Why in science fiction rpgs is bringing someone back from the dead or immortality usually impossible, but shit like faster than light travel possible?
In real life, its theoretically possible to make someone biologically immortal, hell its a strong possibility of happening within a century, and bringing someone back from the dead isn't far off either, especially if the brain is intact.
Meanwhile, faster than light travel is likely impossible, or at best, thousands of years off.
What gives? 90% of science fiction table top game settings are like that, it makes no sense.
Do you know something cool about the latest in brain reconstruction that I don't know? You sound like you might do.
Also, faster than light travel is possible becaue players want to travel between star systems.
Mortality is a narrative barrier that people are used to and like more than immortality.
Not having FTL--that is, being extremely limited to a single area unless huge amounts of time are given up, origins are entirely abandoned, and so on--is a narrative barrier people are not used to and do not like as much.
That said, there are probably sci-fi RPGs where immortality is not just possible but expected (Eclipse Phase maybe? I think that has brain-in-a-jar stuff), and where FTL is nowhere to be found.
>>48227895
So it's just narrative bullshit?
>>48227830
because FTL travel is necessary for a lot of the stories people like to tell in science-fiction. it's a genre convention and present in much of the literature that sci-fi RPGs use as inspiration.
some modern RPGs, like eclipse phase, do focus on that kind of technology (and don't feature FTL so much). but they tell a different kind of story than many people are looking for.
immortality is irrelevant in most games anyway, because they don't last long enough for aging to matter. resurrection is controversial - some people like being able to bring back their characters, other people find it harder to create dramatic tension in a world where death is an inconvenience rather than a major "oh shit" moment. whether or not it's "realistic" (as you imagine it) it doesn't always make for the best stories.
>>48227938
You can do a whole lot without FTL - terraformed solar system with tons of asteroid bases/ringworlds/satelites making up the core of the human spaceward expansion - nearby star systems requiring long travel times developed similarly
Starships functioning as a futuristic pony-express, delivering messages between systems
Super long lifetimes from biological immortality making these long voyages feasible
You can do a lot of cool narratives with harder sci-fi
One other thing I've wondered in most Sci-fi, why are spinally weapons so rare? It's the most efficient way to pack weapons, and if you use missiles in space, theyre realistically all gonna be casaba howitzer type missiles, anything else is a terrible mass/energy proposition in space
i wish there was more stuff with spacefights that have verisimilitude
Mass effect handled space combat well, except in cutscenes. All the big guns were spinal mounts, except for point defense weapons. The only missiles used had an amazing mass/energy ratio
>>48228364
Realistically, any kinetic weapon or particle beam is going to be spinally mounted, because both type of weapons directly benefit from being longer. Both types of weapons are likely to be the "big guns", because kinetic weapons are BY FAR the most efficient mass/energy weapons, and particle beams are also quite destructive and have some advantages that make up for the worse mass/energy efficiency.
Lasers are not likely to be the "big guns", nor are plasma weapons. Lasers suffer from diffraction, and they both suffer from blooming. Lasers make good point defense weapons though, would probably be used for shooting down missiles or small ships because they move at light speed. I only foresee plasma weapons really being used because a fusion reactor would naturally have a bunch of excess plasma, so it can be weaponized, and you can shoot plasma out of a mass accelerator (raillgun or coilgun), so it'd be like a less efficient kinetic weapon, with a radioactive kick. Again, they'd probably just be weaponizing exhaust when it comes to plasma weapons. Maybe a second spinally mounted weapon, just for shooting out the excess plasma? Who knows. That's something cool to think about though,imagine the kind of damage some plasma moving at relativistic speeds would do.
Because FTL makes good stories, and reducing or eliminating the risk of death makes bad stories. That, or having resurrection be an amazingly rare occurrence makes for good stories.
Not always, but as a general rule.
Most SF is either a reskin of :
- greek tragedies (star wars)
- the colonization era (star trek)
Plus our civilisation has a strong taboo about death.
