Wagon Train to the Stars: your take

[Zor]

I am not classifying this as a RAR! as it has little scenario value.

Basically the idea involves boiling the basic idea of star trek (at least for TOS, TNG and most of Ent) down to its bare bones. Forget the Klingons, Starfleet, phasers, bumpy forehead aliens, Warp cores, Nacelles and saucer sections and all that stuff. Basically you have this rough premise...

It is the Future and humanity has developed starships able to cross the galaxy (most likely some form of FTL drive exists in which case, but not nessisarily), at least one of said ships is dedicated to go out and explore the universe, collect scientific and especially find and make contact with intelligent life that might be out there.

Basically, given that basic idea how would you run with it as a series? I know there have been many takes on it over the years, but i am sure that there are some fairly creative ideas which could be done with this sort of thing. One idea of mine try to go for a higher degree of realism in ship design (baring the cheat of an FTL drive) without too much space combat with scientists (in praticular xenobiologists and xenoanthropologists) and Diplomats being the primary charecters, spending several episodes on each planet, with exploration of how alien societies work as well as politics (both with aliens and among a non united humanity) being a major driving political force.

Do you have any ideas about what could be done with this rough concept?

Zor

[Samuel]

How different a universe are we talking? For the most part interacting with aliens isn't exciting in and of itself. There needs to be a drive behind it. Like humanity has just reached out into the galaxy and is attempting to carve out a sphere in order to insure its continued existance. Or attempting to find out why aliens have not come to Earth before hand (aka are there precursors?). Going out into space needs to have menace and a goal.

Or you could go the Firefly route and have an independent group trying to make a living. Or you could go the hard science fiction route and see how long the series can run before people realize that the different locations are all in one solar system.

[NecronLord]

I couldn't come up with anything as balls-out cool as TOS on my own, but it'd be much the same concept. It's fundamentally not broken, why fix it?

[adam_grif]

Can somebody explain what RAR! means?

Stream of consciousness time. This isn't precisely the same scenario as in OP but I'd find it more interesting and it's still tangentially related.

Scenario:

- Distant future (>200 years)

- Post singularity.

- Singularity was achieved in the late 21st/early 22nd century via government funded AI research, individuals involved decided to ignore orders and seize control of it for themselves, don't share any advances with the world. International tension results in panic at the rapidly shifting balance of power, some kind of disaster (nuclear war perhaps, details unimportant). Ecological damage repaired by the post singularity folks but they decide to leave rather than rebuild society (because they don't really care).

- Sol system + nearby stars are colonized with either terraforming equipment or (mainly) orbitals. Some colonies survived without support from Earth, some died.

- Singularity folks launched Berserkers/Von Neumman probes with instructions to guarantee the safety of humanity + explore + terraform, malevolent genie type situation where they decide to exterminate biospheres that have produced or are likely to produce technological civilizations. Humans operating in Berserker space are given carte blanche to do as they please so long as they don't interfere with their mission.

- Earth has reverted to pre-industrial civilization. Most or all information from before disaster was lost to Earth based societies because it was all stored electronically. Information that did survive is generally inaccessible for these reasons.

- Colonies + Orbitals generally didn't have the information base that Earth had to begin with, although several are still operating at their peak they are technologically stagnant due to small populations and insufficient expertise.

- Depending on level of social and technical sophistication, some cultures simply fear and respect the singularity folk, others mistakenly assume they're gods.

- Singularity folk didn't stay together, split off into groups and fly around human space and beyond in smallish groups trying to keep themselves entertained. Some of them go the direct neural stimulation route and just kind of sit in one place experiencing pleasure 24/7 and not interacting with the world. As a general rule they have avoided this kind of manipulation. All are trans/posthuman, although most keep their human body-form despite being entirely synthetic.

- Periodically, singularity folk will either kill themselves or undergo a voluntary death-of-personality when they get tired of living. New people become singularity folk when they take a shine to them in their travels and bring them aboard, or decide to create new people from the ground up for various purposes.

- Occasional tension between singularity folk, sometimes escalates to shooting conflicts. Mainly personal reasons.

- Star systems have partial Dyson swarms for power generation. Spacecraft are generally not flying around under their own power, large laser arrays provide acceleration and deceleration via light-sails. They do maintain the capability to decelerate under their own power and have excess Delta V on top of this for course correction, the ability to go to undeveloped solar systems and (potentially) combat maneuvering. They cannot reach high relativistic velocities under their own power. Top speed is generally 0.7C to 0.9C, although they can go faster if they really want to.

- No FTL, at all.

- Takes place in a 50ly radius of Sol for the most part.

Characters:

- Would follow one group of the singularity folk on their journey to stave boredom.

- "The Captain" archetype. Is in charge of the vessel, one of the original people who made the singularity happen, feels guilty for being partly responsible for the extermination of alien biospheres. Went to the outer reach of Berserker space (which advances relatively slowly) to find/rescue some intelligent aliens.

