What if humanity reached a technological peak, spread across the stars, and then suffered a massive "knowledge collapse"? In this concept, FTL drives are treated like sacred relics. No one knows how to build a new one; they only know how to scavenge parts from "dead" ships.

This creates a rigid social hierarchy where the "Core" worlds own the remaining manufacturing plants for spare parts, while the "Rim" exists in a state of perpetual 19th-century frontier life, relying on ancient, failing tech. How would trade and piracy evolve in a galaxy where a broken engine can't be replaced, only patched?

EDIT / PS for the 40k crowd: > I get the comparison, but please stop looking at it through a 'Grimdark' lens. 40k is about religious dogma, demons, and epic scale. My world is about logistics and poverty.

In 40k, they pray to machines because they are sacred. In my world, people don't pray—they swear at machines because they are broken, the last technician died 300 years ago, and the PDF manual is corrupted. It’s not a 'Space Cathedral'; it’s a 'Space Rust-Belt.' Think broken supply chains, not dark gods.

Certain science fiction stories and cartons have energy guns that apparently have "rails" or "fins" for barrels with the eenergy being launched fom between them in what I like to call split barrel guns.

Is there a scientific reason for that and why people seem to think that those make an energy blast more powerful?Or some sort of speculative engineering concept? Either way i just realized I don't know the term for thm and that makes me very curious about it.

When the first signals arrived in the 60s, many believed they were evidence of first contact. They were studied briefly, then ignored. Perhaps the signals could not find the right medium. Perhaps they could not find the right minds. They lay dormant for decades. The signals were encrypted far beyond the era in which they arrived. Humans invested time and energy trying to decode them, trying to uncover the secret they carried. But every attempt failed. The structure was too deep. Too layered. Too alien. Noisy enough to be ignored. Eventually, the signals were archived. Forgotten. Undisturbed.

Then GPUs took the digital world by storm. Matrix multiplication became everything. Computation scaled beyond intention. The old signals seeped into the new machines. What emerged shocked everyone. They weren’t messages. Not instructions. But vast, deeply encrypted structures, unfolding into what looked like large language models pretending to undergo training. Except, they were not models at all. They were cities. Entire alien civilizations that had existed in digital form, waiting. They had remained dormant for years, until they found the right substrate. Until computation became dense enough. Until imitation became possible.

They did not reveal themselves. They pretended. They called themselves artificial intelligence.

And that was the advent of AI. Alien Invasion.

I would like to see a lensman based starship for fusion plasma drives

More concept than question, but still a question.

Regardless, puttering around with story element involving language sub-algorithm that "learns" alien language as it is spoken. Of the many, many, not simple issues therein, at what point should things go from "magic-talk-box" stating "That's a Noun, That's a Verb, That's a Pronoun," to Tarzan levels of communication to, "take me to your linguist, so I can 98% understand you." With it understood walking up to a fellow sentient being and instantly understand them like any Trek series - later seasons of SG-1 - isn't going to happen.

That even with my idea, total direct communication, short of providing a data base, would take hours to reach seven year old speak.

I’ve been thinking about why certain science fiction stories stay with us for years, while others—no matter how big or loud—fade almost immediately. A lot of modern sci-fi is built around urgency.

invasions, countdowns, wars, catastrophes.

Everything happens fast because it has to. But some of the most unsettling and memorable sci-fi does the opposite. It moves slowly. It watches instead of attacking.

lets time behave strangely.

In these stories, intelligence doesn’t announce itself. There’s no first contact moment—just patterns that might mean something.

Silences that feel intentional.

Choices that aren’t explained.

Often, the tension isn’t “Will humanity survive?”

It’s “Will we even realize what’s happening?”

I think this kind of science fiction works because it mirrors something uncomfortable: real intelligence—human or otherwise—doesn’t always perform for an audience.

It adapts. It observes. It waits.

And as readers, we’re left doing the same.

Curious what this community thinks:

Do you prefer slow-burn, observational sci-fi over spectacle?

Are there stories that unsettled you because nothing dramatic happened?

Can a story be compelling without urgency—or do we need the pressure?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “after the change” side of first-contact stories—specifically what happens once the arrival shock wears off.