To allow resurrection in your setting you have to deny the existence of soul. It seems like something easy but it's far from the most spread PoV.
>>48228635
You can still have good stories where characters can come back to life, IF it has a clear and defined set of rules - for example, if the body is totally destroyed, they can't be brought back. If the brain is destroyed, being brought back to life won't return any of the memories or anything that makes them "them". You don't need FTL for space travel, just make the solar system REALLLLY busy, like every goddamn piece of rock is colonized
>>48228697
You can just handwave the soul bullshit by saying it returns to the body when ressurected
Its annoying how poor translations and cultural cruft have turned "soul" from it's original definition of mind into some intangible piece of nonsense
>>48227921
Mostly, yep!
Deal with it.
>>48228783
Well obviously it is *possible* but it's not what people think of when they think about adventure in the future.
Most works which ignore death are niche and very special settings, like Paranoia or 40k (to an extent).
They're not bad. They're not popular either, sadly.
Because if you can bring someone back using medical technology then they're not dead. The definition of death changes as medical technology advances.
>>48228783
You're completely missing the point. For the most part, stories require conflict. When you remove the threat of death, conflict becomes SIGNIFICANTLY harder to create. He Never Died is a really good example of this; 'Jack's immortality removes almost all conflict from the character and makes the fragility of the people around him that much more relevant. When you remove the risk of death from EVERYONE, then suddenly you have to generate risk, and thus conflict, in weird, lateral ways that people find it much harder to identify with.
>>48228912
I've often wondered what might happen to Paranoia if you got rid of the clone limit and made death an irritating inconvenience but kept treason the same. Would it become more slapstick with death being treated with the gravity of being slapped, or more paranoid with elaborate frameup jobs and imprisonment being the only ways to actually eliminate rivals?
>>48228973
You can still have the "threat of death", it just takes a higher degree of damage for someone to be dead.
Instead of people dropping like fleas, you can have death be pretty slapstick unless they actually get obliterated
>>48227921
In that everything is narrative bullshit. Think of it like this: the moment actual revival of the dead comes into play in a science fiction setting, that's all any story set in that world can be about. Anything else, and you'll get the same reaction: "But wait. I don't care about any of this shit. Talk more about the science necromancy." FTL travel is at least analogous to other forms of travel in the mind of the layman. Things like hyperspace usually don't involve any issues different from larger-scale version of problems you might run into on the sea or flying in a plane. But reviving the dead is totally outside the context of almost anyone, so its entry immediately becomes the topic of intrigue. It's a question of scale, and just reducing that to "narrative bullshit" is kind of intellectually dishonest.
>>48229742
Or, you can just treat it like any other medical advancement
A thousand years ago, getting a cut was a death sentence. Now it's easily treatable.
You just need to treat it like any other medicine and have none of the characters bat an eye. You don't need to treat it like anything special, because it's honestly not.
>>48227830
Immortality is actually pretty common amongst the wealthy in sci-fi, but resurrection is simple- it cheapens the idea of character death and guts the stakes.
>>48227830
>pay a lot of money to become immortal
>kek at all the poorfags who can't afford it and have to age and die like fucking peasants
>>48229833
I think that's reducing the concept of death to an unfair degree - its not a binary switch of alive/dead, normally when someone dies, its because their bodies systems are too damaged to be repaired by medical science. Well, I'd assume in a thousand years our medical science would've advanced to the point that barring disintegration, anything can be repaired.
You can still have stakes if people can come back from the dead, you just need to raise the bar on what's deadly.
>>48229804
If death stops being a threat, then how it's interacted with also needs to change. Eclipse Phase, for example, has a tendency to treat death a resource a lot of the time. If you're really desperate to escape from a situation, farcast your mind to the other side of the galaxy so it can be resleeved, and kill yourself in such a way that your cortical stack is unrecoverable or destroyed. "You" still exist, and you're in a state where recovering you is probably worth less effort than trying to undo whatever it is you did before you died.
