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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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.
I’d hit the red button and end it all.
I’d aim for Annares as a model. From 'The Dispossessed". Syndicalism/Anarchism.
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.
If I get some kind of SimCity interface to run it, I think I’d do pretty okay.
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.
That’s not too far off what you can do here. https://www.nationstates.net/
First decision is a false dichotomy between wealth equality or having a good GDP.
That’s just how the game is. It’s incredibly simplified. Every issue has a decision for you to make and that decision only impacts 2-4 things. Usually 1-2 positives, and 1-2 negatives.
It’s a really fun little game but it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for actual policy.
and if the Aliens like it,
I think this is the part I would become obsessed with; trying to figure out what the Aliens actually want. I’m confident that at our current technological level, we could automate a society that supports a million people. I’d start with accomplishing that, and then spend the rest of the time trying to develop a perfect piece of performance art including all million members to try and please the Aliens.
Your humans can procreate so in 1,000 years there will at least a few 100 million, provided you don’t wipe them out with a flood or whatever.
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.
Do I get a copy of the grading criteria? What marks ‘success’ to our alien overlords?
It doesn’t matter, cause I’ll still do poorly, but I always want to know the desired ends…
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
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
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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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There’s a song about it.
And I wanna conquer the world
Give all the idiots a brand new religion
Put an end to poverty, uncleanliness, and toil
Promote equality in all of my decisions
I want to conquer the world
Expose the culprits and feed 'em to the children
Do away with air pollution, and then I’ll save the whales
We’ll have peace on Earth and global communion
