Hardest SF possible

[far-trader]

Well both do imply some interstellar travel though they don't get into specifics but yes it is true the whole is set on Earth. I'm trying to recall where the book was slightly less hard but drawing a blank. Time for a re-read

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by epicenter00:
3) Nobody brings a knife to a gunfight. Nor do they bring lightsabers or cutlasses. They may have sonic stunners or similar exotic weaponry, but just because some people are members of the SCA doesn't mean that in the year 40,000 people will be fighting with glowing swords and chainsaw battleaxes.

The corollary to this: knives and clubs/batons are still going to be around no matter how cool the guns look (in other words, not every fight is a gunfight, just like IRL).

Industry produces pollution of some sort. It may not necessarily be the byproducts we're familiar with today (the future may not necessarily have 55-gallon drums dumped in waterways or coal smog), but there will be other problems, just as ugly and pressing, that people will have to deal with.

Not nessecerily as ugly and pressing as today; it is possible to have far more sustainable technology even today (quickly-eroding plastics rather than almost indistructible ones, less poisoneous chemical ingredients, biological anti-pest methods rather than chemical pesticides, and so on); however, economical, social and political reasons prevent most of this reduction (for starters, it's cheaper to pollute, and, in some cases, highly-polluting energy sources are easier to monopolize than sustainable ones).

And, ofcourse, with fusion power, the amount of pollution is going to be significantly cut down, as the only waste produced by such a process would be irradiated inner parts of the fusion reactor (replaced from a time to time); remember that most pollution comes from energy production from fossile fuels (be that in a power-plant or in your car's engine).

Sure, a certain amount of pollutants would probably be there, but it is very possible that the amount would be far smaller than today.

The Future Is "Aliens" not "Star Wars." You don't have cheap plentiful fusion power for levitating cities, 3000 ton tanks with Iridium armor, and so on. Instead, hard sci-fi tends to have a gritty, industrialized feel to it. Instead of spotlessly clean glass cities inhabited by tall beautiful in shimmery tunics and lucite sandals, there'll be garbage in the streets, graffiti on the walls, and homeless people.

Not nescerily; what you're givin here is an element of cyberpunk rather than hard sci-fi. Sure, hard sci-fi societies won't be utopian, but that doesn't mean they have to be dystopian either. Furthermore, they don't have to look like our society, especially with different technology. With enough genetics and/or cybernetics and/or AIs you could have a very alien post-human society if you want, and the society of long-term small-vehicle asteroid miners is probably going to be quite different from that of our own.

That said, personally I like playing in gritty industrial near-future settings like you've described above

 

[Chaos]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Welcome aboard Nyrath Only slightly belatedly

Just wanted to mention that even without FTL or some shortcut to the stars one can still have a great game.

Imagine a slow hibernation ship leaving Earth in the next century (for any number of reasons, we have the technology) and travelling to a near star with a recently discovered habitable/terraformable planet.

They arrive in say a hundred years and change and find that contact with Earth was lost sometime during the trip. They are probably not surprised (one of the reasons for going would be a suspicion that civilization here is on the verge of collapse) and go about building their colony on the world. The terraforming could even have been started in advance by fast robotic probes.

A few decades pass and the 21st Century settlers on New Home have visitors. The 24th Century survivors of whatever happened on Earth who are now far advanced technologically but not socially (wars can do that) have arrived aboard their much faster ships (say a couple decades for the trip). And they are here to settle this new world (having lost the records of the earlier expedition they are surprised to find life here, especially human life that speaks old Earth languages).

Each sees the other as an enemy of course. Let the conflict begin.

Though some on each side may see the reality of cooperation as better, they'll be the minority.

Just as one idea. Which is nothing like 2300 of course so it may not be what you're looking for kafka. Maybe you meant something different, like how to sell the tech of 2300 as more hard than opera?

The Coyote series by Allen Steele is very much like you describe.

 

[TWILIGHT]

DADOES has more esoteric stuff included. Penfield mood organs, outer colonies, robotic androids.
In the movie it's kind of implied that the colonies are mars. in the book they're definately Centauri.