Even then, Eclipse Phase treats its cortical stack technology as something special no matter how ubiquitous it is. And why shouldn't it? Making copies of your mind which can be loaded into bodies when you die (or even if you're still alive) raises a lot of questions about continuity of identity and the nature of the individual or the soul. Having that technology without at least trying to address those questions is ignoring a huge amount of the implications, societal affects and impacts upon human existence that that kind of technology would bring, which some would argue is a pretty huge part of what science fiction is about.
>>48229921
reminds me of dollhouse
what if theres a biological metaphysics division that figured all that out?
just pull the soul from the warp or whathave you
maybe there is no soul? then people dont care
Because most "Science fiction" is humanist space-opera fantasy.
Hard science fiction is like a detective story: everything is set up so that the reader can react along the characters, puzzle over possible outcomes, etc.
Because many readers aren't interested in that experience, but find real space fantasy unsuited to their fedora'd tastes, they choose "science fiction" like Star Trek where the technology is stage dressing instead of critical to the plot and environment.
>>48229921
I'd assume if a society is at the point where resurrection technology is ubiquitous they'd already have worked that out
>>48227921
playing TTRPGs is narrative bullshit, my friend
>>48230013
rarely
more often then not its an excuse to blow stuff up and take peoples stuff
>>48227830
Why in TV shows are the scientists attractive 20-somethings who are able to solve the crisis of the week in approximately 44 minutes?
In real life, scientific breakthroughs hinge on years of boring and repetitive research, and many scientists are physically unattractive.
in rare cases, human brains have been known to stay alive for 17 days after the rest of the body died
the more you know...
>>48230071
Japanese doctors have a 90% chance of bringing someone back after their heart stops beating in the case of a cardiac arrest
The More You Know
>>48227830
Slower-than-light travel results in deep time and its attendant consequences; which is incompatible with modern religious superstitions like universal human progress.
Humans also like telling stories about the past, but want different baubles in them. FTL enables people to tell stories about pirates, empires, and islands from the 17th century-but-with-glowy-lights. Without FTL, they would be forced to tell stories about space instead, which has very different economic, strategic, and physical dynamics and therefore results in a different set of stories. Many people don't like new stories, they prefer rehashed ones.
>>48230118
is deep time the same as the deep web
>>48230006
"Worked that out" how? Continuity of identity isn't a scientific question. In many ways, neither is consciousness yet. These questions are philosophical. They relate to how we live our lives and how we see the world. A person might consider themselves well and truly dead every time they die and see each resurrection as a whole new person. Another might become a ascetic sage in search of the memory of what the afterlife looked like while they were dead. Another person might see it as just a thing, as common as a cell phone or a computer. Another might become an adrenaline junkie with no sense of mortality, only to fall into depression when they realize that the lack of real danger takes all meaning out what they do. These people's concerns don't have anything to do with the science of resurrection itself, but everything to do with how it interacts with their lives and how it affects how they view the world and themselves. Each of those reactions says something about a person and just ignoring something that has that big of an impact on a person's life by saying "well, they just worked it out" is completely negating a lot of what could make this technology interesting from an audience's perspective.
>>48230410
>Continuity of identity isn't a scientific question. In many ways, neither is consciousness yet
>yet
I rest my case
>>48230516
When I say "consciousness isn't a scientific question yet" I mean it won't be anytime in our foreseeable future because for all the numerical data we've assembled about the brain, how it actually works and how it relates to the idea of consciousness is still very much a closed book. Even if it weren't, we don't actually know what consciousness is, how to define it, or even how to contextualize it with the rest of the perceivable universe. That the very idea of quantum superimposition rests on the notion of conscious agents being capable of observation is testament to that. We think it affects shit, and the shit we think it affects is way far out, but we don't have much in the way of real proof and nothing short of an upheaval of neuroscience on the scale of Kepler's "planetary motion" thing is likely to change that.
>>48230661
If it's possible to be solved, it will.
