So the civs in SA are definitely post-need but their metrics for what constitutes a basic need certainly differ. An average citizen of the Tao Of History has Metatech 5 which is basically mind control powers. Such a citizen could wreak havoc in a habitat belonging to the Disciples Of The Void. Their civilisational Metatech has a maximum of 2. How do the Disciples protect themselves from being subverted by a malicious Taoist or missionary Unionist?

Also, how do these Civs with these different attitudes to what are basic tech police themselves within their own societies and without?

EDIT: Looks like I misunderstood the term post-scarcity. Looks like it means post energy and resource scarcity.

Daoine na Foraoise Réaltaí

Sorry to nitpick but it was bugging me :'(

150 (100): Illustrious Stardwelling Armada
116 (102): Nanori
114 (55): Cognitive Union
109 (62): Harmonious Nations of Gaia
105 (70): Association of Eternal Life
98 (46): Perpetua
93 (64): Tao of History
92 (45): Daoine na Realta Foraois
91 (60): Eternal Masquerade
84 (68): Association of Stored Humans
84 (28): League of Independent Worlds
77 (45): Listeners at the Celestial Post
73 (62): United Planets of Mechanica
70 (36): Builders of the Great Beyond
60 (16): Rationalist League
56 (37): Disciples of the Void
54 (46): Spacers
9 (9): Cargo-Cults
5 (5):Old-Worlders

Without Chronotech included:

125 (75): Illustrious Armada of Stardwellers
98 (39): Cognitive Union
91 (44): Daoine na Realta Foraois
91 (86): Nanori
89 (61): Association of Eternal Life
84 (37): Harmonious Nations of Gaia
77 (48): Tao of History
75 (59): Association of Stored Humans
75 (51): Eternal Masquerade
73 (37): Perpetua
68 (24): League of Independent Worlds
64 (58): United Planets of Mechanica
54 (27): Builders of the Great Beyond
52 (36): Listeners at the Celestial Post
51 (16): Rationalist League
47 (36): Disciples of the Void
45 (37): Spacers
8 (8): Cargo-Cults
5 (5): Old-Worlders

Lessons to be learned from these lists? The average Nanori or Stardweller citizen is very dangerous. The Logicians appear to keep the general citizenry deprived of technology for reasons that no doubt appear rational to them.

1) Ignore.

2) Help.

3) Control.

So, when designing highly asymmetric games, a big problem is that each faction requires a different skill to do well with. Getting enough data to balance the factions against each other, across different minds (who are good at different things) is nightmarish. But, if you can fork yourself to play every faction at once, you can balance any number of asymmetric factions within a few playtests… for your mind. With a few friends, you can get similar balance data for their minds, and quickly come to a "good enough" balance for anyone playing (or a framework to re-balance the game based on who is playing what, and what their skills are).

Also, there's likely a great deal of demand for highly asymmetric games among the Replicants, since you can play against yourself and be thinking radically different thoughts. Both more fun to play, and more fun to remember after merging.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/SufficientlyAdvanced

Inverting just one gram of matter produces 1.8 * 10^14 J . That's about ten times more energy than a modern nuclear plant produces in an hour[1].

On the other hand, if you're only 99% efficient at using the energy, then you have to dissipate 1.8 * 10^12 J of energy, which, if released all at once, would be an explosion of about half a kiloton TNT-equivalent.

Given these numbers, it seems much easier to imagine a world like Mass Effect 2, where you have to replace your heat-sinks[2] to keep shooting, than one where you have to plug into a wall and put several kilograms (mass) of electricity into your batteries.

Or am I missing something?

— David

[1]: "The Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona has three reactors and has the largest combined electricity generating capacity1 of about 3,937 MW." — eia.gov tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=21

4 GW * 3600 s = 1.44 * 10^13 J

[2]: I feel like you probably get these from a municipal power plant, and then send them back nice and hot for use in a Rankine cycle or something.

