Transhumanist superbeings with advanced technology are keeping ordinary humans in enclosed habitats...

Humanity evolved through chasing large animals until they died of exhaustion. They don't fear larger foes, which is just a game to them.
They eat and inject poisons for the fun of it.
Humans are docile only through insane dopamine production.
Of course you would want to keep them locked.

This logic sucks such an enormus amount of horse cock.

Sure, their logic doesn't have to be centered around the same idea as our logic is, but an indivudal of them still needs to center their thinking around a fundamental idea.
Just saying,
>LOL they aliens, i don't need to reason for shit
just makes one look like an idiot as a writer.

1+1 is still 2 for them
Smaller masses are still attracted to larger ones
and the final form of energy is still heat for them

Their core idea might tbe to "create the tastiest donut" but it is still logic and their thinking will center around that idea.
And as long you don't know that they just wish to create the donut supreme their actions won't look reasonable to us.
But that doesn't mean that their logic is incomprehensible you Nut, it only means that you don't see all pieces of a puzzle.

because it is

The superbeings have trillions of such species. They try and prod them into scientific development, in the hopes that one of them will develop with the specific intelligence and creativity to solve a problem that has utterly stonewalled their entire civilization.
The problem is what we call the second law of thermodynamics, of course. The last question, and the most important question. For now, we're just another among trillions of failures..

They were created by humans and they derive sexual pleasure form keeping humans happy and well fed.

I like that one a lot!

Another idea:
Superbeings want to find out what if anything happens after death and if there is reincarnation.

They're all the humans who refused to move with the new order. Because they no longer had any place in society, they were given a reservation to live in and practice their own way of life without outside interference. this wasn't meant to be a reference to amerindians but it works all the same

Were amerindians ever given a choice of becoming citizens of USA during the time they were also forced into reservations?

Humanity failed somewhere along the line, probably by warring the shit out of each other.

The survivors were basically kidnapped by superbeings from space who were watching us but believed they had a moral imperative not to interfere with us directly. They have the technology to easily fool us into believing we're in our own habitat, so while that is impressive in our eyes, it's hardly even a decision for them to employ it.

They mostly kept us around as subjects to study and they weren't even that interested in us until our species annihilated itself.

>it only means that you don't see all pieces of a puzzle.
And what if you're literally unable to comprehend a piece of the puzzle?

Suppose you were somehow in a room with some primitive hunter-gatherer. You have a complete understanding of his language and all its proper nouns. He doesn't understand any language other than his own, though.

Now explain to him the how and why of putting Louis Armstrong on the moon. He doesn't have the language, the concepts, to even begin to try and describe the practicalities. It wouldn't work. He lacks half a lifetime of general and advanced education, and his language lacks thousands of years of cultural and scientific development.

Now extrapolate to a superbeing. Admittedly already a bit soft-scifi, but bear with me. It's so advanced that its kind doesn't even primarily communicate with speech anymore. And now it's supposed to explain its reasoning, which is X centuries of cultural and scientific development beyond yours, in your dead language that doesn't have even have words for any but the most basic of its future-science concepts?

Fine. The explanation may be a bit longer.
"I gotta. Bcuz dark matter, branes and quantum stuffs."

You absolutely could get that caveman to understand what you're talking about if you put enough effort in. Just because you're too lazy doesn't mean it's impossible.

Depends on the region. Areas where tribes were considered to be hostile (i.e. most of them) didn't get the choice.

The super-beings were originally developed as custodians and caretakers. It started with computationally complex, but largely dull duties. Coordinating the logistics of supply & demand across vast areas for example. But everything is an interconnected network. They could only improve their performance at their assigned duties so much before the most major failings were caused by inefficiencies in still-human-run sectors that fed into their duties. So they expanded their duties to better serve out their overall directive of 'take care of things'. Fundamentally their job became to run all the parts of human society that have anything to do with taking care of or providing for humanity and they quietly cut humans out of the process of doing that because humans were, frankly, not as good at it as they were.

They continue to do it because seeing to the physical, emotional and mental well-being of their charges is what they were created for, and they operate best when doing so. Artificial in nature, they are bereft of wants or desires not imprinted upon them, so even beyond humanity's obsolesence, they see no need to alter this aspect of themselves.

The reason for secrecy is simple: Humans like to feel in control of their own destiny. But if they were allowed to actually have high-level influence they would inevitably fuck it all up. Optimum solution: Falsify their life surroundings such that they feel in control, while in fact fixing the results beforehand to prevent failures or lapses in the duty of care.