Not something to worry about.
>>48230765
Truths within a formal system are not necessarily provable. /godel
I sympathize but can we keep the black-science-man cosmism to a minimum?
>>48230864
All aspects of philosophy will eventually become just another field of the natural sciences
Eventually, there will be no questions for philosophers to ask.
I actually recall reading an article that disproved the existence of conciousness
>>48230661
>That the very idea of quantum superimposition rests on the notion of conscious agents being capable of observation is testament to that
In science, observation has nothing to do with consciousness. It means particles interact with other particles.
>>48230895
See, that's pretentious BS. There are some things that are inherently unknowable, and quite a few things that are likely unknowable.
And consciousness exists. Source: am conscious, you idiot.
>>48227830
Like all genres, science fiction has a past development period that defines it and everything else is built around the genre conventions developed in that first phase. In the past we had less knowledge of technology and it seemed more likely to travel to other galaxies than being immortal.
Also often light travel is there so it makes sense that planets act like islands and spaceships like boats. There's no equivalent to this for immortality.
>>48230936
No, really. It was disproven. Seriously.
It doesn't matter anyway. Idiots like you will do anything to prove their self exists.
Pretentiousness douchebags like you like to think some things are sacred or unknowable, but thats complete bullshit. Everything can be reduced and known.
>>48230999
Cite source or fuck off.
>>48230999
No, seriously. I'm conscious. You're conscious. I am fully aware of what I'm typing; it's absolutely retarded beyond belief to think otherwise. You're being an unbelievably pretentious douchebag, which necessitates consciousness. The act of studying consciousness and understanding the existence or nonexistence of consciousness requires consciousness.
>Everything can be reduced and known.
Obviously not your arrogance. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, I'm just saying, don't be disappointed when some things eternally remain baffling.
>>48230999
[citation needed]
Inb4 you misinterpret Metzinger or take p-zombies seriously.
>>48230936
Now you're just going full lib arts here. Descartes has been disproven for roughly a century now and so will other philosophers come time - our universe (the only one in existence) has no room for things that aren't objective and empirical, only our flawed brain living in its permanent illusory hormonal daze has. Fortunately we have science to fix that for us. But by all means, keep deluding yourself.
>>48230936
>>48231062
>>48231096
i know what article hes talking about
a bunch of neuroscientists definitely disproved it, its kind of a schema the mind uses to interrupt information
its a very good article but its hard to find
basically it boils down to its hard to define a different word to describe how we think and feel
ill look for it, its a few years old but yeah, we're just meat computers and our sense of self is actual a malfunction
>>48231110
interpret
>>48231096
I'm getting euphoric just reading this.
From your perspective, understanding is good, yet if we're not conscious we can't understand anything. Your position is self-defeating and you're an idiot.
>>48231110
>its a very good article but its hard to find
>it's a "fusion is impossible" anon thread
So much for any actual discussion.
>>48231110
see >>48231062
I called it. You looked at opaque/transparent workspaces/self-reference and thought that because we understand a little about consciousness it doesn't exist.
>>48231131
Knowing. Not understanding. Knowledge is absolute and factual. Understanding is a fictional construct.
>>48231131
not him, but its hard to talk about things when the words you want to use dont exist, so you have to use "borrowed concepts"
>>48231156
And yet here I am, self-aware, conscious, and understanding.
>>48231154
>Metzinger
im not talking about any philosophical bullshit, im talking hard science
im looking for the article, its a little difficult to find several year old scientific articles when your not a student anymore
>>48231189
But you're not
You really aren't and neither am i
you're just a meat machine interpreting the environment
people are basically just Chinese rooms
>>48230999
Even if we concede that point to you, that doesn't mean every sci-fi story should be in a setting that's reached the end of philosophy.
Supposing medical science advances faster than figuring out the problem of consciousness, even if the technology to duplicate a brain exists and is commonplace conversations about it are going to dominate the setting.
