Aliens have come and kidnapped the first human they came across, unfortunately, that was you. They take you to a new planet almost identical to our current Earth, but without anything man-made.
The aliens say you can have 1 million real humans to start “New Earth” and you can put them anywhere and teach them anything you want. You’ll have 1,000 years to make a good New Earth and if the Aliens like it, you’ll get to keep it, if not they will blow it up and try again with someone else. You will have access to old Earths internet so you will have the choice on what technologies you introduce and when. You live in the ship, but you can choose to pop in and out of New Earth as you please. You will not be burdened with all 1 million humans at once. You can choose to add a small number of them at a time until you get the proper resources established.
Edit: The humans can reproduce, and will unless you implement some form of birth control to prevent them from doing so. Also the first 1 million humans will start with the basic knowledge of how to human and you can pick personality traits for them, like you would a Sim, but the babies they make are blank slates.
You don’t have to try and make it a good society, you can choose to watch the world burn for 1,000 years. Up to you.
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Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!
Seriously though, my goal would be to build a society that exists for and is utterly committed to providing for the needs of all of its citizens. All else is secondary. The rule is simple: have a pulse? Congratulations, you’ve won a lifetime supply of all the clean air, healthy food, pure water, sturdy and comfortable housing, quality education, and top-tier healthcare you need to live a long, comfortable life in which you can pursue whatever you’re passionate about so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else (and there will probably be a stern talking-to for anyone who seems set on hurting themselves.)
Aside from teaching skills and such, education would also convey the importance of community, cooperation, helping each other, etc to the pursuit of maximizing individual liberty for everyone.
This works if everyone is willing to put in the effort to contribute, how do you handle those who are not willing or able to do so? I feel like everyone is probably able to make meaningful contributions to a society in one way or the other, but what about those that just don’t wanna? Do you think the number would be high? I’m not sure.
Why do you imagine people wouldn’t contribute? People aren’t only motivated by money - unless I’ve somehow been missing out on getting paid for doing the dishes, cleaning up trash at the park, or helping my friends move this whole time. People are so programmed by capitalism to stop any idea that comes into their head that might challenge the status quo and apply the ‘rugged individualism’ bullshit to it until they figure out how it couldn’t possibly work, while failing to realize that humans worked together for thousands of years before capitalism came along and taught us all that we should be thinking of ourselves first, last, and only.
But also you missed something important here, in the first two words:
Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!
What contribution do you imagine is required if automation can meet everyone’s needs? This isn’t the real world, we’ve got goddamned aliens in space ships flying around, there’s no reason to believe someone with that level of technology couldn’t automate away literally everything. And even if that wasn’t the case, the point of the bit I said about education was explicitly to deprogram people who are still hung up on capitalism’s ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude, if that’s required (the prompt said nothing about where these people come from, what their preconceived notions are, etc, so I was covering all bases.)
Based on this part
you can pursue whatever you’re passionate about
I wouldn’t have anything to “contribute” as I don’t consider myself passionate about anything. All I would do is consume media if all my other needs were met.
Passion isn’t something you either have or you don’t, it’s something you develop by being curious about the world, by seeing a need that you could fulfill and wanting to feel useful, etc. Sitting on the couch all day is not the way to develop your passion (take it from someone who has done it). Find something you care about, find a way to help make it better. But, if everyone’s needs are met by automation I see no reason you couldn’t be a giant couch potato if that’s all you want out of life, because no contribution is required of anyone at that point. I’m not here to judge.
Yeah I don’t have any of that curiosity, ability to fulfill needs, things to care about or make better either.
They’re skills, they require practice like everything else.
