Human-only scifi

dear Veeky Forums,

are there any successful sci-fis games that don't feature aliens, sentient android/AIs, fantasy races, etc... just humans?

>sentient android/AIs

How do these change it from "just humans"?

well, it adds a competing intelligent race of beings

The choice between humans and machines is a false dichotomy created to confuse and mislead.

your wife's gonna fuck your toaster, transhumanist cuck

>Implying I'm not going to cuck my wife with her toaster

I'm currently writing a novel where the only races are human and things created by humans.
Uplifts, Synthetic intelligences based off humans, Transhumans, ect.

Main reason is because far as I can tell there aren't many series that go for that angle, so hey, none I know of.

I heard the RPG based on it wasn't too bad.

Battletech

Human-only sci-fi strikes me as less believable than, say, a medieval setting. A galaxy devoid of aliens is just too empty.

Perhaps if it were limited to our own solar system or the local cluster it can work.

Dune is the only one I know of

Eh, just have a longer timeline and secessionist human states spread across the galaxy. I admit I'd be tempted to add aliens for flavor, but no need to make them technologically comparable.

something like The Expanse, is just within our system, so it's a matter of scope

like full-blown space opera would be a bit hard to go with, without mutation, etc, splitting the human race

>Believing that finding intelligent alien life before we go extinct is something to be counted on

I mean, it's possible (I say this more as an attempt at fairness more than out of any real expectation that humanity is going to establish meaningful contact with another intelligent species), but far from assured. Finding alien life might happen, depending on how likely it is that life as we understand it occurs on a planet that could theoretically support it. Becoming a part of some galactic or universal federation like in a lot of sci-fi settings is wishful thinking.

Ultimately we have no idea what that special ingredient is that makes "life" possible and a sample size of exactly 1 when it comes to planets that have successfully given birth to life. Meanwhile we've been actively searching out extraterrestrial life since as soon as we were technologically able to do so, have found nothing, and--just as importantly--nothing *else* has ever found us. Even if intelligent life does exist, the universe is huge enough that the chances of us meeting them (again, depending on how likely life is to spring up) might be so small as to render it moot anyway.

Like, you've got several gateways to get through before "humans coexisting with aliens" is a thing.

>1) You need non-terrestrial life (no guarantee that it's out there)
>2) You need that life to qualify as "intelligent" by whatever metric we're using (which cuts down the already-questionable "life" category down even further, again by an unknown variable)
>3) You need proximity. We don't achieve our glorious inter-species galactic federation if life exists so far away from us that we never know about it. The universe is a big place.

Right now, we have no reason to consider making meaningful contact with alien life as anything approaching inevitable. Real life is--and we have no real reason to believe it will not remain--a humans-only setting. And, hey, it's plenty exciting already.

you could probbly makes something out of logh

...

>signs
>human only

same with the matrix and skynet

>it's plenty exciting already
No it's not. I want to fuck a space dwarf.

They prefer to be called High G Worlders.

Traveller without the other two imperiums?

Battletech, there is a general here

Something else to think about: the universe is about 13.9 billion years old. It took about 4.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth. We are pretty much right smack dab at the very beginning of the universal timeline. If anything we're the mysterious Ancients that lived and died out long before the heroes of the story come along.

Firefly / Serenity

Read Foundation.

>If anything we're the mysterious Ancients that lived and died out long before the heroes of the story come along.

This I like.

>what is the Fermi Parodox
Intelligent aliens dont exist.

Surely by the time genetic engineering and the like are so advanced you could pretty much get away with becoming anything, the distinction between humans and aliens would become irrelevant.
I think we're much more likely to work in tandem with "aliens" that are just humans but differently coloured and with forehead ridges and all that, even with everyone scoffing at Star Trek-esque aliens all the time.
Hell, the chances of a human colony ship going way off course, and getting rediscovered after hundreds or thousands of years running a decently exotic and spacefaring culture, is probably far more likely than running into actual aliens.
Or maybe not, I dunno.

>not fucking the dishwasher

I do like the idea of us just douching around the universe only for future ayys to marvel and wonder at our vandalism.

mekton? heavy gear? Jovian chronicles? ciberpunk 2020?

...

Maybe your players would like to work on the Encyclopedia? They get to live in a quiet Foundation and not be bothered by politics.

Radical.

Yeah nah, that whole plan worked a treat.

Where's that picture from?

1: always space espers and only subverted by having THEM as the viewpoint and humans as the primitive but dangerous aliens, sometimes sentient AIs, rarely aliens
2: sentient AIs
7: sentient AIs
10: sentient AIs

Well, to be more exact there doesn't seem to be any galactic civilization in our vicinity, so even if intelligent aliens do/did/will do exist in our galaxy, they seem to be pretty rare. We will probably be the first to pass the Great filters to become first such civilization. Life as such might be relatively common, we don't know.
I'm sorry, but reality doesn't operate on your fee fees.

That's another factor we don't know. 4.5*10^9 years might be short time, or long. What is likely that there aren't that many cases of life beginning much earlier in the Universe, as there was not enough heavier elements formed yet.

Citation needed but I read recently that Sol is amongst the oldest 7% of stars in our Galaxy that is capable of supporting liquid water... that's assuming you buy into the Galactic habitability zone hypothesis

A demonstration of this idea is the existence of entire galaxies where no "mundane" life could exist due to high levels of background xray radiation.

Then throw in the biology bit; primitive life seems to have emerged very quickly on Earth, the first evidence indicating that proteins were folding even before the surface had stopped being a magma death zone... however we've only had what you'd consider a "cell" about 2 billions years ago, and photosynthesis about 2.5 billion. The implication is that complex life is... very rare

My point; nerds like us like to imagine that aliens are waiting for us, but just imagine.

Out there are entire galaxies without a scrap of organic life. Its entirely possible that we could truly be alone

More depressing thoughts; its also highly possible that we may never reach other habitable stars. The numbers are not good and getting worse as we rush away from everything.

Hell haven't we got a date with Andromeda in about a billions years which is going to wreck this joint?

I like that user's point

How come? The observable universe is demonstrably devoid of other intelligent life. We're all alone here, user.

I don't count AIs as an extra species, so settings with just humans and AIs are still "human only" in my opinion.

Sounds like we need to review the principles of psychohistory.

>We're all alone

All alone with 7.5 billion other humans. How ever will we cope with this crippling loneliness.

>Sentient AI
>Not human