How do you justify soft sci-fi space opera withOUT Transhuman Space/Eclipse Phase-tier "and now, as an infomorph...

Butlerian Jihad.

Perhaps it is just me, but I simply do not buy the "Uh... people do not do it often because of social stigma" line of reasoning in Transhuman Space and Eclipse Phase, with regards to creating copies of oneself.

Surely, there are people who do so regardless, social stigma be damned. If someone is smart, charismatic, talented, and the type to scoff at such social stigmas, what is stopping them from acquiring an army of themselves? They would be of the same mind and agree with one another anyway, so it is not as if there would be power struggles. Maybe there would be problems if an independent-minded person duplicated themselves, but probably not for a community-minded personality.

It seems like anyone can become a supervillain of the week simply by doing exactly that, and they might not even be villainous. They might do so to try to genuinely help their community.

I just want to play as a space smuggler with a sassy ship AI and a crew of dysfunctional misfits. That's all.

If I recall, Eclipse Phase does have at least one person exactly like that. That person does happen to be a criminal organization, so sort of villainous. Couldn't tell you who or where so I could be wrong.

9 Lives

Just make everyone retarded like in WH40k.

There is bound to be at least one intelligent, charismatic, and reasonably philanthropic person who thinks to themselves, "I could probably pitch in to my community by duplicating myself and then sharing my skills with everyone." If they are talented in STEM fields, they might think to become a "one-person" research and development team.

Who is going to stop such a person, and why?

>soft sci-fi

First off, you lose control of forks immediately upon creation. Egocasting like that is expensive as all hell. Those morphs are expensive. Once again you have no control over the forks, if you have the means to communicate with them over that distance that is super expensive. Also, ego casting is faster than ship travel, but it still takes time. Not weeks or months mind you but from one end of the solar system to the other, its a few days at least. It isn't easy to do that, and your character would go crazy after making the forks.

>It isn't easy to do that, and your character would go crazy after making the forks.
Why, other than "because fuck you"?

>justify soft sci-fi
You don't, that's the point of being soft.
The point of hard sci-fi is social commentary.

Making forks causes mental strain, as you are making a copy of your self, to either possibly die or be captured. Forks are not permanent, but they are still you. Now if done once or twice its not a big deal, but if you fork yourself into an army, you are going to go fucking nuts.

Soft sci-fi space opera? Why not something like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's easy, since the story and plot are already there. Just make analogs for things that happen in The Odyssey and set it in space.

This. End of discussion.

Base it on Dune

Transhumanism and post-humanism is inevitable, though. Embrace it.

They only saw what was in the mirror...

I think is referring to Pax Familae

Or go retro, doing something like Buck Rogers

Depends on the level, modifying the body is certainly possible but what if it's actually impossible to transfer consciousness away from our brains?

"Turns out physicists are wrong, you actually can go faster than light or through time or whatever".

Soft sci-fi, by definition, does not feel the need to justify how everything works in a logical, physically possible way.

Star Wars, which is buttery-soft sci-fi that centers around a family of wizards, doesn't have this transhumanist stuff, because....it doesn't. And no one has ever complained about it

Fork-hiving as a work technique exists, but remember Eclipse Phase tries to lean harder - energy, space and resources aren't free. You need bodies or server space to run multiple copies of yourself and those take time to build, so you could very well be taking resources away from people who are not extensions of you who need shit to live.

Hell, Star Trek could effortlessly make EP look soft babby tier on transhumanism if they actually applied half their technology or the anomalies of the week. Retroviruses that turn you into a fucking spider. Instantly resetting Bad Shit by going through a transporter. Infinite transporter cloning. Transhumans that can pick up and throw dudes like they're made of cardboard while also being smarter than Vulcans. Stolen Borg nanobullshit. But they *don't* utilize this shit. Why? Because it's Just Not That Kind of Show.

>They would be of the same mind and agree with one another anyway
That's fucking hilarious. If I was forced to live with three of my own forks for a week, there would be at least five fights and maybe a murder. Quite a lot of people lowkey loathe themselves, to the point that screaming rows are a practical inevitability, if not Rick and Morty tier "Above average levels of Rick-On-Rick violence".

Well it's soft sci-fi space opera for starters. They just don't have mind uploading or even a huge degree of automation.

Try cloning something other than a Veeky Forums autist.

