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Pink Sandy Crumble
8cb228
So, some musings about interstellar civilizations!
So I noticed a few things. This setting seems to have modern technology as a baseline, have robots that respond to vocal commands, and have several civilizations capable of interstellar travel.
Based on current projections, that seems to imply some things that older sorts of space opera and science fiction seems to have ignored, or noticed only semi-regularly.
Here's the concepts:
1.) If your civilization is usefully and interestingly interstellar, you are capable of putting together absurd amounts of energetic, computational, technological and material resources and moving them about and doing useful stuff with them. Otherwise you wouldn't be interstellar in the first place.
2.) To get to this point, you would likely need a highly automated economy, and at least somewhat useful AI or lots of expert systems
3.) At that point, most people and most skills would be unemployable, and most of the normal people would be living large on the plenty and the income and credits that everyone gets just by breathing; thus a true post-scarcity economy
4.) There will always be some sort of wealth and something that only a few people (like those that own all the robots and robot factories) have. Those would be the only people worth taxing, and therefore, auditing.
5.) Most people would be spending very little time doing a vocation or actual job for actual useful (beyond baseline) amounts of money. Maybe a few hours a week. A 'computer programmer' would be, say, mostly, 'part time professional AI nanny/mother/grade school teacher', for example.
6.) Most people would, when not compelled to work for food/shelter/healthcare/etc., probably spend lots of time doing whatever interests them. For a good chunk of the population, that would be sampling pleasures.
7.) Most civilizations by this point would, as a matter of course, make a push to develop vices that aren't harmful, so as to not implode. For example, people are beginning to develop synthehol, like as in star trek synthehol that doesn't get you hung over or addicted but gives you the pleasurable drunkenness and there's a pill that immediately sobers you up from it, from the class of drugs that Valium is a part of. Most other civilizations would no doubt have the same thing. Also video games and sports and obtaining social position would become relatively more important.
8.) Our hero therefore needs to open up his goddamn eyes, start collecting his basic income, realize that he can actually go do pretty much whatever he wants, go get some new clothes printed, get whatever neural cybernetic enhancement or neural lace will actually useful plug him into the local infosphere, plug into whatever AI life-assistant service there is, and go partake of the free 'utterly harmless' intoxicants like the synthehol and pot equivalents, and start to actually really enjoy himself and let loose!
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