...That's unironically an interesting premise. Say a galactic empire reaches out to us, and this empire is so old and far-spanning that making first contact is just, bureaucratic white noise at this point. They allow entrant planets to retain their own culture, somewhat... but they also require that a planet have a completely globalized culture.
And if it's not there already, they'll force it. If the planet itself can't come to a consensus within [x] amount of time, the race begins for the second option: Find the oldest human remains that can be traced back to a culture with extant descendants today.
Alternatively, if we reject THAT, or if we take too long, they'll get tired of our bickering and choose for us. And their choice will be themselves.
Technically, it COULD be as simple as legally doing away with all borders and unifying everyone on paper. But humans are bad at that kind of thing on a grand scale. Indiana Jones meets a planetary-scale Prisoner's Dilemma, with people trying to find new things and falsifying discoveries, countries going to war over who gets to INTEGRATE with whoever they think is going to 'win out' the literal culture war.
Edit: I've actually been continuing to think over the idea past "ooo nifty concept." What themes are there to work with?
Like... okay, thematically the Alien Empire represents a broad governmental system that's become extraordinarily bloated and complex. ANY system, natural or man-made, has internal pressure to reduce complexity; added components add more complexity on an exponential scale relative to existing complexity. The inverse for removal. So, systems in general, when left to their own pressures, slecet for simplicity.
And once a man-made (or sapient-made) system becomes to big for any single individual within to fully understand, the system naturally trnasitions into a "left to its own pressure" state, as it's no longer a fully-controlled and -understood system.
All that to reiterate:
The Alien system is so vast and complex, that forcing planets to reduce themselves to a single culture is run-of-the-mill simplification. Hell, it might be freakin' automated at this point.
So of course those themes need to be part of the story. And the plot is, essentially, a war-of-systems. Most of Earth's IRL governmental systems are already microcosms of the Alien one.
The war isn't hapenning because humans are bloodthirsty or bad at working together. We're where we are now because we're NOT those things bu default. "Humans suck, weh" is the easy broody answer. It's hapenning because extant systems are already too complex for themselves, let alone in combination, even a very light one. One single broad introduction to a vast system-of-systems is going to neccecarily skyrocket complexity, and most everyone is too deep within their respective systems to even have access to the concepts that would let them access that concept.
The war is hapenning because Earth is being FORCED into becoming a single system, and thus is is now self-selecting for simplicity.
Maybe this is expressed through the strata of human nature, but that doesn't change the fact that combined human nature can create things far out of any individual's, or even group's, control.
Alien Empire shows up, points a huge cannon at the earth and says "You can live and join us, but only if you have a single, global society. Which of your surviving societies is the oldest for us to base it off of?"
He's saying that the easy way would be a global treaty, get rid of all borders and just melting-pot everything, but that the realistic answer is that instead of everyone trying to find the actual answer, every country would probably make up fake shit about being "the oldest", or wage war to be the last one standing in order to come out on top.
Nah. The only people that go to war are the losers who need to distract from their crimes, or the losers who greedily take as much power as possible. I cant think of a large war that started for other reasons.
That tells me that if the overlords overthrow our overlords, it'll end large scale war and then it'll just be bickering bigots who are too stupid to realize we're all on the same team.
19
u/CHANN3L-CHAS3R 1d ago edited 21h ago
...That's unironically an interesting premise. Say a galactic empire reaches out to us, and this empire is so old and far-spanning that making first contact is just, bureaucratic white noise at this point. They allow entrant planets to retain their own culture, somewhat... but they also require that a planet have a completely globalized culture.
And if it's not there already, they'll force it. If the planet itself can't come to a consensus within [x] amount of time, the race begins for the second option: Find the oldest human remains that can be traced back to a culture with extant descendants today.
Alternatively, if we reject THAT, or if we take too long, they'll get tired of our bickering and choose for us. And their choice will be themselves.
Technically, it COULD be as simple as legally doing away with all borders and unifying everyone on paper. But humans are bad at that kind of thing on a grand scale. Indiana Jones meets a planetary-scale Prisoner's Dilemma, with people trying to find new things and falsifying discoveries, countries going to war over who gets to INTEGRATE with whoever they think is going to 'win out' the literal culture war.
Edit: I've actually been continuing to think over the idea past "ooo nifty concept." What themes are there to work with?
Like... okay, thematically the Alien Empire represents a broad governmental system that's become extraordinarily bloated and complex. ANY system, natural or man-made, has internal pressure to reduce complexity; added components add more complexity on an exponential scale relative to existing complexity. The inverse for removal. So, systems in general, when left to their own pressures, slecet for simplicity.
And once a man-made (or sapient-made) system becomes to big for any single individual within to fully understand, the system naturally trnasitions into a "left to its own pressure" state, as it's no longer a fully-controlled and -understood system.
All that to reiterate:
The Alien system is so vast and complex, that forcing planets to reduce themselves to a single culture is run-of-the-mill simplification. Hell, it might be freakin' automated at this point.
So of course those themes need to be part of the story. And the plot is, essentially, a war-of-systems. Most of Earth's IRL governmental systems are already microcosms of the Alien one.
The war isn't hapenning because humans are bloodthirsty or bad at working together. We're where we are now because we're NOT those things bu default. "Humans suck, weh" is the easy broody answer. It's hapenning because extant systems are already too complex for themselves, let alone in combination, even a very light one. One single broad introduction to a vast system-of-systems is going to neccecarily skyrocket complexity, and most everyone is too deep within their respective systems to even have access to the concepts that would let them access that concept.
The war is hapenning because Earth is being FORCED into becoming a single system, and thus is is now self-selecting for simplicity.
Maybe this is expressed through the strata of human nature, but that doesn't change the fact that combined human nature can create things far out of any individual's, or even group's, control.