>Every Calvin and Hobbes Duplicator "Why should I do Your work?" story.
The Teleporter problem has been proven to be insurmountable in-universe. Teleporter clones, uploads, etc are never perfect duplicates due to quantum or other effects on brain bit-state measurement and replication errors. They do not believe themselves to be the original, their personalities are clearly divergent, they lose older memories and skills, they lose the original's motivations, etc. This means that everyone, including teleporter clones, refuses to participate in teleportation or other processes requiring brain digitization (which is only possible through destructive imaging).

>Teleporter clones, uploads, etc are never perfect duplicates due to quantum or other effects on brain bit-state measurement and replication errors. They do not believe themselves to be the original, their personalities are clearly divergent, they lose older memories and skills, they lose the original's motivations, etc.
"I put myself through recursive transport cloning and see what comes out after the twentieth generation." [Aroused mad scientist giggling]

>Every Calvin and Hobbes Duplicator "Why should I do Your work?" story.
"Because I'm doing the same work you are, genius."

You do something along the lines of the Night Land. Sure, you could do your resleeving and braincasting, but your morphs are going to turn into abominations and an Eater is going to to suck your soul the moment it gets transmitted. Bad end, bitches.

My soft sci-fi takes place in a different universe with different technology, history, physical laws, etc.

>the luminiferous aether is real. Relativity isn't.
>Spaceships have aetherdynamic wings, fins, and sails. That's why they look like weird fighter planes and catamarans. They have a speed limit, and are affected by aetheric weather.
>hyperspace exists.
>microchips don't exist. Electronics have to use vacuum tubes. The computers seen in Alien (1979) are basically the highest-tech portable computers available.
>"positronic brains" are a thing for droids/AI. It's basically an animal-like neural network that can easily interface with electronics. Like an animal, it has to be trained, cared for, and has an individual personality. "AI trainer" is a lucrative career path.
>Also, there's magic/psi/whatever

Brain upload/transfer isn't a thing. Computers are barely advanced enough to store and playback a few books. Miniaturization is severely limited by the lack of computational power. The processor for a CNC router takes up an entire room. And you want to build a machine that disassembles a brain on a molecular level?

Transhumanism is a spiritual practice, not a technological one. If you want to upload and transfer your consciousness, you'll need to do freaky mind meld shit with hyperdimensional ancient aliens or something.

Why do you think cybernetic modification turns people evil in a lot of fictional settings? By accepting the ideology of transhumanism, you're throwing humanity in the trash. It's like willingly becoming a lich or a vampire in fantasy, you discard your humanity for something else. And other people, rightfully, are not going to like that.

>By accepting the ideology of transhumanism, you're throwing humanity in the trash. It's like willingly becoming a lich or a vampire in fantasy, you discard your humanity for something else.
Shit, my pancreas stopped working right and now I'm a diabetic. But if I get a robo pancreas, I'll turn into a cybernetic sociopath and kill people. Better live with diabetes and preserve my humanity! And maybe get rid of these glasses that are inhumanly augmenting my shitty eyes, too, they're turning me EVIL!

Yes, putting on glasses - or perhaps shoes! - is exactly the same as making a thousand copies of your mind in silicon.

My setting has two basic power blocks. One uses electromagnetic something or other for shields, particle weapons, etc, while the other uses life energy channelled through crystals to make big ass guns and mutate animals. I wanted something akin to a magic vs. science conflict, but both sides have in-universe math explaining their respective techlines.

>Why do you think cybernetic modification turns people evil in a lot of fictional settings?
Because some people are terrified of the idea that oppressive social hierarchies that benefit them will be undone by technological progress, so they write stories talking about how change is bad.

When the same billionaires who own you now will be immortal and capable to buy off other people's memories and skill sets - it's all data, after all - I'm sure you'll be happy about it too.

Of course I will. And so will you. We won't have the choice not to. Smile! The Corp is Mother. The Corp is Father. The CEO is God. Come worship with me, friend!

>If they are talented in STEM fields, they might think to become a "one-person" research and development team.
Yes, because in a society where uploading fucking consciousness is possible, one or five dudes with STEM degree will totally make some sort of difference. Because while it's absolutely unthinkable that people could be doing interstellar travel without also reaching perfect transhumanism, it is totally NOT necessary to reach without such improvements of A.I., robotics, energy production and self-modification that the actual value of ANY individual intellect or even a couple of individual intellects is going to be negligible.

Right.
You people smart good.

>Yes, because in a society where uploading fucking consciousness is possible, one or five dudes with STEM degree will totally make some sort of difference.
One to five, yeah, no.

A whole lot more? Now we're talking.

"Uploading consciousness" is equivalent to a suicide.

The second instance knows you died and doesn't feel like experiencing it himself.
>I'm going to go do something that I'm interested in, not what your doing.

