History is strange. I've scarcely started living through my third decade, and the changes I've witnessed in my world are sweeping. Look in a history textbook, though, and you'd think that about one really significant thing happened a year. Before the past 200 years, even less. Is that incongruity an artifact of...
...real, substantial historical change happening at a much faster clip than the history books let on?
...a postmodern (post-postmodern?) world, hurtling through social acceleration at a rate newly enabled by technological acceleration?
...a hindsight bias of historicization, only "reading" events that connect in a chain to contemporary life and losing the countless seismic shifts that wash out in the intervening generations?
...a product of my psychosocial development, signaling not a change in the structure of the world or history but my awareness of it?
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Thinking about the future in these ways is even more precarious. The word for "atom" comes from the Greek "unsplittable one". 69 days after the New York Times claimed that human flight would only be possible in the next 1-10 million years, the Wright brothers flew their first airplane. Our telephones carry more computer than it took to put man on the moon, and AI asterisk asterisk asterisk. We're who knows how long way from renewable energy infrastructure, much less flying cars and interplanetary colonization. Our fantasies of what's possible when, and what can and will change the world, are greatly misaligned with the realities of human development.
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Anyways, this post is about Pb. Since Pb is my experiment in anti-canonicity, it's hard to pin down specifics, but here's one vision of what's to come.
Near future (~10 years): Legions of adamant-clad serpent-men pour out of the Undreamt Wilds in innumerable hoardes and begin an indiscriminate slaughter. Before our history began, they hiss, we made their fathers our greatest enemies. Some among them still bear the scars.
Far future (~100 years): The core lands of the Motescape lie shattered and irradiated in the wake of the Infernal War. What remains of the Entente progroms Septacanonical worship out of its despondent and traumatized citizens. On the peripheries of the Undreamt Wilds, cells of civilization stitch their souls back together in the shadows of jet-ship nebulae and pox-bomb wastes. Maybe we are those who survived the end times, maybe the stories of end times were simply a false comfort.
Distant future (~1000+ years): At the center of the world, a monastery-metropolis of crystal-carvers endlessly refine the great silicon god AM. Once they’ve finished him him, they say, they won’t have to live out the rest of time. AM will tell them what’s to come, down to the smallest details, and then they’ll decide: live out eternity, or drink the potent lotus they’ve brewed for five generations and pass into dreamless death. Everywhere else, they believe, is lifeless dust, and even the lights behind the firmament are guttering, the groaning and cracking from above an omen of immanent collapse into the Æther. Where have the Saints gone?
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GLAUGUST 5: "Post a timeline of the near, far, and distant future of one of your precious pet settings." This has proven to be a productive GLAUGUST for SSnSS! It's been wonderful reading everyone's posts, and seeing steadily strong blogging come out of the scene- I appreciate everyone's creativity and inspiration. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.
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