 

[epicenter00]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
Not nessecerily as ugly and pressing as today; it is possible to have far more sustainable technology even today (quickly-eroding plastics rather than almost indistructible ones, less poisoneous chemical ingredients, biological anti-pest methods rather than chemical pesticides, and so on); however, economical, social and political reasons prevent most of this reduction (for starters, it's cheaper to pollute, and, in some cases, highly-polluting energy sources are easier to monopolize than sustainable ones).

And, ofcourse, with fusion power, the amount of pollution is going to be significantly cut down, as the only waste produced by such a process would be irradiated inner parts of the fusion reactor (replaced from a time to time); remember that most pollution comes from energy production from fossile fuels (be that in a power-plant or in your car's engine).

Sure, a certain amount of pollutants would probably be there, but it is very possible that the amount would be far smaller than today.

Re: Fusion - I know that there's a ton of futurists here who believe that fusion are the Keys to the Kingdom or something and with it, all of our power problems will go away and fusion will herald a golden age of plenty.

I'm less sure.

Count me as a pessimist. I'm highly suspicious of anything that is considered such a flawless solution to something. I'm a firm believer that such solutions don't exist. Even if we develop fusion power as sustainable (which I even have my doubts about), I'm betting there'll be something it will have a variety of issues unique to it.

Re: Pollution problems, it's my experience that pollution problems are never that terrible if they are identified and human intelligence and willpower focused upon finding solutions and/or alternatives quickly. However, people have a tendency to put things off, especially if it's more profitable to put things off, like in the case of industrial pollution. It's my belief that in the future, any kind of heavy manufacturing will have some sort of hazards that go along with it. Perhaps nanoids being leaking into the environment, genetic corruption from retrovirii "leaking", waste heat of the kind that Larry Niven used to obsess (back when he was fun).

Not nescerily; what you're givin here is an element of cyberpunk rather than hard sci-fi. Sure, hard sci-fi societies won't be utopian, but that doesn't mean they have to be dystopian either. Furthermore, they don't have to look like our society, especially with different technology. With enough genetics and/or cybernetics and/or AIs you could have a very alien post-human society if you want, and the society of long-term small-vehicle asteroid miners is probably going to be quite different from that of our own.

Re: Social problems. Admittedly, I was weaned on Cyberpunk. When I read Stirling and Gibson's stuff I was impressed. When I read Neuromancer I was wow'd. But I don't think that homelessness and graffiti are necessarily dystopian. Graffiti has been around pretty much forever - it's not anything new. There's graffiti on the Pyramids, Ancient Rome had quite a bit of it, you can find it on temples in China and Japan. As has homelessness. As long are there are cities and large groups of people, I think there will be people whom society can't really find a good use for or find they can't fit themselves into society and they fall through the cracks. Provided there are cities, I think there will always be homeless. The police may chase them off, but that's just hiding the problem. The problems may be reduced by concerned socities, but the kind of free-wheeling capitalist societies that most players like to play in aren't the kind which are that concerned - there's no percentage in helping the homeless.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by epicenter00:
Re: Social problems. Admittedly, I was weaned on Cyberpunk. When I read Stirling and Gibson's stuff I was impressed. When I read Neuromancer I was wow'd. But I don't think that homelessness and graffiti are necessarily dystopian. Graffiti has been around pretty much forever - it's not anything new. There's graffiti on the Pyramids, Ancient Rome had quite a bit of it, you can find it on temples in China and Japan. As has homelessness. As long are there are cities and large groups of people, I think there will be people whom society can't really find a good use for or find they can't fit themselves into society and they fall through the cracks. Provided there are cities, I think there will always be homeless. The police may chase them off, but that's just hiding the problem. The problems may be reduced by concerned socities, but the kind of free-wheeling capitalist societies that most players like to play in aren't the kind which are that concerned - there's no percentage in helping the homeless.