So if your options are writing about societies that have figured out consciousness, writing stories about people's reactions to brain copying, or writing stories where neither of those have happened the third category seems like the broadest.
>>48231189
*being deluded.
>>48231211
>conversations about it are going to dominate the setting.
Why would they. The facts are on the table. There will be nothing to discuss.
>>48231212
You have to be conscious to be deluded.
Similarly, you have to be conscious to be not-deluded.
But keep defeating yourself, please.
>>48231190
>im not talking about any philosophical bullshit, im talking hard science
The hard science is I can observe my own consciousness, thereby disproving your fraud of a hypotheses.
Incidentally, Metzinger runs an open-access neurology journal, is director/president of two different neural science groups, and has published peer-reviewed research.
Whereas you seem invested in the fedora-tipper superstition that understanding something makes it go away.
>>48231211
its not a matter of conceding anything
you can't just "concede" scientific facts
>>48231208
>you're just a meat machine interpreting the environment
Yes, and all that means is that any sufficiently complex machine is capable of self-awareness, consciousness and understanding.
>>48231249
>derp derp im retarded
>>48231208
There's a lot of evidence that our conscious experience is constructed after the fact, and it doesn't have any causal effect on how the meat computer operates.
That's different from disproving consciousness, though. Qualia are definitely real, and no one has a good explanation for what produces them.
>>48231257
>Chinese room
>>48231241
Do you understand how difficult to use the correct words in this situation? they DO NOT EXIST yet, so you have to use borrowed concepts
anyway you can delude a computer, and a computer does not have consciousness
>>48231257
It isn't though. Humans aren't and machines will never be.
>>48231277
>Chinese room
Is it really a Chinese room when the Chinese dictionary is entirely in your brain?
>>48231269
Qualia are weights in a neural net.
The fact that e.g. reflexes can occur before conscious thought hardly disproves consciousness; since 1. obviously it is tested to exist, and 2. it's a quantifiable phenomenon observable as slices of time perception and 3. consciously thinking about choices produces different results than not.
>>48231228
The facts are pretty much on the table about what happens to dead bodies now. Doesn't stop the majority of the world from arguing over it.
>>48231256
You (and I) believe it to be a scientific fact with a very high level of confidence, and neither of us is knowledgeable to show that denying leads to some necessary contradiction, so you ought to be at least capable of considering an alternative case where we're mistaken.
>>48231325
Its entirely possible that in the future no one will argue about it
Everyone with a differing opinion has that opinion removed
>>48230039
Because people are shallow and easily entertained.
>>48231249
I would feel sorry for you if that was objectively possible. The only one you are harming with your ignorance is yourself and you are wasting my time.
>>48231325
Science is not a matter of belief. Facts remain the same even if doubted. There is no reason to doubt if it does not change the subject.
Searle is a meme.
Speaking of Metzinger: http://open-mind.net/papers
>>48231277
Incorrect. Delusion implies choice, whereas a computer is bound by its programming.
>>48231372
>you
Who?:^)
>>48231228
The problem is with assuming that the mind is purely physical in all sci-fi settings, even the ones which have in-universe proven there is a non physical element to the mind. Whether it is true in real life is irreverent.
>>48231315
>qualia are weights in a neural set
This is not even specific enough to mean anything.
>consciously thinking about choices produces different results than not.
This does not require that consciously thinking about the choice had a causal role in producing the different result, only that the operations that produce one result also create a conscious experience while operations that produce a different result do not.
>>48231424
Sci-Fi settings that imply the existence of an incorporal "mind" are inherently flawed because they betray the Science part of Science Fiction. They serve no purpose.
>>48231461
>Sci-Fi settings that imply the existence of an incorporal "mind" are inherently flawed because they betray the Science part of Science Fiction. They serve no purpose.
>>48231422
*The only one that unit is hurting is itself.
This one had anticipated the usage of "you" (a 2nd person pronoun used in conversation) would be adequate given the environment.