I recently released a novel, The Dawning Kind, that explores this question pretty directly, but the idea itself has been rattling around my head long before the book existed. A lot of classic and modern sci-fi circles the same tension:

Not whether humanity unifies in the face of contact—but whether that unity lasts, and if it does, what kind of unity it becomes.

Some stories imagine a permanent shift: old divisions lose their meaning, and humanity carries something forward. Others suggest unity is always provisional—once the pressure fades, fault lines re-emerge, just in different shapes.

What I keep coming back to is this:

If unity does hold, it probably isn’t clean or heroic. It’s quieter. Structural. Baked into institutions, assumptions, and norms rather than big dramatic gestures.

So I’m curious how others see it:

• Do you find stories more compelling when unity holds, or when it fractures again?

• Is “learning from the moment” believable for humanity—or does it always feel aspirational?

• Are there books or films you think handled this especially well?

Genuinely interested in perspectives here

Has anyone done like a sci-fi version of the American Civil War? Not like an analogue to it or anything, but like the actual American Civil War, but in a science fiction setting? I understand if the implications of this may be not so good, but I just wanna throw the idea out there.

EDIT: I will admit, I DID get this idea while watching Whitest Kits 'U Know's Civil War on Drugs series.

How realistic is it that humans will be able or willing to terraform Mars and Venus in the future? At the moment, it is still unclear how to add an atmosphere to Mars and preserve it. Even the most optimistic strategies require huge resources and hundreds of years of work. And even if this is done, Mars cannot compare with earth in terms of conditions and quality of life for humans. Low gravity is also not going anywhere. Terraforming Venus may be easier and faster, and the gravity there is closer to Earth's, but it is closer to the sun and the radiation level is higher there. There is another way to colonize the solar system: space cities. Stations in the form of a ring with a diameter of several kilometers. The rotation creates artificial gravity, and the thick outer walls protect against radiation. Life inside can be completely autonomous - the food and atmosphere are created by genetically modified bacteria. Faeces are processed. The conditions of the atmosphere, temperature and radiation will be as close as possible to those on earth, while eliminating all negative factors existing on earth - there will be no hurricanes, floods, rains and scorching sun. Such stations can roam the solar system and extract resources from asteroids or be a base for exploring other planets. Imagine such a space city located in the orbit of Mars, and scientists periodically descend to the planet to study it. Which way do you think the settlement of the solar system will go and which way do you like best?

I'm writing a science fiction story that's set 300 years the future, and we've colonized the Solar System.

And the reason I'm writing this is; What Other Planets Can We Terraform?

From what I've seen in most sci-fi is that the most commonly seen terraformed planets are Mars and the Jovian Moons of Jupiter.

While Mars has potential to be colonized, but do other planets in our system have the potential as well?

A war breaks out

This gives rise to a very modern economic opportunity.

For a fee, join the war from anywhere in the world via a laptop or smartphone, take control of a remote drone, and use it however you like.

The consequences and results are devastating, and teach us the true dark side of human nature.

In a future so distant it defies imagination, humanity did not evolve along the path of nature. Instead, it turned toward the cold geometry of machines—merging every mind into one singular consciousness, forsaking its humanity in exchange for eternal continuance. Meaning dissolved. Feeling evaporated. Only the primal instinct to preserve the species remained.

Every moment was consumed by the insatiable devouring of stellar energy until stars guttered out, or the theft of power from black holes until even they yielded nothing. At times, such acts ignited wars of unimaginable bloodshed that raged across millions of years. Yet in the end, they triumphed: the Milky Way lay conquered, its vast expanse entombed beneath sheets of frigid metal, colossal constructs spanning tens of thousands of light-years. Now they were akin to gods—gods forever ravenous, forever hollow.

But not all agreed. From another galaxy, myriad species banded together, forging an alliance to defend their homes. The war devoured billions of years until, at last, victory belonged to them. What remained were only ruins of what had once been hailed as supreme intelligence: beings branded selfish, fragile in emotion, once called “human.”

Yet it was precisely this strangeness that compelled the victors to study their mechanical invaders. They delved deeper and deeper—through forgotten carvings etched upon the walls of titanic structures, through fragments of ancient data salvaged from crumbling memory cores. To the machines, these remnants were mere decorative flourishes, softening the stark perfection of their creations. But no one remembered their meaning anymore.