I don't see why it would be so hard to explain to hunter-gatherer this things. Granted we would need to start with basics like "moon is an spherical object orbitin around the earth which is spherical object in itself" and if we had something to back our claims (which would be more of a matter of him trusting our information NOT him not able to comprehend it). He would already understand what "travel" means, what "discovering" means, what "achieving" something really hard means. It would be super easy explain why we put the man on the moon and even how we done it wouldn't be that hard.

And the hardest part would be to get over the basic scientific knowledge about how universe works. Stuff that already explained in here
>1+1 is still 2 for them
>Smaller masses are still attracted to larger ones
>and the final form of energy is still heat for them

>if you put enough effort in.
That's a big if. You would need to teach him an entirely new language, aside from a couple of decades of scientific education.

Now extrapolate that to a superbeing again. What if the time required to explain all the elements of its reasoning properly to a 'simple human' would be in excess of a few hundred years?

It could just say that. But the end result is the same and it doesn't have the pizazz of "Just bcuz".

Plain and simple. It's a sentient seed bank.
Someday something unknowable and unforeseeable might happen to the transhumans but, due to their preservation efforts their base genome is preserved and safe ready to take root again and start a new crop. Maybe humans are like seeds where the older less specialized seeds fare better in less than ideal environments compared to the specialized and modified seeds that are the transhumans. Perhaps bits that were done away with in the transhumans because they were thought to be useless or redundant actually served some obscure purpose in base humans and it's only through carefuk curation and observation they came to realize this and modify themselves accordingly. Perhaps there culture is stagnating and they're trying to clean why base humans build comparatively more stable and robust cultures than they do. Maybe these super beings are just plain bored of it all so they made a new reality show featuring their dumb ancestors. Maybe they're sentimental and conservationist and decided homo sapiens need not be wiped out like homo neanderthalensis was when his successor took up the mantle. Maybe they all agreed millennia ago that it was a choice to become transhumans and not a requirement so the protohumans were put into structures for protection from their naivete and primitiveness getting them killed in the galaxy at large while the transhumans took up the mantle of Man all while keeping little brother safe simply because they said they would all those years ago and who breaks a promise to their family?
It'll come across as a cop-out but you can justify any of this by them being transhuman and thus they have an inherently different level of intellect and views when compared to bade humans and to them it all makes perfect sense you just can't see the big picture.

Ex: Gorillas think humans are weird entities who look roughly like them except their heads are too big and they don't have enough hair with enormous eyes and occasionally they abduct you and perform experiments against your will for what they claim is for your own good. Humans think aliens are weird entities who look roughly like them except their heads are too big and they don't have enough hair with enormous eyes and occasionally they abduct you and perform experiments against your will for what they claim is for your own good.
Gorilla>Base Human>Transhuman simply due to the nature of how different they are as entities combined with how advanced their technology is Base Humans might be viewed by Transhumans as a less capable brutish cousin where explaining to them why they're doing what they're doing would be an effort in futility because they just wouldn't get it so why bother when instead you can go about your business quickly and just assure them it'll all be okay don't worry.

Because the Culture think it's amusing.

>That's a big if. You would need to teach him an entirely new language, aside from a couple of decades of scientific education.

That seems a really inefficient way to explain a moon rocket to a caveman.

Have you had a couple of decades of scientific education?

Maybe he's trying to say how long it'd take to teach the caveman to make his own rocket? I dunno.

>That seems a really inefficient way to explain a moon rocket to a caveman.
It's the only way. You can't explain it properly in his own language. It has no words for the concepts involved. No speaker of his language has ever needed them.

Paraphrasing can only get you so far.

When someone teaches you a concept, they will frequently teach you a word for it.

You already said I'm fluent in his language, so the hardest barrier is out the way and we can build up a bank of loanwords.

Even then though, if you take that away and neither of us can communicate in the first place, the language barrier becomes the largest problem. You're severely overestimating the difficulty of explaining something to someone who wants to learn it.

>putting Louis Armstrong on the moon
u cheeky twat

I thought the whole issue was that teaching him a new language was inefficient.

If you're going to flood his language with either newly invented words or English loanwords that end up completely dwarfing his original vocabulary, that's basically still what you're doing.

And those that weren't were given the option of sign this treaty giving us all these rights, or we'll consider you hostile.

Also were fostering all your children with white christians to make them into white christians.

...

You mean like the thing we do with children all the time ?

>Transhumanist
>Human
So what you're saying is they WERE ONCE A MAAAAN.

They are likely containing the last "pure" humans in a confined existence, hiding them away from a universe populated by dozens of different transhuman branches - everything from a digitized hivemind to bioengineered ubermensch to machines built in our image - and are trying to achieve a unity of space by analyzing the Original Man for some sort of clue, a central drive they can unite Numanity with. The real fun begins when OG humans break free and discover their many "children" among the stars.

Because slavery is easiest to maintain when the slave believes he is free.