To clarify: in most of my games, there are usually cyberpunk-style cities, complete with homeless squatters, "mole men" living in abandoned steam tunnels/subways, petty crime, slums, and walled-off corporate enclaves where the quality of life is high but the level of freedom is low. I like cyberpunk universes to play in, even though these aren't the universes I'd like to live in

Also, I have nothing against graffitti. It's urban art at its best and, if done well, should be encouraged. It adds life to grey walls.

What I was implying is that not all hard-scifi settings have to be urban or suffer from exactly the same social problems as our society. For most Belters, homeless bums and polluted metroplexes are a dirtsider problem. And if you set your game in a distant solar system where the players are part of the crew of an STL colony ship, you'll probably have a very different society than our modern, urban, corporate one.

Also, "alien" cultures (not alien lifeforms but strange beings and cultures arising from technology), especially the posthuman ones would probably look very different, socially speaking, from our own.

My bottom line: A hard scifi setting doesn't have to look like 2007's USA, though, if you want, a near-future one could easily look somewhat like 2007's USA (with cyberware, interplanetary flights and fusion-power added in, along with their ramifications).

EDIT: Bad social and ecological conditions on Earth are a great reason to immigrate to the stars - a colony job (complete with an enclosed pressurized environment, weird gravity and possibly strange and unwanted xeno-bacteria) would be better than living in a run-down apartment in a pollution-choked, crime-infested metroplex on a dying planet (over-polluted Earth).

EDIT2: If you like cyberpunkish settings, you might like the ATU that's currently cooking in my mind (a mere century into the future, TL9-10, Earth at a bad ecological shape, and the economy just starting to recover from the bursting of the Space Bubble and the ensuing coonial war), but it won't be THAT hard scifi (it'l be a Traveller setting with all the Traveller handwaves we all know and love, so it isn't relevant to the topic at hand).

 

[kafka47]

Given that my premise is that it is 2320AD, there are some handwaves (ie, shutterwarp) and some Aliens, they will be mostly confined to the margins.

However, what I was interested in was also descriptions of technology in the near now. 2320AD does have several equipment lists but can we begin to think beyond it, whilst, keeping the Hard SF angle?

 

[Space Cadet]

What about Antimatter?

What about AI Robotics and computers of human level intelligence?

Virtual Reality?

Carbon nanotubes?

Artificial Worlds made out of carbon nanotubes?

Terraforming?

3d holograms projected into the air?

What about Dark Matter manipulation?
90% of the universe is made of dark matter.
Dark Matter has mass, and according to Einstein's equation E=mc^2 it can be converted into energy if it can be manipulated. One possible way to convert dark matter into energy is with a singularity reactor. Dark matter is affected by gravity just like anything else, if we can get a black hole small enough, the outflow of hawking radiation will equal the energy mass of inflowing dark matter, hence we have a sustainable source of energy. If nothing else falls into the black hole, then Dark matter will sustain it and prevent it from radiating down to nothing.

How can mini-black holes be made? Well if there are more than 3 dimensions, you need less mass to make your initial black hole, and if you can force feed it mass and energy, you can enlarge it perhaps to the point where it can be sustained by an inflow of dark matter.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Chaos:
The Coyote series by Allen Steele is very much like you describe.

I've just read a short story of his set on Coyote (The River Horses) in fact but it didn't come across as much like that. But then it was just a snapshot of colony life. I may have to add the series to my list to track down if you think it a decent read.

 

[Space Cadet]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by epicenter00:
Re: Social problems. Admittedly, I was weaned on Cyberpunk. When I read Stirling and Gibson's stuff I was impressed. When I read Neuromancer I was wow'd. But I don't think that homelessness and graffiti are necessarily dystopian.