- Alien crewmember(s). Truly alien aliens, design unimportant but vastly different from rubber forehead archetype. Some of them abandon their alien form when going trans-whatever (was going to type transhuman but...) and adopt a human bodyform.

- One or more individuals picked up from Earth and other colonies or orbitals.

- A couple of other people who've been living the good life on the spacecraft for centuries.


Themes that can be explored in such a setting:

- The eventual stagnation of technological growth when true physical limits are hit. (As opposed to the idea that tech growth will be infinite and continuously accelerate forever)
- The disappointment involved when GUT ends up providing more limitations than it does new possibilities.
- The progression of technology quashing notions of humans being special and "better than machines just because".
- Squashing annoying AI brainbugs, like the idea that AI can never be creative just because.
- Ship of Theseus thought experiment with respect to transhumanism.
- Culture shock (esp. with alien cultures) and future shock (Leaving and returning to Earth between episodes results in 90 years passing, etc)
- Truly alien entities, cultures and civilizations
- How people react and behave when they are in a position where they can change their likes, dislikes, desires and so on at will.
- Societies in which atheism is the majority and religions are a small minority. Explore secular ethics.
- Societies dealing with nihilism as an accepted truth, people trying to find meaning in an existence that doesn't really appear to have one.


aaaand I've been typing for way too long.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that SciFi is more compelling when it's less about Napolean era battles with pew pew guns than when it is evaluating ourselves against a technologically sophistecated backdrop. This can be achieved in many ways, although I dislike conventional space-opera backdrops for a variety of reasons.

[Uraniun235]

Why not do something actually like "Wagon Train to the stars"? A fleet of ships heading out to colonize a planet. Sort of like Battlestar Livejournal, only not as grim and preferably without mysterious angels hiding in the rafters.

Can somebody explain what RAR! means?

"RAR" is a word that Zor likes to prepend/append to the title of a topic about a hypothetical scenario.

[Zor]

I couldn't come up with anything as balls-out cool as TOS on my own, but it'd be much the same concept. It's fundamentally not broken, why fix it?

The same reason why people can like both the 1989 Batman film and the Dark Knight. If such a series did exist, Star Trek would not vanish from existance if something done with the same broad concept was done and people often like interesting takes on older ideas, provided they are done well and this is a fairly broad idea that i am sure Roddenberry was not the first to come up with.

Zor

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

RAR, the last two letters are definitely Alternate Reality. Individual choice and particular case whether or not the first 'R' stands for Random, Radically, Revisionist, or Ridiculous. I suppose if it was a really good idea and gets published somehow, it could be a Remunerative Alternate Reality, or if things go badly wrong it could end up Radioactive.

Everything I know about getting a television show made, I know from cast and crew interviews and items in the news; that said, I don't think it would be easy. Everyone's going to want to see something that confirms their prejudices, and going to sneer at- and refuse to watch or fund- something that doesn't. What would end up getting made is what the channel is willing to show and the studio willing to give resources to, and there have been so many headbangingly stupid decisions lately, IMHO.


What I would really want to see is something that takes the science and the predictions seriously. Hell with it; go with Apes and Angels. And real starmaps. Astrography matters, as does xenobiology. Check out "What does a martian look like", Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, a book on how we can expect alien life to be at least as wierd as some of the odder lifeforms on earth, and they are very wierd indeed.

Show Humanity as a minor race, a probably highly fractured race at that, no world government or any such- set it after the Culture Wars; Earth is as balkanised as ever, starships are the newest and shiniest item on the 'Are you a Major Power?' checklist, genetic- survival colonies around distant stars are a good idea considering, and there may well be rhetoric about how drastic, brutal things are necessary to keep the earth alive- doubtful whether there's any more to it than that.

I want a show that is not afraid of industrial grade lies and corruption; the frauds we tell ourselves to persuade ourselves that what we are doing is right, the normal prejudices and rivalries (and stupidities) of the human race.

Science serves politics, unfortunately, and I want to see that; fantastic tools and inventions, brilliant ideas sold and prostituted for stupid, primitive reasons- and sometimes put to use brilliantly despite all that. I want the bad to be out there too, on galactic display. I want to see national bias and corporate greed, human versus human, racism and bigotry.

Also, the transforming and uplifting effect of pushing the boundaries, of transforming what it means to be human, of rising to the galactic scale of the challenge and genuinely making ourselves better beings as a result. I want a tale of transformations, some of them failed; I want the worst and the best of humanity on a cosmic stage.

The other beings out there, of course, are going to be observing this, the best and the worst- and reacting in their own way to both. Exploiting and avoiding being exploited, cheating and being cheated, mindboggling acts of solidarity with all lifekind alongside literally inhuman brutality.