>>48231357
Which, again, seriously limits the kinds of stories you're going to write if widespread brain editing and duplication are always commonplace in your scifi settings.
>>48231372
>Science is not a matter of belief. Facts remain the same even if doubted.
Sure, but we our knowledge of the facts can definitely be wrong. If you are wrong about the facts - which is always a possibility, no matter how confident you are - your argument that brain duplication ought to be prevalent in realistic sci-fi is significantly weaker.
>>48231489
>This one
Which one?Please keep going, autist-kun, this is too much fun.
>>48231506
There is nothing more to be said.
>>48231493
Knowledge about facts will be proven or disproven by reality, not discussion.
>>48231526
>Knowledge about facts will be proven or disproven by reality, not discussion.
I've never claimed otherwise, but now we're not even talking about your original point any more.Please keep going, I hardly ever get to actually use my philosophy degree.
If anyone here brings up quantum physics trying to prove consciousness, it's the measuring equipment that causes the changes, not the fact that someone is observing it
if there was no one there, the changes would still occur due to the measuring equipment
>>48231628Funny how an uneducated lurker can completely BTFO someone who wasted years of his life getting a worthless degree in fee fee studies just by posting the most fedora shit that comes to mind. Do something productive with your life
>>48231677
>BTFO
Anon, I have some bad news for you....
>>48231677
You're not lurking if you're the OP, which is sort of indicative of the quality of the rest of your post.
>>48231768
I'm the OP and i stopped posting in this thread a few minutes after i made it
I sometimes wonder if the people who insist consciousness doesn't exist are actually desperately trying to justify their miserable existence by claiming that it's all pre-programmed and they had no choice. It sure is a convenient way to escape any responsibility for anything while still sounding "intellectual."
>>48227830
As far as unrelated images go, you picked a good one. I love that painting, so much life in it.
>>48231836
Are you a fan of cossacks?
>>48227830
Effective treatments for damage caused by oxygen deprivation of the brain are basically nonexistent. Even if such a thing were possible, at the point of clinical brain-death as it is defined now, even if you were to restore the material to a pristine state (which we cannot even begin to do) the person's personality and memories would essentially be gone.
Think of the human brain as a bowl of thumbtacks. Today, if you poured out the bowl, we would not even be able to put the thumbtacks back in. But, perhaps someday they will assemble gloves and we'll be able to scoop the tacks all back into the bowl--but then, the tacks will be in a totally different order from how they were originally. Unless in the future everyone has some sort of constant brain-scan going on to record the exact proper composition of their noggin, how would we restore a person's mind even if we could heal the matter? There are no guarantees that it is even physically possible to miniaturize technology that far.
Right now it looks like it may actually be impossible, not just far off, so it's not wrong to exclude it from science fiction.
>>48231940
>Right now it looks like it may actually be impossible, not just far off, so it's not wrong to exclude it from science fiction.
So, like FTL travel?
>>48231461
Science Fiction is a very wide genre, and with that gives it much of its appeal due to its diversity. Restricting Science Fiction to only transhumanist Science Fiction would greatly narrow its appeal and breath of stories. As much as you might hate it, softer sci-fi is still sci-fi.
>>48231960
Except assuming FTL travel often makes stories easier to relate to, is a genre convention, and allows the author to explore other scifi hypotheses without getting in the way too much narratively. The same isn't true for cortical stacks.
Yay we're back to the very beginning of the thread again.
>>48231940
Atomically precise manufacturing is physically possible - the theoretical math has been done for boser-style printers and diamondoid nanotechnology. And ofc biology is just another word for evolved nanotech, and does it constantly.
Perhaps any given method might be too slow or too hot, but the idea is practical.
>>48231960
FTL, relativity, causality; pick two, and relativity has been picked for you.
Causality is arguably an even greater jump than immortality.
