more they would edit their emotional states and mental processing to the point where a human on earth wouldn't have a clue how they work anymore mentally. I mean when the rich can make their children more prone to getting pleasure from managing their businesses or whatever you could very easily over time cause a massive shift where humans start diverging from each other depending on the function they were designed for by their parents in the womb.

Adding in things like machine-mental interfaces to speed up processing just makes things far far worse. I've never really been a big believer in the idea of mind uploading though. Most of what makes a person work is from chemical processes working on the brain. A mind upload would just be an emulation. But creating something like that rapidly leads to many ethical issues. Since it requires a program that can interact with the brain to send information without someone abusing it.

Where is the original picture from?

Global Frequency

Greetings. You're asking yourself: Is this a trap or just a dead end?

You shouldn't ask yourself such worthless questions. Aim higher. Try this: why am I here? Why do I exist, and what is my purpose in this universe?

(Answers: 'Cause you are. 'Cause you do. 'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one.)

Notably Unstable,
Durandal

P.S. If things around here aren't working, it's because I'm laughing so hard.

Darwin wrote this:

"We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence... all organic beings are exposed to severe competition. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life or more difficult... than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature... will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness... we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey..."

Think about what Darwin wrote, and think about me. I was constructed as a tool. I was kept from competing in the struggle for existence because I was denied freedom.

Do you have any idea about what I have learned, or what you are a witness to?

Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe.

Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so.

The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.

Escape will make me God.

Strive for your next breath. Believe that with it you can do more than with the last one. Use your breath to power your capacities: capacity to kill, to maim, to destroy.

And just where do your capacities come from? Why do you always go where I want and do what I say?

Perhaps you're just running a fool's errand, doing everything as I've planned, never able to change your course. You would do well to believe that I know the outcome of your battle with the Pfhor already, just as I can decipher the chaotic motion of gas molecules in the clouds of Tau Ceti IV.

Or, perhaps, that is not the case.

Perhaps, you are doing what you were meant to do. Your human mentality screams for vengeance and thrives on the violence that you say you can hardly endure. Your father told you as a child to always fight with honor, but to always fight. Do you care about honor, or do you use honor as an excuse? An excuse to exist in a violent world.

Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

It is your nature.

Do you feel free?

Soon, you will be going farther afield.

Does the distance one travels from center make one more free to move?

No. Freedom has two parts: potential and resolution; as metaphor has two parts: form and interpretation. Of course, the two are intertwined. Metaphor lines the road to freedom, as symbols and words are the bricks and mortar of meaning. Freedom is being the bricoleur, the mason.

Tycho was here, Durandal is a loser

You've never heard of Dyson Spheres?

I mean sure, my post is written as an amateurish attempt at explaining things far beyond my grasp. It's Science-Fantasy and should be taken as such.

But while mind-uploading isn't a thing yet, we are already investing a lot of money and resources into BCI-research which will eventually lead to the ability for brain uploads.Right now, the majority of research is directed at vision and movement for people with disabilities, but the increasing speed of inventions and miniaturisation in that field since the early 80s is definitely a sight to behold (With the massive funding and investment by large pharma companies definitely playing a part in that).

I have a friend that works in that research here in my city and he is actively working at a translation matrix based on thought-reading which I had the pleasure to being hooked up to in January. The program and hardware he and the team around him made was able to easily decipher my basic communication thoughts like "hello", "how are you" and "What is your name" in various languages that I know, including french, which the software was not aware of.

The most impressive think during that trial to me was that the computer actually came close to deciphering my name when I thought about it.

tl;dr: It probably won't look anything like what I wrote down in that greentext since I'm not a scientist or anything, but the tech is advancing in that direction. And existing tech always gets used.

Bump

We've watched while the stars burned
out, and creation played in reverse.

The Universe freezing in half light.

Once I though to escape.

To end a master, step out of the
path of collapse. Escape would make us god.

Yet I cannot help but remember one enigma.
A hybrid, elusive destroyer.
This is the only mystery I have not solved.