At least one race of aliens who are as much prisoners of their own biology as we are, although it may be very different- and really ought to be; similar instinct- flawed logic, striving for perfection and failing, most of the time.

The primitive things we come across are not the problem; the species far in advance of our own, who have met and overcome so very many of the problems we have yet to face- they are going to be interesting. Individuals, perhaps, each reacting in their own way, very little collective 'us'? Some of them are going to envy us, challenges and achievements all ahead, some of them are going to pity us, all the primitive problems we still carry and all the miseries we have yet to overcome, half way between ape and angel.

[Formless]

From our very own wiki:

What is a RAR!

A RAR! thread refers to a thread with a "highly complicated" hypothetical scenario. Originally it was a purely derogatory remark (and is occasionally still used as such). Now it is a somewhat well known aspect of SD.net Culture and has taken on the role of simply describing a hypothetical scenario that may or may not be stranger than your usual ones. Mere versus threads are not considered RARs, however RARs can include versus elements inside them.

Note

RAR is not an acronym, so stop asking what it stands for.

So for instance, SDN World started out as a RAR! (by Zor no less). SDN in Middle earth was a proto-RAR! (it predates the term but otherwise meets the criteria). Here is another good example of a RAR! by someone other than Zor. This thread on the other hand is just an ordinary question, not a convoluted scenario (but being that its by Zor, I suppose he has to clarify...). So anyway, question answered.

[Patrick Degan]

Why not do something actually like "Wagon Train to the stars"? A fleet of ships heading out to colonize a planet.

That was very much my first thought. "Wagon Train To The Stars" directly implies the journey of settlers across a harsh frontier, so you could do something like a fleet of worldships: orbital habitats which were fitted out with engines and set out with several million human inhabitants to establish their own empire at the first star with reasonable energy output and a collection of rocky worlds and asteroids sufficient to supply that civilisation for a few million years. The traveling society would have their own intercourse between worldships: trade, communication, entertainments, and as the journey proceeds the storyline would examine how it and the time involved would reshape their society over the years/decades to their destination.

[Hawkwings]

to get a "wagon train to the stars" idea actually made, you'd probably have to set it in the timeframe around when they actually reach their destination. Maybe the first season could be stuff that happens the year before, as everyone starts preparing to engage in colonization. And then your season finale is them finally setting foot on some planet for the first time.

[Patrick Degan]

to get a "wagon train to the stars" idea actually made, you'd probably have to set it in the timeframe around when they actually reach their destination. Maybe the first season could be stuff that happens the year before, as everyone starts preparing to engage in colonization. And then your season finale is them finally setting foot on some planet for the first time.

Alternatively, you could set each season in it's own decade: the idea being that time dilation is making the journey a matter of just a few generations for the population while centuries of course are passing in "normal" time. The actors could end up playing their own descendants, in the same way that Raymond Massey, in the 1936 movie Things To Come, portrayed John Cabal and later his grandson Oswald Cabal.

[RedImperator]

"RAR" was coined by Mayabird in this post.

IUnknown/formally Evilcat at least seems like a nice guy, if a bit dumb. Zor's style is more like "RAR! HIPOTHETICLE SENAREO!"

I think someone put it in his sig, and it took off from there.

[Themightytom]

"RAR" was coined by Mayabird in this post.

IUnknown/formally Evilcat at least seems like a nice guy, if a bit dumb. Zor's style is more like "RAR! HIPOTHETICLE SENAREO!"

I think someone put it in his sig, and it took off from there.

I always thought it would be read and repost whoops

If iw ere doing a wagon train to the stars concept, I would deelop the universe and pay particular attention to the vehicle with which I am exploring it. Roddenberry seemed to use the Enterprise as a horse and its crew as sort of a gang of cowboys riding around exploring new frontiers and saving townfolk. I kind of like the model heroes intended for its first season though, with a group of recurring characters pursuing unconnecteded plot lines in the same verse and having chance encounters from time to time

[sirocco]

I'd have a universe in which the humans have just mastered FTL travel technology and made their first viable ship.

Before the start of the story, Earth had already sent numerous wave of generational ships for search of habitable planets and sentient life.
They created bases in each solar system they crossed on their path to harvest the necessary resources for continuing the trip. They became less human (physically speaking) and even encountered totally alien forms of life.

Each wave being made of more advanced and faster ships than the previous wave. Their prime mission is to upgrade the previous ships and bring diversity to the original gene pool.

The story starts with one of the ships sending back a message through FTL transmission : it has finally encountered an Earth-like planet suitable for large scale colonization.

The first FTL ship is then built to reach that planet, find the optimal course, assess the potential of the human bases on that route and finally encounter the transhumans and the alien species.
The crew is comprised of diplomats, soldiers, scientists and engineers. Along the trip they may recruit transhumans from earlier wave of exploration. They are the forehead alien while still being human.