>>48231940
nothing at all in this post is not solvable
the japanese were able to revive a person after being brain dead for a week
>>48232032
Immortality, at least in the biological sense, is currently very theoretically possible, the technology is not quite there, but likely will be soon
>>48231461
> the existence of an incorporal "mind"
But that's what uploading is, anon; an affirmation of dualism through information "beyond" and partitioned off from the body. And therefore it's a denial of materialism.
/jovian catholic supremacy
>>48232039
Source?
>>48232070
>genetrash forgetting that mind uploading is sinful while trying to blend in on Jovian synthspace development forums
MOOOODS.
>>48232039
I haven't heard of the incident, but there is a difference between dying in a hospital bed and being dragged off of a battlefield. Synaptic degredation occurs very quickly.
>>48232032
The issue is not that we cannot ever theoretically manually repair damage to the brain, it is that that is not sufficient to restore a "person" to life. The exact synaptic pattern of a person degrades when the brain is deprived its constant biological maintenance, and as far as I know there is no way to know which synapse connected to which other one after they decay.
It's as much a question of information as it is of welding nerves back together. How will we know which to connect to where to restore Timmy's memory of his childhood? Which synapses allowed him to associate his birthday with his locker-room code? That sort of thing.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just as FTL travel may not be impossible, but both, I think, are unforeseeable in the near future.
>>48227830
Faster than light travel is also theoretically possible via the alcubierre drive.
>>48232303
>theoretically
>mfw no face
Also, I remember seeing some mathematical tricks to show that if you went anywhere with the Alcubierre Drive you would nuke the system when you got there. Bit of a shame, considering it's our best bet right now, but oh well.
>>48227830
It makes dumb people upset because they'll think that if you can just clone someone death will be cheap.
>>48227830
I think Eclipse Phase might be what you're looking for. From what I've heard anyway. I tried reading it but I couldn't stomach the formatting.
>>48227830
>ITT: Fedorafag attempts to present his opinion as scientific fact
You're a cunt OP.
>>48227830
There's plenty of hemming and hawing in this thread about whether consciousness and continuity of self is knowable or definable, but ultimately that isn't important.
If we have a story where death has been conquered, the real questions are how? How does this incredible discovery change the fabric of society? How does it affect resources? The economy? Politics? Law? Religion?
If a person can be resurrected in the flesh, a perfect duplicate, sans maybe a few seconds of memory prior to death... Are they a clone? Are they healed in some way? By healed, I mean, the process to revivify them might leave scars or noticeable damage like any other injury might.
Are they a copy of the person's personality uploaded into a machine? Downloadable on command to any number of devices which can store and process the information that is quintessentially "them"?
Who can afford this miracle? Is it available to everyone, or must you be among the privilidged few?
>>48227830
Immortality is usually impossible to keep players from solving everything with kamikaze tactics.
You want an in universe reason, specify a setting or system, jackass.
Eclipse Phase is an RPG, where immortality and whole brain emulation exists and have utterly changed society, politics, culture, combat, and more. FTL, if it exists at all*, is limited to poorly understood alien artifacts.
The idea that solving death solves or renders irrelevant conflict can be quickly shown to be incorrect. Even extreme wealth via automation and assemblers just means that we have more toys to shoot and stab each other with, and otherwise engage in high-velocity dramatics. Not to mention political, ideological, social, and other non-violent forms of conflict.
*there's a non-trivial chance that the Pandora Gates, the setting's equivalent of a Stargate, are actually just disassembly machines that scan objects entering and instance then in a simulation, then reassemble them when they 'leave' the simulation. Possibly because our machine overlords are massive assholes.
>>48236056
>Immortality is usually impossible to keep players from solving everything with kamikaze tactics.
If immortality implied kamikaze tactics, either your enemies aren't smart enough or you're doing immortality wrong.
>>48234762
It's widely available to everyone, and has as a result rewritten what human society looks like. Everyone accepts that a copy is the same as the original, because 90% of humanity is dead and 90% of those who survived were restored from backup - and no one wants to believe they're 'not real'. Anyone who would or did object on philosophical grounds is dead.
