With the assumption I can choose who I am, I would argue that Banks’ Culture would be my choice. The Culture as a whole is much less vulnerable due to its size and scale and their technology is more advanced. Want cool space adventures? Join Contact or just go travel around in another civilization. Magic adventures? The sleep games and VR is like holodecks but on steroids. Want to live forever? No problem (although it’s frowned upon).
Yeeeah, I’m not so sure I’d opt for the Polity in third place. It has a lot of problems, and major population centers are regularly threatened. And their AIs go rouge with alarming frequency, but that’s probably a consequence of being force-grown for war. Plus, just… Prador. As a civilian, I’d rather face xenophobic Idirans over Prador any day.
Statistics:
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month.
Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants:
851.4 billion (\B1 .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) -
91,215,660 (\B1 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1;
Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or
sequence-position alteration) - 6.
Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space… Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
It’s more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.
Don’t forget the ability to switch sex/gender freely. I think in Player of Games there is one person known for switching to female and having a kid every ten years or so. Having lots of kids also frowned upon.
I think this is actually one of the more clever points Banks makes, although not explicitly.
Fundamentally, the Culture believes that living things (and their definition in this regard is remarkably broad) have a moral right to exist. Therefore, as a society they are not expansionist. In order to remain non-expansionist, the population must be kept stable and this has implications either in childbearing or lifespans. The average Culture human mothers about one child but that means they can’t, on average live forever. Why they choose to have children at all perhaps also boils down to the future generation’s moral right to exist, but also because they recognize that a renewing population means a renewing culture and Culture.
In this light, I believe it’s easy to see immortality as a sort of childish self-aggrandizement comparable to wanting to become the ruler of some backwards planet. Skaffen-Amtiscaw (an artificial entity and citizen of the Culture) even remarks on Zakalwe’s immortality as childish in Use of Weapons.
The Culture never appeals to nature – how could they, they are ruled by their Minds!
(Mind is a sort of very powerful artificial intelligence).
There is a lot of similarities between the Culture and Trek, they are both visions of post-scarcity humanity made impossible by the simple fact that humans could never be that nice.
I don’t think you’re expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It’s set against a rather different set of background conditions.
If you knew anything about The Culture, you’d know it’s not that simple.
Attitudes individual citizens have towards death are varied (and have varied throughout the Culture’s history). While many, if not most, citizens make some use of backup technology, many others do not, preferring instead to risk death without the possibility of recovery (for example when engaging in extreme sports). These citizens are sometimes called “disposables”, and are described in Look to Windward. Taking into account such accidents, voluntary euthanasia for emotional reasons, or choices like sublimation (abandoning physical reality), the average lifespan of humans is said in Excession to be around 350 to 400 years. Some citizens choose to forgo death altogether, although this is rarely done and is viewed as an eccentricity. Other options instead of death include conversion of an individual’s consciousness into an AI, joining of a group mind (which can include biological and non-biological consciousnesses), or subliming (usually in association with a group mind).
With the assumption I can choose who I am, I would argue that Banks’ Culture would be my choice. The Culture as a whole is much less vulnerable due to its size and scale and their technology is more advanced. Want cool space adventures? Join Contact or just go travel around in another civilization. Magic adventures? The sleep games and VR is like holodecks but on steroids. Want to live forever? No problem (although it’s frowned upon).
Agreed, but honestly either is ok. I’d prefer the Minds ruling me to humans too.
The main thing that would scare me is the Megadeath scenarios from the Idiran war.
But that seems like a pretty rare thing. Also, they seem to be a lot better at the sex and drugs thing than ST, as well as how they handle crime.
Coming after these guys is Neal Asher’s Polity. It’s like Culture “lite”, And the robots are a bit less “extra”.
Yeeeah, I’m not so sure I’d opt for the Polity in third place. It has a lot of problems, and major population centers are regularly threatened. And their AIs go rouge with alarming frequency, but that’s probably a consequence of being force-grown for war. Plus, just… Prador. As a civilian, I’d rather face xenophobic Idirans over Prador any day.
The appendix in Consider Phlebus put the Iridian war into interesting perspective.
Wasn’t it just one GSV on the Culture side basically fighting the whole war?
It’s more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.
Don’t forget the ability to switch sex/gender freely. I think in Player of Games there is one person known for switching to female and having a kid every ten years or so. Having lots of kids also frowned upon.
Listen, if Bashir can casually turn Sisko into a klingon in an afternoon, outpatient, I’m pretty sure
becoming my fursonagender transition is nbdLove the Culture. Also, transgenderism is amateur hour. Let’s get to trans-humanism. Fuck ‘no wrong way to have a body’; I don’t want a body at all.
Wow, even the most out-there sci-fi has built-in biological chauvinism and fear.
Sure, the universe is boundless and filled with energy and resources, but don’t you dare live longer than 80, that’s against Nature!
I think this is actually one of the more clever points Banks makes, although not explicitly.
Fundamentally, the Culture believes that living things (and their definition in this regard is remarkably broad) have a moral right to exist. Therefore, as a society they are not expansionist. In order to remain non-expansionist, the population must be kept stable and this has implications either in childbearing or lifespans. The average Culture human mothers about one child but that means they can’t, on average live forever. Why they choose to have children at all perhaps also boils down to the future generation’s moral right to exist, but also because they recognize that a renewing population means a renewing culture and Culture.
In this light, I believe it’s easy to see immortality as a sort of childish self-aggrandizement comparable to wanting to become the ruler of some backwards planet. Skaffen-Amtiscaw (an artificial entity and citizen of the Culture) even remarks on Zakalwe’s immortality as childish in Use of Weapons.
The Culture never appeals to nature – how could they, they are ruled by their Minds!
(Mind is a sort of very powerful artificial intelligence).
There is a lot of similarities between the Culture and Trek, they are both visions of post-scarcity humanity made impossible by the simple fact that humans could never be that nice.
Just a bunch of guilt-tripping. Expanding from the Earth, OK, expanding past x light years, childish. It’s just moralistic nonsense.
I don’t think you’re expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It’s set against a rather different set of background conditions.
If you knew anything about The Culture, you’d know it’s not that simple.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Death
I want optional mortality, but am also comfortable with death, and I can imagine situations of survival where I would prefer death.
OR
“There’s even more to it than that!” [putdown intro not necessary]
I think my reply was still a de-escalation from the attitude in the post to which I was replying. But, noted that I could be better.