—

The Association of Eternal Life: The Replicants speak an eclectic blending of Mediterranean languages that most unenhanced minds would struggle to keep up with. It has a superficial similarity to ancient Latin, but aside from personal names shares only basic grammatical structures with the tongue of the Romans. Recently it has become popular for some Replicant copy-groups to network their minds together and forego conventional language. Instead, they use their meshes and identical brains to know one another's thoughts and feelings via direct neural interface.

The Association of Stored Humans: The Stored use a family of languages that can best be described as a descendant of various Romance languages that someone grafted hypertext onto. The vast majority of Stored DIs are capable of advanced levels of cognitive multitasking, and their languages have been evolving to take advantage of this through branching parallel discourse. Stored speaking amongst themselves will often hold two or more seperate conversations simultaneously, one branching off a particular reference in another. Younger or more adventuresome Stored are experimenting with adding another layer to their conversations by exchanging snapshots of mindstates and sensation to provide extra context.

The Builders of the Great Beyond: Language is divided along generational lines among the Builders, with a few exceptions. The living and embodied still speak in descendants of various East Asian language families. The dead and digital maintain those languages for the sake of communicating with their descendants, but are in the process of exploring a wide range of constructed languages and computer code alternatives among themselves. In both cases communication exploits the extensive Builder infosphere and its highly contextual content to provide extra clarity and meaning to their conversations.

The Illustrious Stardwelling Armada: Stardwellers are difficult to generalize about to begin with. They are being almost deliberately frustrating to outsiders when it comes to languages, because they keep inventing new ones for the fun of it. They consider it polite, however, to code and provide translation software for your new language so that others can understand you if they don't feel inclined to learn whatever your Tolkien-esque brain came up with last year just to talk about your latest lithium pie recipe or something.

The League of Independent Worlds: The League made an effort to maintain and reconstruct various Old Earth languages for living use where possible. Audio samples, pre-existing translation guides, and neural meshes make this a relatively painless process. Even so, by virtue of everyday use most of these languages have evolved to have about as much in common with their original forms as Information Age English had in common with Medieval English.

The Nanori: The Nanori speak languages which superficially resemble Arabic and Persian, but have blossomed into so many dialects that native speakers of those languages wouldn't be able to make any sense of them. They also use an eclectic variety of machine languages to communicate with the nanophages and other devices that are so integral to their way of life. They teach their children these languages in song form as a handy mnemonic device for accessing the controls to their technology.

The Rationalist League: The Logicians speak and write in "Optimized Exchange," an artificial language. It was intended to avoid ambiguities caused by homonyms and other inefficient linguistic pitfalls. Every word conveys precisely what it intends to, with as little need for interpretation as possible. Members of the augmented Rationalist monarchy are prone to group-minds due to increased communication efficiency - the result of possessing meshes and removing the need for speech through direct neural interface.

Secondly and relatedly, where OA has achailects and lower transapients ruling most of the setting, those sorts of giant computers/ascended beings do not appear to exist in SA, outside of the Aia and Transcendentals. This is probably just a difference in social histories, looking SA it seems reasonable to suppose it didn't happen like in OA because of bad luck. My guess the Transcendentals Desired Future looks similar to OA in this respect, lots of newly ascended beings looking out for a revitalized (trans)humanity.

If they did exist, all technology that is implied to be in the future would've been developed a long time ago.

As far as Capabilities go:

Biotech: OA does not have immortality without treatments, and looking at the page of Superior genemods, they seem to be a solid Biotech 3. However, on the civilization as opposed to personal level they do have quite impressive biotech, just maybe not to the degree as SA.

On another hand, they do have asomnia, which while not explicitly to not exist in SA, if it did would've probably been mentioned either in the Biotech section or in the Needs box (one of the needs requires sleep). Although it could just be uncommon ATM like in OA.

Chronotech: This does not seem to be a thing that exists in OA.

Cognitech: Modosophonts in SA seem to get much better performance from Cognitech before hitting the toposophic barrier, due to it seemingly not existing. On the other hand, no giant superitelligent computers like in OA. The Stored sorta count, but they're still not as smart as in OA. So overall seems mixed.

