Apr 05, 2024
ok pls disregard this just watered my nerd marbles
I can't get over the characters being so savvy about 20th/2st century fiction, customs and cultures when this is taking place literal thousands of years into the future and there are QUADRILLIONS of humans. It's something I see a lot in sci-fi where the setting feels way, way more elevated than what the author is presenting. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like... imagine if the casual citizen was a connoisseur of 4000 BCE literature. And sure, Ashtin gets a pass because he's a 'historian mage', but it's still jarring and bizarre that anime is so prevalent with, again, Q U A D R I L L I O N S of humans scattered across several star systems. We have roughly eight billion people right now. Eighty billion is an order of magnitude above this and would drain resources very fast. Eight hundred billion is insane and probably wouldn't fit in this star system, communicate often, or be particularly savvy about culture in other colonized settlements due to the sheer enormity of space. If we develop different cultures, languages, beliefs, etc. in the same country, how is it even remotely possible that they'd be the same across multiple STAR SYSTEMS? Just for some context about the sheer magnitude between celestial objects, at the velocity voyager is leaving the Solar System right now, it'll take it approximately 30,000 years to ENTER the Oort Cloud. Not leave--enter. That's the beginning of the presumed border of our Solar Sytem, and nowhere near the end of the Sun's gravitational influence, which is roughly a light-year away in all directions. Sure, let's say that 9000 AC (just to throw in a number) technology can surpass the absolute wall that is time and distance vs. space exploration. That humanity has remained as such for thousands of years across various star systems (I'm going to assume it's the local cluster because it hasn't been specified otherwise so far, there has been 0 detail about whether teleportation or FTIL travel is a thing, and that it's one of those stories where you can fix the logic holes with 'because magic') is such an insane concept because, again, even beyond cultural differences a hundred kilometers away from where we live, people have actually adopted different traits based on location. I'm not talking race. I'm talking high altitude tribes in Nepal, Andes, Ethiopia, etc. actually getting 'super athlete' genes that allow for more oxygen absorption in hemoglobin (smth like that I'm no doctor). I'm talking Polynesian tribes that can hold their breath underwater for insane amounts of time because they're been fishing for thousands of years to sustain themselves. To think about the ways people could evolve based on star systems is such a cool concept, or how they can conceivably manage a population so huge it makes bacteria on Earth seem like nothing. How do they even communicate when the closest star is 4.2 light-years away? As in, electromagnetic waves would take four years to reach it if sent from Earth right now. Not to mention that redshift is a thing and electromagnetic waves would deteriorate as they travel through space. I guess you could 'because magic' it, but then I'm left wondering what the point of Sci-Fi elements are if there's no exploration about scifi whatsoever, just fantasy in space. But there's been seeds of nothing here and there that make it SEEM like the science fiction elements will be explored. They just haven't been at all. I dunno. Maybe they will later, but at this point I'm left wondering what the point is, and why it couldn't just be set in medieval europe fantasy no.849608 rather than this.
