Sfdebris.net

An alien time traveler appears in front of you, and offers you a choice. To be allowed to be transitioned 1000 years into the future, to the world of 3021. Do you take it? In this scenario, you cannot come back. There are two possible options.

1) It's a liberal's wet dream where a lot of our dreams today have come true. We have space habitats through the solar system, engineering triumphs like the space elevator, fusion energy with solar as a high supplement, or geothermal energy, we have good social progress like perfect biological mastery, so you could swap your sex all day if you chose to, for fun, for recreation, robots tend to a lot of our needs, the population has gone down, we can extend life, we have internet hook-ups between people's brains (and have had it long enough to shimmy out the social repercussions around that, to get laws in place), and while money may still exist as a means of barter, it holds less of a rotted centralized role in our hierarchical systems like today. Perhaps by mining the planets and moons littered about the solar system. There are still petty political battles of the present, but also old problems long since solved, and a lot of things to feel upbeat about. Example being some habitats are exclusively nudist colonies where you can imagine every R-rated thing in the book, haha. You can have VR pods to let you feel whatever you want. Sex robots. The works! Or entertainment farms where space habits are focused exclusively to the development of the arts that touch our dreams and hopes, our loves and imaginations, even our darkest vices.

Or:

2) It's a hellscape. Nuclear war came in the early 21st century, and the human nations have just splintered into all the sociopolitical fallout you could imagine. Infrastructure wise, we've been knocked back into something resembling the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, maybe lower than that. Remnants of modern tools are still around, but there is massive abuse of power, warlords carving out chunks of territory, we've regressed, radiological diseases still spread on prevailing winds, very few cities are left, older structures are crumbling, our civilization has collapsed, and hey, places like Chernobyl have long since rotted away, meaning that adds more radiation polluting to the mix. Winters are infrequent and come very hard and harsh, but always sicken and kill millions due to green snow. It's rule of the strongest here. Very few armored vehicles are left, badly maintained by renegade outfits who have only a basic bones working grasp upon the complicated mechanics, and of course women are a commodity, sadly. It happens in most post-apocalypse societies. For breeding stock, pleasure, to trade, to vent and abuse off on. Backstabbing is common. Or recreational wars for pleasure. A lot of the knowledge built on over 6000 years has been lost, that you hold in your heart and mind. Religion and religious sects are on the rise since people blame gadgets for where we went wrong. Lots of death cults and death rituals to be found. Very few books remain, as well. The human population borders around the hundreds of millions or tens of millions and we may be facing the twilight of the species.

Where do you choose to go? You can go anywhere. But there is a caveat. You might be sent to the opposite of your choice. You MUST, however, choose one, or the planet will be wiped out. Choose wisely.

Discuss either possibility.

Yukaphile wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 9:24 pmWhere do you choose to go? You can go anywhere. But there is a caveat. You might be sent to the opposite of your choice. You MUST, however, choose one, or the planet will be wiped out. Choose wisely.

The choice is irrelevant. Great job genie...

I want to gauge your reactions, all participatory users here, to what you'd do in such a future world. Maye it was worded poorly. Because most would OBVIOUSLY choose the first one. Perhaps the only real choices are "live happy" for the first and "go seppuku" for the second one, but really, where's our imaginations? GO INTO DETAIL. Really, anything goes. Make it as detailed as you want. Good or bad.

I agree that the fact that you can choose whichever you like but you may not go there takes quite a bit away from the exercise - or at the very least I'm unsure what it adds.

That said, I think I'd pretty easily choose the second option. There are some terrible things about that second option. I think the one that stands out to me as the worst is the what is described about women as a commodity. Meanwhile, on the "liberal's utopia" side I'd have to imagine there are definitely many good things, though without intending offense, the description as given here doesn't seem to give too much attention to the things I think I'd be happy about for this option and seems a bit preoccupied with having a lot of options for having sex.

Why would I choose the latter, then? Well.... for all the good things that the former seems to offer, the particular sorts of things about that option which concern me are more overriding. For example, I would imagine in a society like that there would be a relatively narrow range of acceptable worldviews. As at least alluded to above, there are plenty of things which would be considered "liberal" which I believe in, but at the same time it does seem ironically that where societies grow more liberal the range of what is tolerated tends to become more narrow. That might sound counterintuitive because within those particular categories of views that are tolerated, there's a pretty deep selection of choices, but that can tend to mask the fact that the categories themselves tend to exclude quite a bit. To pick a perhaps obvious and easy example just to make the point (though I shudder to do so because it's such a hot button topic) within a liberal utopia one could likely choose from an enormous number of options for gender, which seems incredibly diverse! - but the view that there are only two genders would be strictly a no go. I don't raise that particular example because it's necessarily the one I'm personally worried about here, but because I think it's an easy to understand example of the dynamic I'm trying to explain.

... and here's sort of the next step in the thought process, really the key one: I have no idea what a liberal utopia 1,000 years from now is going to think of anything. Heck, there are things today, in 2021, which society feel extremely strongly about which less than 20 years ago were looked upon completely differently. 1,000 years is a long, long time. It's entirely conceivable that 1,000 years from now the views they're going to have might be entirely frightening to even the most ardent 2021 liberal, and that those views might be enforced quite severely. Again, I'm not focusing really at all on any specific view or policy or mindset that I am in particular concerned about. I'm moreso looking at the bigger picture that I don't know what they're going to believe in such a society but it does seem likely that if I don't believe it, too, that's going to be a big problem.

Meanwhile, there are things about the second option which are awful - BUT that second option seems to me to at least offer the hope that in a society like that, even if one couldn't find somewhere in which they fit in, one could find some little corner of the world where they could go to live largely undisturbed, at least for a while. Now it might be hard. Getting food or other necessities in such a scenario might be extremely difficult. There might be strong danger of failure, and death. Yet at least in that situation with only a few tens or hundreds of millions of people, even with the warlords and other large obstacles I'd have hope that I could find somewhere to go if the place I was plopped down initially didn't work out.