/Thread

>A whole lot more? Now we're talking.
No. One fucking computer is going to take the role of tens of thousands of the best of the best scientists, and will likely have the capacity to freely and easily to further replicate itself if there is necessity. You people REALLY fucking don't know about the kinds of volumes and scales we are thinking here, do you?

Which would be fine if you weren't the same retards bitching about how other people's settings "don't make scientific sense".
By very definition, in a world where transhumanism including uploading and cloning itself, is going to be COMPLETELY obsolete as a resource/computation device. Laughably obsolete.

It's a different universe with different laws and possible technologies.

Have fun egocasting at the speed of light (if it is possible at all) while other guys are jumping around in their FTL ship.

>Have fun egocasting at the speed of light (if it is possible at all) while other guys are jumping around in their FTL ship.
>never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of hard drives on the freeway.

Or of a flat rate box brimmed with 512 gb SD Cards.

Egocasting/resleeving does not mean godlike AGIs.

This isn't the Culture for chrissakes.

Considering how pirates in space operas are almost a must have I would prefer to travel in my own ship with guns. And not as a dead weight cargo in the hold. It doesn't give you that much more of a chance to survive but at least you have some agency.

What you describe is hard sci fi. You are in the clear.

>hard sci-fi is higher-tech than soft sci-fi

>fantasy is higher-tech than hard sci-fi

From what OP described it's all inside hard sci-fi

My dick is hard scifi

No, they are just different.

In most cases soft sci-fi doesn't have a lot of information and body modification technologies but high energy, materials and anything related to war and travel can very well outpace hard sci-fi world by lot.

Hell, I still remember how I was reading "The Star Kings" and the uberweapon destroyed a whole star cluster. Just completely erased it from reality. And it wasn't impossible to replicate and build more of it - only fear that the galaxy could just cease to exist in case such weapons were deployed en masse was stopping that.

one word: RETRO

Justify what? I actually have no idea what you are asking. You mean that sort of shit should crop up in all space opera for some reason?

B-but It's not dying if I don't notice it! :^)

Besides gargling on a cock of some retarded arbitrary terminology of some shit game or anime or whatever you seem to be raving on, you are wrong.
Any form of digitalization of human cognition sufficient to even create a facsimile of a human mind NECESSARY requires A.I. and computation powers SEVERAL LEAGUES BETTER than an actual human mind. That is non-debatable. You need incomparably higher and more efficient computation to even begin basic modeling of human cognition. Like: several millions of times stronger than the computational power of an individual.

This is fucking laughable. It's like talking about the importance of a physical stregth of an individual man when we are talking about getting items into high orbit. Jesus.

By that logic it doesn't matter what any of the non-AGIs do because they're already under the overlordship of godlike AGIs who've probably already got everyone as infomorphs in a virtual utopia.

What utopia? They gonna hate your guts when they find out that for all their power and intellect they can't get away from death.

First of all "egocasting", "AGI", "infomorphs" are bullshit technobabble from a subpar fiction you just insist of fucking sucking the cock off. They don't mean anything to anyone but you.

Second of all, nobody talks about god-like creatures because that is a child's way of thinking. The most likely scenario would be that machines actually take care of actual problem solving - both in terms of resources and energy, and new possible scientific inquiries, while what was formerly known as humans is now likely establishing entirely new value systems of their own, probably taking into account the specifics of evolutionary needs of humans such as need for exploration, satisfaction of status requirements, emotional and sexual satisfaction etc... in what ever models of semi-virtual and virtual world they create to keep them comfortable.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infomorph
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

AGI is a real term meaning Artificial General Intelligence.

So: A.I. and virtual consciousness. Great. Just say those fucking words.

>The most likely scenario would be that machines actually take care of actual problem solving
Look at this optimist who don't know shit about paperclip optimizers.

You mean "Paperclip MAXIMIZER"? Yes, I know about those. Hardly actually changes anything. We managed (so far) to resolve this issue among humans who have exactly the same tendency, there is no fucking reason to manage this among other forms of intelligence.

AI can be anything, from algorithms designed to find certain patterns of pixels, to complexes which are to the human mind what the human mind is to a Casio. AGI carries connotations of abilities and performance similar to or greater than that of the human mind.
Why are you being so vitriolic when you don't even know such basic terms of art?

AGI is a masturbatory term enforced by a bunch of pricks based on a sci-fi story to make themselves sound smarter than they are. For the purposes of this discussion it's absolutely fucking worthless, because we can all extremely simply infer what we are talking about from context. Now fuck off.