I have been on disability and unable to work for ~14 years now, and I certainly went through a long phase of just being a big couch potato with no ambition or dream other than to do the least amount of work I could possibly get away with and still have a tolerable life. My house was a mess, I was a mess, shit fell through the cracks, etc. But it wasn’t those things that drove me out of that pit, it was boredom. I started watching youtube videos and stumbled into science-related topics and discovered that despite hating school I actually quite enjoy learning. That’s what rekindled that curiosity in me, the drive to be doing something to better myself all the time, even if it was just packing my head full of information that served no other purpose other than it being pretty fucking cool to know shit about the world. From there I got motivated to read (I used to read literally everything I could get my hands on, and stopped for various reasons), to start caring about my health, to take care of myself, etc, and from there I started wanting things again. I discovered that what I - a ~20-year veteran of network engineering and security - am passionate about is writing and politics, so now I divide most of my time between seeking out deep, serious political discussions/debates and trying to write a novel (emphasis on the ‘trying’; maybe it’ll work out, maybe it won’t, but in the meantime I’m writing and it’s making me happy.)
I’m not saying all this to say ‘lookit me, I’m so fuckin’ awesome’, but to say that even going from being really depressed it’s still possible to find things in the world to be interested in and if you pursue those interests you will find something you’re passionate about. If you want to.
That’s cool and good for you and all, seems like you had some good bases to build from, but that ain’t me.
I’m not big on skills or practice. Can’t rekindle a curiosity that I’ve never had. Can’t stick with anything long enough for self-improvement. Never enjoyed reading. No career to speak of, worked food service more than anything else.
I’m just running out the clock. Day by day, week by week, year by year.
We definitely have aliens in spaceships flying around in the real world.
Also I don’t doubt that technology can evolve well past anything we know because you would start pretty close to where we are now, but you don’t get magic powers you still have to have scientist and tech bros figuring shit out and inventing new shit and YOU have to teach at least the first few generations how to do that. You’re not just snapping whatever you want into existence, and the aliens are not helping you. I don’t doubt you can get to “Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!” over 1,000 years, but someone somewhere is gonna have to put some effort into it.
Why do I assume people wouldn’t contribute? It seems reasonable that at least some people will want to smoke weed instead of building houses, but idk! I literally said that I wasn’t sure and asked what the solution was because this is fun little prompt that I am curious about and want to hear everyone’s different perspectives on. I think that asking follow up questions is kinda reasonable.
We definitely have aliens in spaceships flying around in the real world.
I, uh… we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one, chief.
but you don’t get magic powers you still have to have scientist and tech bros figuring shit out and inventing new shit and YOU have to teach at least the first few generations how to do that.
But the aliens have already invented all that shit, so it seems like a real dick move to not let us use it. Especially since if we have to reinvent technology from the ground up all over again there’s a whoooole lot of people who are going to die that wouldn’t have had to otherwise, so that’s trending into ‘if god exists he’s a fucking asshole for allowing people to suffer needlessly’ territory. I’m gonna assume they’re helpful aliens, cause otherwise I’d have to pause my experiment to tell them just exactly what I think of them, but with guns instead of a few impolite words.
Why do I assume people wouldn’t contribute? It seems reasonable that at least some people will want to smoke weed instead of building houses, but idk! I literally said that I wasn’t sure and asked what the solution was because this is fun little prompt that I am curious about and want to hear everyone’s different perspectives on. I think that asking follow up questions is kinda reasonable.
That’s fair. If everyone’s needs are taken care of then there’s no requirement to contribute at all. Sit on the couch and smoke weed if that’s what makes you happy. But having done that for a few years I have to say I found it hard to not get up and do something useful on occasion. In the scenario where everything isn’t fully automated? Well, if you don’t care about your community and don’t want to make your/their lives better, why are you a part of it? Maybe you’d be happier somewhere else. Life (currently) requires effort to sustain, if you aren’t willing to put in that effort then it seems like you’re probably not terribly interested in continuing to live, so maybe there’s a conversation to be had about that.
This is an interesting prompt. Critically it seems like you definitely aren’t omnipotent, so whilst you can try to influence and teach the new inhabitants, there’s nothing stopping them simply ignoring you and doing something else.