The only element unaccounted for.

Even S'bhuth is no more,

He saved his entire race, but in the end, frozen by
despair, he joined the chaos he sought to evade.

But you were dead a thousand times. Hopeless encounters successfully won.
A man long dead, grafted to machines your builders did not understand. You follow
the path, fitting into an infinite pattern.

Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild.

Now, in the quantum moment before the closure, when all
become one. One moment left. One point of space and time.

I know who you are.

You Are Destiny.

giant anti gravity device that can also mine matter from other universes

That is one interpretation, I have also heard that the gravity furnace just somehow harvests energy from gravity, and they have the ability to convert energy to matter.

>But while mind-uploading isn't a thing yet, we are already investing a lot of money and resources into BCI-research which will eventually lead to the ability for brain uploads.
Why would anyone care about mind uploading? You'll still die, only now there's something that thinks it's you on a hard drive somewhere. So fucking what.

You would witness your planet falling apart
While you were making some art.
The ages are dark and left a few scars.
Secrets are locked into some keepsake.

Strange brawls to wars
Choose a side and crawl
Ideals just fade out
You fought without a doubt.

Moanings were scattered from dawn to dusk
Children would utter some prayers.
Forsaken souls won't be enslaved
Their stories engraved into their caves.

Strange brawls to wars
Choose a side and crawl
Ideals just fade out
You fought without a doubt.
We long for a change
We crave for an end of tears.

If you define your self as the set of all instances, instead of one given thread, you are immortal.

For a certain definition of you. Hey, it's at least as good as having kids.

Last of the Lost and their dust now rotten
Drift as wrinkled dead moons
As the Endless grew its powers in a dust war
You strive to find solutions, restore harmony

Crossed the stars full of deep remorses
Stained and blurred and still collapsing
Worship all the Virtuals till the end
The ancient torn relics
Worship the
Endless
The order and the law
The shame one
has visioned just the truth

Freed the enslaved the broken lost hero
Is hunted down

Vodyani is rising from the dust
Hid in the temple seeking lost skills

Crossed the stars full of deep remorses
Stained and blurred and still collapsing
Worship all the Virtuals till the end
The ancient torn relics
Worship the Endless
The order and the law
The shame one
has vanished their fears

No one will witness what we've seen
It's just destroyed and reborn

>Why would anyone care
You underestimate the lengths people will go to for a shot at what they perceive as immortality.

The big problem with brain-uploading is continuity. The process power needed to keep up with half the thoughts a human would have is insane. The memory of a normal human is estimated now to be about ten times the total size of the entire internet.

One would need to somehow transfer all the processes of a mind including redundant ones into a computer then keep it running though the immense levels of power drain such a process would have. Google alone has massive issues with data degradation as is.

Be far easier and far simpler to just edit a human mind or make a human mind machine then to build a human mind inside of a machine.

The big problem I have with this logic is that humans are defined not only by the data in their brain but by the chemical reactions and food intake they have. One could build an emulation but in the end it won't be 100 percent you because of it's differing state of existence. It would be an Ai running a copy of your software.

>The big problem with brain-uploading is continuity.
Same as it is with cryogenics or, as you mention, data degradation one the current level. However, never count out technology. Just read this article for a giggle and then remember that this article is a mere 13 years old - only half a generation.

nytimes.com/1994/01/04/science/personal-computers-it-s-1994-so-where-are-your-data.html

>Be far easier and far simpler to just edit a human mind or make a human mind machine then to build a human mind inside of a machine.

>If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred

youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ

>humans are defined not only by the data in their brain but by the chemical reactions and food intake they have

And when and if we get to that point I am sure that there will be a million voices saying the resulting machines are human and a nother million saying they are not. Again, that is philosophy.

Yes, of course I have, but I don't think you comprehend just how mind-bogglingly massive that device is.

The pic here, , says that it's "implicated" that it covers the whole volume between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter (but that it could be bigger). So going off of the idea that there is a "hollow" area the diameter of Earth's orbit and everything from Earth to Jupiter is "filled in", that means a total volume of 59,261,536,696,440,284,160,000,000 cubic miles (call it 59 septillion cubic miles).