Would you want to be homeless? I wouldn't.
Graffiti is a form of vandalism if done on someone else's property. In the future, they'll probably have wall surfaces to which graffiti doesn't stick too, or they might have graffiti removing robots that patrol the streets and spraying surfaces to chemically remove graffiti. If you do it on your own property, then you might as well make it a fresco and have something nice looking on your walls rather than someone's crude drawings. I think in the future buildings might be covered with "electronic paint", this is similar to electronic ink Let me explain:

Electronic ink is a sheet of paper with circuitry and a number of ball bearings embedded inside, the simplest form of this technology is the black and white electronic ink, and it exists today by the way! On one side the ball bearing is black and on the other side its white. You can download an image into the paper's flexible memory chip and through the embedded circuitry it will direct each ball bearing to show either its black side or its white side. Each ball bearing is tiny and cannot be seen individually by the naked eye, but taken together they produce an image on each sheet of paper, it can be either words or balck and white images. For color you need three kinds of these ball bearing on one side its white and on the other its one of three colors. primary colors when combined can produce any color such as in a projection screen television. A sliding hemispheric cover can pivot around each ball bearing to cover the primary color with black so virtually any image can be displayed on a sheet of paper.

On walls you can do the same thing. If someone takes his handy spray can and decides to do some artwork, it all gets caught on security cameras, they are all quite inexpensive now and in the future everyone is likely to have them. The smart surfaces of the walls of buildings could likely detect the paint chemicals adhering to them and would likely snap a picture of the culprit.

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
[QB]Graffiti has been around pretty much forever - it's not anything new. There's graffiti on the Pyramids, Ancient Rome had quite a bit of it, you can find it on temples in China and Japan. As has homelessness. As long are there are cities and large groups of people, I think there will be people whom society can't really find a good use for or find they can't fit themselves into society and they fall through the cracks. Provided there are cities, I think there will always be homeless. The police may chase them off, but that's just hiding the problem. The problems may be reduced by concerned socities, but the kind of free-wheeling capitalist societies that most players like to play in aren't the kind which are that concerned - there's no percentage in helping the homeless.

To clarify: in most of my games, there are usually cyberpunk-style cities, complete with homeless squatters, "mole men" living in abandoned steam tunnels/subways, petty crime, slums, and walled-off corporate enclaves where the quality of life is high but the level of freedom is low. I like cyberpunk universes to play in, even though these aren't the universes I'd like to live in

Also, I have nothing against graffitti. It's urban art at its best and, if done well, should be encouraged. It adds life to grey walls.

What I was implying is that not all hard-scifi settings have to be urban or suffer from exactly the same social problems as our society. For most Belters, homeless bums and polluted metroplexes are a dirtsider problem. And if you set your game in a distant solar system where the players are part of the crew of an STL colony ship, you'll probably have a very different society than our modern, urban, corporate one.

Also, "alien" cultures (not alien lifeforms but strange beings and cultures arising from technology), especially the posthuman ones would probably look very different, socially speaking, from our own.

My bottom line: A hard scifi setting doesn't have to look like 2007's USA, though, if you want, a near-future one could easily look somewhat like 2007's USA (with cyberware, interplanetary flights and fusion-power added in, along with their ramifications).

EDIT: Bad social and ecological conditions on Earth are a great reason to immigrate to the stars - a colony job (complete with an enclosed pressurized environment, weird gravity and possibly strange and unwanted xeno-bacteria) would be better than living in a run-down apartment in a pollution-choked, crime-infested metroplex on a dying planet (over-polluted Earth).

EDIT2: If you like cyberpunkish settings, you might like the ATU that's currently cooking in my mind (a mere century into the future, TL9-10, Earth at a bad ecological shape, and the economy just starting to recover from the bursting of the Space Bubble and the ensuing coonial war), but it won't be THAT hard scifi (it'l be a Traveller setting with all the Traveller handwaves we all know and love, so it isn't relevant to the topic at hand). </font>[/QUOTE]

 

[Uncle Bob]

A couple of random thoughts..
Bladerunner Not sure what replicants really were, but seem kind of soft to me.

Fusion power, at least at lower tech levels, will either be very dirty (D-T) or clean using exotic, aneutronic fuels (B+p, or He3).

No artificial gravity/gravity compensators. Some gravity manipulation is possible, making a few grams moving near the speed of light appear to be several tons (not using relativity, something more like how a few million electrons in a wire coil "appear" to be 10 Kg of magnet.) But the kinetic energy stored in this gadget must be measured in kilotons.