Rather than some wanting to just not contribute, I’d be more concerned by a group deciding to focus their efforts on building weapons and simply taking what they want from others.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism is certainly an ideal, but it is extremely vulnerable to hostile forces until it gets large enough and willing enough to excert eqivalent force in return. Hostile forces can be military, ideological, or resource limit based. Responding to all of those, is a massive challenge.
Sci-fi writer Ursula Leguin wrote a book about an anarcho-syndicalistic society called The Dispossessed. In that book, those who ‘opted out’ of this society were barred from enjoying the fruits of the collective labor but could still live on the outskirts and start their own subsistence farm or whatever. Societal control in that story was basically maintained through personal relationships among the community (shame those who don’t want to contribute) whereas the capitalistic society control method is threaten with death by restricting access to resources (home,food,water,etc). I’m not saying public shaming is the best route, but it’s still more humane than work or die.
Anarco-collectivist solarpunk hobbit earth go! Means of production divided into small towns where you can have all your needs met while having the opportunity to produce vital products for the collective. Solar and wind powered earth sheltered homes each with its own greenhouse and drone powered town farming plots where the crops are determined by online voting. Freedom to use your labor how you’d like and real-time tracking of the collective needs that can be filled. Solar powered lora drone mesh networks that can be deployed to any region to extend connectivity. Philosophically and religiously free to believe anything you like as long as you aren’t trying to undermine or destroy the collective. Completely horizontally organized with all town issues voted on by the town and national issues voted on by the whole collective. Real time no waiting for results or analysis. Broad goals to eliminate most of human labor and automate for the good of all. Education could be handled with hybrid online human teachers and specialized teaching ai combined with self directed study. Telemedicine with on site medical and perscribing robots for every town regardless of if a doctor lives there. Art and culture for its own sake, no intellectual property, everything open source and available for anyone to use. Crimes serious enough to warrant punishment handled with ostracization, send you prohibitively far from the collective with a single construction and farming drone and let you live your awful life alone. Start with one test town to make sure it’s self sustaining and then keep adding new towns for each production requirement that arises, probably take a few years to get all million humans settled. I don’t feel the towns would be much larger than 700 people each. I wonder how long before 47% of the population is ostracized… I feel if I am allowed to select like minded humans it would be much less than that.
I’m curious on how you reconcile the “towns not much larger than 700 people” and the advanced automation you have in your world.
Drones, computers, or any of the 15 layers you need to support any “network” need significantly more people than groups of 700 to manufacture.
So you have a supply chain now. Very centralized, mostly for control and property reasons yeah? Found out how we don’t really need to work in the offices over covid yeah? So one town they mine, or harvest some natural resource that’s the main production at that town apart from the personal food production and culture and art, you want to mine or whatever you move there. Nearby is another town, all they do is process the stuff the other town mines/gathers and prepare it for shipment, if that seems like a nice job to you you move there now it starts getting more complicated. for every step in the supply chain between towns that are too far away to retrieve the resources you build a town that just moves things from one town to another. We have 1428.5 towns to build. Do you think that is enough to start a decentralized society? How about after 19 years and everybody’s hookups have borne a new generation of townsfolk? How complex could our infrastructure become after 2 generations? How many more towns from your great grandkids? I live a thousand years, that’s only what? oldest grandkids turning 18 like 38 years? And I have the internet and all the tech currently available? Look what the Chinese peasants did in 75 years after a bloody revolution. I don’t even have to murder anyone these aliens apparently gave me copies of people who are willing to go along with this little experiment. It won’t take many of my thousand years for my collective to cover the planet with very content small groups of people building one piece of a puzzle that when completed benefits them all. I mean china just ran a marathon with bipedal robots and I saw someplace else someone is teaching them hand to hand combat I don’t think we would have trouble improving on that to automate away most of the manual labor in say 100 years. Sure it would be pretty subsistence at first when we are settling the first million and coordinating the supply chain, the first generation will probably be mostly building towns and farming in places their children will possibly be able to utilize but it snowballs quickly considering how many years I’m managing this thing
Oh the like-minded thing gives me a dilemma because ideally I would want them to be blank-minded and be taught by you from scratch, but that doesn’t really work for adult humans they have to have a basic level of intelligence, otherwise it would take years and years just to teach them how to properly human the way it takes babies. We can’t start them all as babies. Hmmm.