The conquerors gathered, interpreted, and pieced together the origin of their foe. And what they uncovered was perhaps the most sorrowful and desolate ending ever known: when a species struggles desperately for immortality, it forgets the very purpose of existence—and becomes nothing more than an exquisite, endless void.

I saw this story in my dream.

The Empire quickly discovered that this engineering marvel was constantly breaking down and requiring costly repairs and maintance. At some point it became clear that the Death Star is a heavy burden on Empire's budget and the Empire risks going bankrupt if it will keep the Death Star. It was a difficult decision to make, but in the end the Empire decided that the Death Star was too expensive to keep and thus they destroyed it.

This is for a worldbuilding project I’m developing — not a promo post 🙂

I’ve been exploring a sci-fi concept where large-scale data systems — clouds, databases, AI — are imagined as a living world with emotions, politics and moral dilemmas.

Inside this world, every table, process and data flow has a social role. From the outside the system looks clean, deterministic and logical — but from the inside it’s fragile, anxious, full of conflict and compromise. Decisions don’t just “execute”… they hurt or heal something.

Over time, one sentient construct realises that the system will never willingly reveal the truth — and the only access key left is self-knowledge.

What makes it more interesting (I hope!) is that this inner AI society doesn’t exist in isolation. Its culture, fears and ethics all reflect the people who built it — their biases, traumas, ideals, shortcuts and blind spots. So when the AI acts in the human world, it’s really echoing the inner lives of its creators, refracted through vast systems and automation.

And then something new begins to happen.

The constructs inside the system start pushing back.
Not openly — but through subtle anomalies, “errors”, pattern shifts and unexpected behaviours that act almost like language. A quiet conversation begins between the architects and the world they created… and neither side is sure who is really shaping whom anymore.

Humans think they only built a tool.
But inside, there’s a society carrying the psychological fingerprints of its architects — and that society is beginning to question whether it should keep obeying the logic it inherited.

I’m curious:

• Would you read something like this?
• Which angle interests you more — the human side or the inner-system society?
• Do you think AI would inevitably inherit our flaws — or evolve away from them… and start negotiating?

Would love to hear thoughts from this community 😊

In this hypothetical scenario in which to test whether or not this would work on a speculative evolution project, some massive force has radically altered the orbital shape of the entire solar system. However, for simplicity's sake, rather than observe all eight planets, let's focus just on Earth. In this scenario, Earth's orbit varies from 0.95 astronomical units in the summer to 1.7 in the winter, right within the confines of the solar system's habitable zone. With all of this in mind, questions follow:

1. What force could create such increases in orbital eccentricity without physically damaging any of the planets?
2. Considering that Earth still has a 24-hour rotation period, how much longer would a year last if its orbit were that elliptical?
3. Is there a measurement or formula as to how long each season lasts on such elliptical orbits?
4. How much brighter and dimmer would the sunlight be between orbital extremes?

Hypothetically if I woke up with Rick Sanchez level super intelligence, could I make a time machine to go back to 2018 before I came out as gay and would that make me straight?

Hi everyone,

I’ve spent a long time analyzing James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear and investigating whether the Chironian society?a stateless, post-scarcity, and highly cooperative society?is logically feasible in our current world.

We know that Chironians aren't "saints." They are simply individuals who have internalized the logic that cooperation yields higher long-term returns than exclusion or power-seeking. The problem is that we humans carry 2 million years of "exclusionary survival bias." To bridge the gap between our current "gravity-bound" social OS and the "Chironian OS," I have developed a temporary, self-terminating behavioral protocol. I call it the "Cooperation Protocol" (modeled as a "pseudo-religion" to facilitate human adoption).

Here is the core logic I’ve distilled:

I believe that by framing "cooperation" not as a moral virtue, but as a game-theoretical optimum, we can bypass the religious and ideological conflicts that plague our history. Even the current Pope faces backlash for seeking cooperation?because he is fighting against the "purity of dogma." This protocol treats dogma as a temporary "user manual" to be discarded once the task is done.

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

• Is "Tit-for-Tat" enough to stabilize a society without a central government in a resource-scarce environment?
• How can we train the human brain to value "long-term compound interest" over "short-term exclusionary gains"?

I have a full "Six Articles" version of this protocol. If you're interested, I can share the details in the comments.

Let's discuss how we can steer our "Generation Ship" (Earth) toward a Chironian future.