Metatech: Overall Metatech looks much more powerful in SA. Psychohistory for example is impractical in OA even for the ascended beings, while it's a standard and highly effective thing for modosophonts in SA.

Nanotech: I'm not really positive, but they seem about on par, maybe.

Stringtech: While OA does have achailect level stuff like basement universes, overall its level of Stringtech seems much lower. They don't have most 4-5 tech, they do have transmutation but it's much less efficient. SA also has remote wormholes while OA only has local.

Another setting difference is uplifts. Uplifts are ubiqitous and important in OA, but if they exist in SA they're not as common or important, as they would've been mentioned in the Mechanicans' Humanity CV otherwise. But as with asomnia above, I prefer to to headcanon SA as being the same as OA in terms of uplifting ubiquity and significance, as I really like the idea of uplifting.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff, but OA is a pretty big worldbuilding project so I'm only passingly familar with it.

If loop quantum gravity were true rather than string theory, then stringtech is now called looptech, but other than that I'm not really sure. Ditto for other theories of quantum gravity.

If Extended Heim theory were true, hyperdrive, which is verboten (as mentioned in "Nonexistent Technology") becomes kosher. Also antigravity.

According to James Woodward in "Making Starships and Stargates", if topology change (tearing spacetime, rather than smooth deformations) is possible, then wormhole time travel into the arbitrarily distant past is possible, rather than just when the wormhole was created. He believes "neither time travel nor topology change are convincingly prohibited by any law of physics that merits acceptance as a truly fundamental law of reality. And as a noted physicist once said, “Anything that is not forbidden is mandatory.”" Sounds really interesting, though I'm not sure how this could be done in game terms.

Woodward also proposes the so-called Woodward effect (he calls it the Mach effect) which allows reactionless drives.

But the author is a physicist, so I'm sure he could come up with clarifications and more examples.

So, say, the Daoine might be centered around what used to be Ireland, now vastly transformed; the Disciples congregate in one or more artificially-isolated areas with artificially-cleared night skies; the Stardwellers actually do go starfaring but have a primary "homespace" in cislunar orbit; the Independents are primarily O'Neill colonists, also cislunar, with colony cylinders in the thousands; the Old-Worlders and Cargo Cultists live in preserves set up in the interstices between the various posthuman enclaves — all of which are bound by some sort of worldwide compact (and technological enforcement) that prevents them from physically encroaching upon one another; etc.

There could even still be wormholes — their range is just more limited: instead of being interstellar, they're mostly only workable out to about the farthest extent of this Earth's Civilizations, so worldwide/cislunar; while to reach whatever few solar or extrasolar colonies there may actually be, you have to transmit yourself, at lightspeed and at cost, however defined.

Plots come, I guess, precisely from the tensions of all these fantastically powerful civilizations pressed up against each other and still trying to share a world. Kinda like now.

What follows are broad overviews of some of the economic models I imagined would apply.

Central Planning
Memetics and psychohistory have made centralized economies much more effective than they were in previous eras. The tools exist to determine what is desired or necessary by the population at large, to influence the populace to desire what it 'should' desire, and for government to organize the distribution of resources to those ends. The Soviet Union of old would have been green with envy at the competence and efficiency of habitats with this style of economics, but they often lag behind in science and technology due to lack of market forces unless there are other incentives to focus on R&D (such as warfare).

Collectivism
Many small groups just want to be left alone, and a combination of augmentation, replication, and transmutation allow for this to be a reality. They share everything in kind, and refuse to rely on anyone else to fulfill their needs and wants. Advanced social techniques and super-intelligence allow for them to cooperate better than ancestral humanity ever could past the hunter-gatherer stage. Many of these systems become group minds over time, but fewer than outsiders might expect.

Corporate Capitalism
A model that never quite manages to die off. A number of people with capital to invest gather together, create a charter to define the parameters of the organization, and apply their numbers and expertise to do their best to dominate at least one particular market or fill a particular niche. They also tend to become political blocs, offically or otherwise.