Any propulsion method has to take into account the conservation of energy (which damns most of 2300's interface vehicles) and thermodynamics (radiators for waste heat).

The work of Alcubierre and van den Broek have opened the possibility of warp drive, but it is not really "hard"

Woodward and process physics have opened the possibility of a reactionless drive (a maneuver or "impulse" drive, but the energy requirements are truly heinous (by my guesstimate, accelerating a 100 ton ship at 1 m/s, 0.1G, takes about 30 gigawatts).

 

[TWILIGHT]

Bladerunner Not sure what replicants really were, but seem kind of soft to me.

'Do androids dream of electric sheep' has 'andys' or extremely sophisticated mechanical androids (like the ones in AI) made by Rosen.

'BladeRunner' has 'replicants' or organic slaves where they are, for all intent and purposes, biological. Even if every cell in their body has the Tyrell logo. (like 'Tanks' in Space:above & Beyond)

 

[MichaelSTee]

Surprised that no one's mentioned "Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle. It's got FTL, but it's the most realistic type of FTL that you can imagine that still lets you have a Traveller-type background.

MichaelSTee

 

[far-trader]

Hinted (very softly ) at it in my reply above about wormhole drives. Though with an Alderson Drive (aka the wormhole drive from Mote in God's Eye) you also really want a Langston Field (also from, and aka in Traveller, a Black Globe).

I'm not sure I'd put either in the "Hardest SF possible" range but they are at least reasonable sci-fi ideas.

 

[nyrath]

Originally posted by far-trader:
you also really want a Langston Field (also from, and aka in Traveller, a Black Globe).

The Langston field was from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE, which was published in 1974.

The original classic Traveller was published in 1977, about three years later. And I think the black globe generator had its first mention in a latter supplement.

Traveller borrowed from Mote, not the other way around.

 

[far-trader]

I didn't mean to imply otherwise

The "also from" was short for also from Mote. Though I can see the confusion, now

 

[nyrath]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Hinted (very softly ) at it in my reply above about wormhole drives. Though with an Alderson Drive (aka the wormhole drive from Mote in God's Eye)

Yes indeed.

The point about the Alderson drive was that it was constructed to order by Dan Alderson according to Niven and Pournelle's specifications. The limits of the drive dictates the structure of interstellar civilization existing in that science fictional universe.

For one thing, it allows interstellar combat to occur, and it also allows the possibility of defending one's planet from an interstellar attack. Many science fictional starship drives do not, which is a real flaw.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html#limits

 

[nyrath]

Originally posted by far-trader:
I didn't mean to imply otherwise

The "also from" was short for also from Mote. Though I can see the confusion, now

Sorry, I guess I didn't read closely enough.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Nyrath:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by far-trader:
I didn't mean to imply otherwise

The "also from" was short for also from Mote. Though I can see the confusion, now

Sorry, I guess I didn't read closely enough. </font>[/QUOTE]Nah, the fault is all mine, I was far too imprecise

 

[MichaelSTee]

Yes, Traveller borrowed from Mote. In fact, when I first encountered Traveller, I thought that its primary inspiration was Mote.

But as Nyrath mentioned earlier, most people want a form of FTL in their games or novels, if only so they can visit planets with shirt-sleeve environments.

As far as hard SF goes, many serious SF authors (not including space opera) have to bend at least one rule of physics to make an interesting background. One thing I liked about CT when I first found it was that it did not bend or break too many of those rules. Jump drive, contra-gravity, maneuver drive (reactionless) seemed to be the only broken rules. The Ancients, and thus variant human races, were plausible plot-hooks, and the Hivers and Kkree were good attempts at realistic aliens. Also vector-based space travel.

One way I would change it to make it a bit more 'realistic' would be to make contragravity more expensive in terms of power consumption - only a ship with a large power plant could use it, and only outside of a gravity well. That way people in space craft need to be strapped in their seats when in atmo. So no air-rafts, but possibly grav tanks, if they can carry a fusion plant.

MichaelSTee