^^^^^^^^^this

get the FUCK out of this thread or I'll MAKE YOU!!!!!

>the best part about the future: transhumanism, and eventually, posthumanism
>complete devaluation of human life is the best about the future
S-sure, user.

Just play it realistic if they want memorycasting fuckery

>player wants to upload himself
sure, there ya go
>make NPC with his same stat block
>player is still stuck with his original PC
>wants to kill himself
you do you, pal.
>then wants to play as the NPC
nope, roll a new character.

Firefly minus the Mary Sue bitch.
>it's all ordinary humans
>wild west in space
>there were attempts at transhumanism, but it failed spectacularly (Reavers)

But user, transhumanism is SCIENTIFIC FACT! Just like technological singularity which is sure to happen in 1995... er, I mean 2005... I'm sure I've said 2015... 2025 maybe?

Why do people assume that we will ever reach transhumanism or even appreciable autonomous AI in any decent timeframe? If at all?
As of right now we are completely in the dark in the wrong building in another city when it comes to understandin conciousnes

y u heff to be mad?

Let me guess, touhoufag.

You didn't get the answer you want in the first thread and so you will keep making these threads until some user guesses right what you have on your mind.

Because you don't want a discussion. You want someone to validate your dumb-ass "solution", whatever it would be, or else this thread would have stopped at , and .

Go fuck yourself, you autistic shitweasel.

There is no need to be upset.

>How do you justify soft sci-fi space opera
Use tab and indents.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . soft sci-fi space opera

>how dare you not liking what I like
>why would you not want to escape the world where human life is cheap to a world where it has as much value as a single copy of "pepe.jpg"

The posts i linked have good answers to that question.

You don't NEED to autistically justify everything in a setting, as long as you can create a plausible world.

I mean hell. look at thousands of space operas, with their "Broadsides, IN SPACE!" and "Napoleonic tactics, IN SPACE!" For some reason, existence of these is okay, and yet a simple explanation of "Resleeving wasn't invented because there's no technology to ensure the consciousness is one and the same" is not.

>soft sci-fi space opera
>without transhumanism
You can't have transhumanism if you have no humans. Or just let them all die on Earth and have Indiana Jones-like alien PCs try to explore the ancient ruins of terran cities.

>soft sci-fi space opera without transhumanism

You don't include transhumanism.

If you're looking for a hard explanation. I can give you several, but recent research suggests that the brain doesn't actually store data. It recreates it. So the idea of being able to put your consciousness into a toaster might be far harder than anybody possibly imagined.

Made in image and likeness of God/Holy human form/Biological is better and more potential than Mechanical bodies or something along these lines.

That's not even a 2hu.

>no microchip
As if that'd stop anyone. Without convenient electronic processing, hybrid Fluidic-Electrical systems would see immediate support rather than stalling out. While that process of R&D would be uncomfortably slow compared to the micro revolution, the end result would be to hopscotch our current, stalling, paradigm. Eventual development of microfluidics would replace many of the missing electrical components entirely.

Firts, unless it kills cohesion with what happened before, you don't have to justify nothing, ever.
Spave Opera is about romanticism, drama and action. You could have cavemen in SPAAAAACE with maser clubs jumping from asteroid to asteroid in the void, and not give a fuck about that it makes absolutely no sense at all while the adventure is fun.
If your transhumanism is about having free lives or invulnerability instead of about the moral problems it brings it has no place in a good space opera game, nor any good game.

Resource shortages is how I've ran it when I did hardsh sci-fi.
Really think of how much resources you need in rare earth metals, raw elements, production centers, skilled labor to create a people copier. Then imagine the infrastructure needed to fix it if you break it.

So if you're a couple years travel from anywhere with advanced infrastructure, a few months from any port at all, ruggedness and ease of fixing becomes super important to any device. So say, you wouldn't want a built in computer and led display for a food heater. You'd want a 50's tier toaster where all you need to do is run electricity through a basic heating element.

So it usually ends up with the outer parts of exploration are traveller tier tech levels while the inner planets are more alien than any distant star.

Man, Lem wrote a story about it. The one robot told the other bot that he was a huge idiot and a criminal who was literally keeping a robot imprisoned and under duress when he told him that he had created a copy of his consciousness and was trying to get it to work for himself.

I'd imagine that non-US nations would have similar laws that would make enslaving copies of yourself or copies of consciousnesses that can pass a certain treshold illegal, which would make the investment very much pointless to the sort of people who'd do it in the first place.

No. Five of you is still one of you, just working at different things. The clones will have the same blindspots and limitations as the original. STEM once again fails to understand how people work, how unexpected.