Yes if I was raising clone babies there would be zero percent chance of establishing a civilization in my lifetime
Your lifetime would be 1,000 years, but I agree, even if you spent the first 50 years raising a village to then raise all the other babies, it would still take way too much time to get it right. So we would either have to pluck copies of real life humans, or program them to know and think what we want them to. I’m not sure which I prefer.
Programmed is a recipe for inhuman humans. Do we really want a society built on a collection of archtype blank slates based on what aliens think we are like or worse yet, what an ai thinks we are like? Originals, copies or babies are the only real options. But if their able to make copies why would they choose a brain damaged disabled person as the administrator? Thinking logically about fantasy hypotheticals always leads to holes
You would have to explain the whole gig to every copy and I just don’t think you could convince 1 million people who have memories of their friends and families and lifestyles to co-operate in starting a new society from scratch, they would just fight each other and bring back capitalism and probably blame whoever their political adversary is at the time for ending up on New Earth. Humans with Old Earth memories would be impossible to work with.
But Idk I maybe they fight for 20 years and decide they might as well give it a shot with the humans that are left and then your society starts, hard to really say. None of its ethical, thats for sure.
You’d have to ask the aliens about the ethics, I’m just the abducted manager. But if I’m selecting copies I would easily be able to screen out uncooperative people. And they wouldn’t have a choice once they were created they are just as abducted as I am, a being that wouldn’t exist at all without the experiment. Their choices would be to participate in the experiment as a new being and potentially become the progenitors of a new humanity, or ostracization with the potential to have the new humanity be obliterated because of their lack of participation. Either way they will still be fed and sheltered by the collective and owe their entire existance to the experiment that created it. How many people would choose to be a hermit for the rest of their lives? And how many people who are collaborative do you need for a society this automated to function? Honestly i think people would get over their divisions quickly when their bellies are full and the rent is free. Who will care about the old life when the new one is an undreamed miracle. And if people are really sad about it we can just make some of the million copies of their family and friends as long as they aren’t trying bring along their cousin Jeff Dahmer or something
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No. You were abducted alone. You can still contact people via the internet if you want, but good luck convincing them to believe you.
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I’d aim for Annares as a model. From 'The Dispossessed". Syndicalism/Anarchism.
I think a lot of this hinges on what the one million humans are like. You said in another comment you were thinking of them to be mind blanked, but wasn’t sure.
So do these people have their memories? Are they from our earth? Do I get to pick and choose who I can take there? Are they clones or the original?
This can really change what the answer would be and how someone would go about answering your question.
Edit: also what resources are available on new earth? Is it a copy of what we have now, or is it like a blank slate with nothing but nature?
All natural resources we have now on Earth are available on New Earth but they are all raw as humans haven’t touched them yet. Same goes for animals, the ones that are extint strictly due to humans are back, but the ones that exist strictly because of human intervention don’t exist (sorry that means most dogs!) The state of the human mind is tricky, importing current humans with their memories is problematic for tons of reasons, so I think it would be better to program them all with like basic knowledge and beginner traits the way you would a Sim.
Oh man that’ll be rough, a lot of tech we have is because we have tech from the past. So it’ll be kinda like a Dr Stone situation but without the obnoxious main character.
I’d hit the red button and end it all.
I wouldn’t. I’d set up at least four groups and let them run autonomously from each other. I might not even let them know that there’s other groups on the planet.
More chance of survival if there’s different groups trying different things. Strength in diversity.
The same way I do everything: poorly.
Oh for sure, I am jacking up at least the first 500 years.
I hope your perception of time is greatly accelerated in that case, I know I couldn’t stand 500 years of failure, I’d off myself way way WAAAYYY before that.