Most corporations exist to provide services that are not easily performed by digital ghosts, installing competence lenses, or using a replicator or transmutation forge. These include research and development, high-end medical services, psychohistorical analysis, and the management of intellectual property. Some particularly large manufacturing tasks, like starship construction, are done by corporations in some civilizations.

Most corporations in the modern age tend to be small and highly automated affairs, employing a small number of administrators and representatives assisted by networks of digital ghosts. These manages overseer a slightly larger number of skilled experts who do most of the actual work behind the business' success. Machines do anything menial, unless management would like to make a statement about their wealth and status by hiring actual people to do the work.

Data Markets
In some economies all physical goods are tied up in the defense, expansion, and maintenance of computational resources used to create simulated environments. Because digital environments can allow someone to simulate as much abundance as they can afford to divert attention to, objects have no value. Instead the only things of worth in these 'data markets' are bandwidth, memory, and secretive or unique information.

Many digital intelligences living in these markets put their expertise to work acquiring or generating unique information such as art or private data, or cutting edge research. Others work to aid or entertain other DIs in ways that are beyond the means of their ghost assistants, such as by renting out some of their bandwidth or memory allotment, or providing interpersonal social services.

Data markets make it difficult to maintain conventional governments within a simulation because of how little opportunity they provide for central planning or corporate organization. Some simulations have administration rights held in the hands of a select few digital intelligences or outside operators; they may arbitrarily impose their will on any DIs inhabiting the simulation, acting as oligarchs. In others the only thing resembling laws will be widespread social customs, and the restrictions coded into the simulation at its inception and imposed by the limitations of the hardware.

Reputation Networks
Some places make use of ubiquitous social networking and surveillance technologies to determine who gets preferential access to the few scarcities that still exist. Impressive and prosocial behaviors add up to "bumps" in measured reputation which applies to this end. Experts in memetics and creative industries share the upper classes with athletes using novel or cutting edge augmentations. Metatech expertise is a necessity to succeed in these environments.

Which Systems Apply to Whom?

Many systems can apply within the same Civilization based on various factors. I will add more Civilizations as I find the time to write on them.

The Association of Eternal Life: Corporate Capitalism, at first. All of their businesses are what Anders Sandberg would call 'Copyrations' which would be destabilizing in any other civilization because the Replicants can just copy a few supremely good individuals in any given field and have them do most of the work. The Replicant star systems are dominated by monopolies made up of a single person and their clones, who can do the work better than anyone else while still undercutting any competition through economies of scale. There will be menial tasks that Copyrations won't want to do, but those are handled readily enough by robots run by data ghosts. Young people looking to work, which is not necessary to live, will move to colonize other star systems. Many young people won't desire to work. Artistic activities are hard to monopolize due to variations in taste, so many will become artists or actors.

The Association of Stored Humans: Classic example of a Data Market. The costs involved in creating remotes are minuscule enough to not require a system of economics, so the only costs that matter besides imports from outside the Association revolve around their computational resources - or unique artistic/scientific data. There are likely controls in place to prevent long-term capital gains from causing an entire network to be dominated by a handful of Stored DIs. Positions in ad hoc task forces will likely be based on merit tracked through Reputation Systems, but are by definition temporary. Trade with outsiders may use Capitalist systems, but Stored are sufficiently intelligent that they need not incorporate to coordinate their import/export trading.

The Builders of the Great Beyond: Central Planning by the Elders for the Baseline Dynamic Builders. Since resources for day to day living are for the most part not scarce and don't require distribution systems for a civilization whose citizens are as smart as the Builders, the main issue is working to expand and defend the Great Beyond's hardware and to perform scientific research. The Great Beyond is their motivator for continued scientific development. The Elders will either use Data Markets among themselves, or create a separate hierarchy of Central Planning Committees.

The Cognitive Union: An efficient and effective hybrid of Central Planning and Collectivism. Everything is decided on by experts polled by the decentralized civic development schemata run on every citizen's Neural Mesh. Implementation is perfect because everyone fulfills their part in the plan. Innovation proceeds because the civic development schemata have determined that innovation is necessary, and all citizens necessary for technological advancement become involved in harmony with the others.