Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mishihari Lord" data-source="post: 6254481" data-attributes="member: 128">I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for as input here, a way to tweak your scale or a way to ensure that not every race is immortal (although that would be alright for some settings)  I'll make some suggestions for the latter, as they're more fun to think about.  If you don't want races to last forever, there are quite a few ways you could postulate that they end which we don't currently have the understanding to refute with any degree of certainty.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They could lose interest in reproduction and just die out </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They could be destroyed by their own creation, a la Berserker by Saberhagen. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They could be destroyed by someone else's creation, a la Berserker by Saberhagen. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They could encounter someone with a significantly higher tech, a la The Excession by Banks (or Cortez and the Aztecs for that matter) </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The event where two universes with different levels of vacume energy hit each other (I forget what this one is called)  Basically, there's a wave of total destruction moviing faster than light, so if you don't have FTL you never even see it coming. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The good old mundane war of mutual destruction. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A natural threat coming from outside the universe, or outside the paradigm of known universes.  I'm thinking of how Superman is invulnerable to just about any physical threat, but he's just as susceptible to magic as anyone else. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The race gets bored with being all-powerful and evolves into something else. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The race evolves socially into pacifism or VR navel-gazing.  Then the some barbarians come along and destroy them.  (Niven's recent Fleet of Worlds is not quite this, but observing how the Puppeteer race is held hostage is educational)</li> </ul>I guess what it comes down to is that if you're going to allow magic-level technology, than of course non-magic-level events aren't going to be a challenge.  That's kind of the point of magic-level technology.  If you want a real threat to folks with magic technology you need to make up some kind of magic-technology threat.</blockquote>

Verification