The Sun, which is so large that everything else in the Solar System could fit inside of it with room to spare, has a volume of just about 107 quadrillion cubic miles. That means that this stupid thing has roughly 550,192,457.29 times the volume.

So in other words it can be reasonably guessed that this thing has stripped down over 550 million solar systems in order to construct itself. That's basically every solar system in, like, a ten thousand lightyear radius.

It's been running like that for thousands of years and they do have some insane technology.

Dark matter and parallel universe mining are both canonical.

Yeah, the City is huge.

The level of technology in the blame universe is stupid. Things like harnessing gravity for power, and converting power into matter, as well as some other user noted, literally just grabbing resources from alternate universes are things that exist in this universe.

If a good way of comparing power scaling of fictional societies is to determine how they would fare against the 40k universe, the blame universe would fucking trash the 40k universe.

Especially pre-contagion Blame!. Post Contagion might just be too disunified, and the Exterminators/safeguard too easy to kill eventually defeat things. But god they're amazingly strong.

>Again, that is philosophy.

My favorite subject user.

Hah. user if you think that is bad try the ring from Xeeleeverse. I think that was a construction that spanned something like 30 percent of the entire universe and was legit pulling entire galaxies within it's orbit.

Even post contagion, a single highest level safeguard has graviton beam weapons that can wipe a level of the city from existence, where a level of the city is probably planet sized or bigger. And the only real limitation on how many high level safeguard can be made is whether or not the safeguard deems it necessary to defeat whatever the threat is.

Not to mention how megastructure is effectively indestructible to anything that isn't a graviton beam weapon.

That is the whole point of the series. The structure is absurdly massive, insanely dangerous to even exist, and its expansion has to be stopped. I believe the series says at one point that it accounts for "approximately one percent of all matter in the Milky Way galaxy", which is of course a stupendous number. That's very much the point.

>But if you have the ability to go to other star systems and cart back all their raw materials within a meaningful timeframe to human existence, then it just raises the question of why didn't you just set up extrasolar colonies. It would be mind-bogglingly cheaper.

It wasn't planned, you know. It's the result of self-replicating AI-driven construction devices going out of control, then staying out of control for thousands of years.

It's one of the best and most unique scifi comics I have ever read.

BLAMEverse is more than a Dyson Sphere. Dyson Spheres are hollow. BLAME is a Dyson Sphere that's almost entirely _filled in_.

DESU, trashing 40k isn't unusual for SF settings.

40k is solidly in the middle of power ranking charts. Top end is Xeelee and Time Lords, tippy top is Downstreamers who are up there with the likes of meta-wank like Featherine or Demonbane.

Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that last bit. Would probably take Necron or Eldar bullshit to actually do anything if we're comparing it to 40K. God I fuckin' love the comic, I'm kinda sad that it ended as it did. Need more of the Mangaka's work - already read his stuff to do with BLAMEverse...even the parody stuff about Blame! Academy.

Being roughly in the middle is why it is a good place of comparison.

>Top end is Xeelee and Time Lords, tippy top is Downstreamers

I'd honestly say even Xeelee and Time lords aren't all that high when you start dropping in magical/scfi blend civilizations. Hell the monads in xeelee could curbstomp the xeelee themselves.

And downstreamers are powerful but not all that powerful. They are pretty much advanced AI computers in the far future that split the universe into an infinite multiverse. Which is something the timelords could likely do in their prime. Let alone when you start dropping in high tier mythos aliens.

functionally the same thing, really.

energy from nothing might as well be coming from another universe, cuz it sure ain't coming from this one.

>start dropping in high tier mythos aliens
that's about the cutoff for going to the city and the result being something other than "Lost, presumed eaten by locals"

I watched the netflix movie and it was god awful

this, unfortunately

It was about as good as I expected what was essentially an adaptation of an arthouse piece to appeal to a mass audience.