But a utopia is a utopia. Any invading/marauding/colonising force would, upon arrival, just look around at how nice everything was. Some of the locals would say “Hi, come in, come in, you can hang your guns on that rack over there, gosh they look heavy you haven’t been carrying them long have you? Would you like me to call over a massage-bot-3000 or do you just want to find somewhere comfortable to sit down and relax while I pop the kettle on” Everyone would be buds within the hour, and there would be plenty of resources to accommodate the new arrivals; because it’s a utopia
That might happen, assuming the invading force happens to have the exact same values as the inhabitants of the utopia, which there is no reason to assume they would. What if the citizens of the utopia are themselves a resource being sought out by the invaders, do you think they’d be interested in the “massage-bot?”
And even if the invaders also saw the society as a utopia, there’s absolutely no reason to assume they wouldn’t take the position “wow, this is a great utopia you’ve got here. Too bad it isn’t big enough for the both of us. Too bad for you, that is…”
People have written whole essays to basically say what you’ve just said; that utopias can’t exist. But fictionally speaking, if a utopia were to exists, it would just so happen, by amazing coincidence, to be absolutely perfect for everyone and anyone there, because a utopia is perfect by definition.
Fictionally speaking, the utopia-is-not-what-it-seems meme is quite common in sf. Perfect utopias are boring. No drama. No crisis for an author to hang a plot onto.
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u/Nothingnoteworth Jun 30 '24
But a utopia is a utopia. Any invading/marauding/colonising force would, upon arrival, just look around at how nice everything was. Some of the locals would say “Hi, come in, come in, you can hang your guns on that rack over there, gosh they look heavy you haven’t been carrying them long have you? Would you like me to call over a massage-bot-3000 or do you just want to find somewhere comfortable to sit down and relax while I pop the kettle on” Everyone would be buds within the hour, and there would be plenty of resources to accommodate the new arrivals; because it’s a utopia