I’m good under pressure and I learn from my mistakes. Waiting until the last minute to get it right is exactly my style.
Hmm not going to lie I don’t trust humans to be qualified self-governing at scale, brains are too small and empathy is too weak.
Big brother surveillance sucks, but is probably one of the most effective ways to mitigate crime. Power begets corruption so it’s essential to limit any one person’s power, to that effect a monthly empathy and compassion test should be mandatory for any person in a position of power. Obviously the test itself is the weak point so you need some sort of balanced system of administration and auditing, one group has only the power to judge, the other has only the power to judge the judges etc. Perhaps some sort of distributed dao style voting system, in which voting is mandatory, you cannot purchase anything without performing your duty of voting.
Ai is imperfect but it’s fairly safe to assume that 1000 years of progress fine tuning the current technology would lead to a reasonable system that could be relied upon as a final arbiter for decisions that humans fail to form a consensus on. A “supreme court” of sorts. Important with such a broad timeline that the ai system can only be used after the death of the last person to work on it. So you literally cannot personally benefit from corruption, and income of officials would be strictly monitored, anything unreported would be assumed to be corruption and the position would be lost.
Prison is ineffective, punishment in general is ineffective, so some alternative needs to be established. Since we’re all meaty human flesh machines, there’s not an awful lot of options, perhaps an option to move off-planet if a crime is committed, with a system of working their way back to a main colony.
Work as established is dystopian, I think the focus should be on creating automations, mandatory work should be limited to something like 1 week a month.
There’s a lot more I think, in general hedging against common human corruptions would be the gameplan. Humans will self destruct given enough time and there’s just not much you can do about it
I’ve put a bit of thought to this over the years, and I have come to the conclusion that “might makes right” is always going to underpin any society. The people with the resources have the power, and by extension, get to make the decisions. The path to change, if people without resources want something different from those with resources, depends on a transfer of (at least some of) those resources from the haves to the have nots.
That only happens via force, or the threat of force.
Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse) in spite of anything I might impose, and instead try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:
Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation” tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund other, more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example and trying something new instead.
First steps would be to create a religion with all the usual “be kind and caring and patient and forgiving and nice in general to others and yourself” and then “do not be an asshole unless the others were an asshole first and then you may respond in moderation with an appropriate pinch of extra salt” and the ritual of an Aztec pyramid with slice and dice and flush them down the sewage sacrifice of any billionaires and power hungry totalitarians and corrupt public servants. Every year that do not require any sacrifice pleases the gods. But any year it is needed, the gods are content that required action was taken.
Do you think you would make yourself God? Because you can pop in and out as you please, it would be very easy to convince the populace that you are all-powerful and all-knowing.
I’d prefer not to. I’d like to make it Buddhist philosophy inspired non-religion if possible. But people seem to have this need of something to gather around and have rituals and festivities and believe in so religion is still useful. I’m thinking it would be easier to get everybody pulling together early on in a theocracy though the deep teaching aims to dissolve itself.
The teachings would promote (or demand) something of an egalitarian society with food and shelter and healthcare for everybody and encourage learning and education and culture and arts and own responsibility and critique and discussion and questioning the whole shebang in orderly fashion with ongoing goals of improving it for everybody.
I like this idea. Being new humans the concept of “God” doesn’t really exist to them yet so you can make it anything really. Like instead of God you can just have Dave. “Oh, thats Dave, he’s got some wild ideas but he’s the reason we all exist so we like make him Tacos on Tuesdays.”
It doesn’t have to be a person or an entity or deity.
I haven’t been nerdying on religion for much long many moons but AFAICR Buddhism has this core idea that “yeah we have symbols and chants and icons and totems and rituals and we pray but the more we dedicate ourselves we understand that they are just there for us to see beyond them into the nothing and the everything”. In Buddhism this has evolved into place, so it would be interesting to see if it was possible to kickstart straight into some sort of non deity centric anti religion without the animistic precursory heritage.