>>48236617
Accelerando, and other stuff by Charles Stross which this reminds me of, also has processes of communicating with people or traveling distances with copies of yourself (the protagonists send copies of themselves, for instance through a suspect, relatively distant gate. They are busy people, and also want to keep their property rights back home, and are also paranoid)
What their copies find on the other side, in one instance, is a shelled out wasteland of a solar system that had built a dyson sphere, and the intelligent life was either extinct, went to another higher plane, or was undetectable. All they found was the rampant multi level marketer/spam bot/corporate shell demon spawn A.I., and various dubiously intelligent scammers, refugees, and filth ripping each other and especially new comers off with "advanced" technology and such.
One of the most hotly desired commodities was basically "souls" and/or creativity and diversity. Because the artistic and cultural well was relatively dry and stagnant, getting a really good and vibrant intelligence to milk for new ideas and creativity, or at least a good copy was appealing.
On another level, having a really different mind and in some cases plain old genome was also valuable just for the sake of evolution and reproduction.
>>48236817
Eclipse Phase is based at least partially on Accelerando, and also on the Takeshi Kovacs series (which had travel-by-brain-scan, but no FTL ships - though the transmission was FTL, and therefore no less physically nonsense).
>>48227830
Because being ''biologically'' immortal (but not God-like or without cool abilities) is boring as fuck.
But you know what else is even more boring? A space-faring scifi setting WITHOUT faster-than-light travel! It's like F1 racing but none of the cars have fuel.
>>48227830
Because going to distant stars is a default premise and thus the physics are plugged in with an exploit to allow that.
On the other hand, mortal danger when adventuring is also a needed part of the flavour, so it needs to stay. Additionally, dying of old age is not a concern for players so there is no need to do anything about it.
>>48229915
Read Schlock Mercenary if you think 'anything can be repaired' means 'dying has no consequences'. hits to the brain can still damage your memory, skills, personality...which would translate to lost levels, abilities, skills, whatever character progression is tracked by in the particular system.
>>48236626
>Implying stopping a kamikaze is easy.
Anon, you're clearly underestimating the ingenuity of players when they no longer have to preserve a character...
>>48227830
>In real life, its theoretically possible to make someone biologically immortal
I don't think that even Synthetic biology companies would be cray-cray enough to replenish the genes of a significant part of a local organism, seeing how the process is basically done by hand right now.
>>48228697
>- greek tragedies (star wars)
Nah man, it'd be a tragedy if Vader and Luke would only find out that Leia was their daughter/sister AFTER they killed her AFTER Vader had killed both of their foster families.
>>48227830
Stargate has both resurrection and FTL.
The resurrection is a limited resource, in terms of who has access to it, and which species it can be used on.
The nox use it Willy nilly. The goauld use it to keep the host alive and prevent aging (but the goauld itself still ages, albeit more slowly).
You might be able to fix a stab wound or gunshot to the heart, but you're not going to come back from disintegration.
>>48232387
EP has FTL travel.
>>48231960
Just like FTL travel, yes. It is not wrong to exclude it from sci-fi. You can include it if you want. Just like immortality.
It's narrative problems that cause the argument rather than scientific ones.
>>48231940
The brain is basically like RAM. While there's a current through it information is stored as fields in capacitors but the moment you kill the current that information is gone. Everything discharges and you still have a RAM stick full of capacitors but none of the information.
>>48237270
It's difficult to stop an agent that doesn't care about their survival or extraction from getting somewhere long enough to detonate a bomb or shoot someone. It also doesn't matter; your opppnents have backups too, resleeving takes time and resources, and actually getting anything accomplished requires sticking around to.
>>48227921
Yep, but it's sort of necessary to have any sort of stakes.
I mean, in a land where death is trivial, what's actually worth fighting for?
I don't even like throwing round resurrection magic willy-nilly in fantasy campaigns; it just kills any sense of real peril.
If your character dies I want you to FEEL it.
>>48241365
In a land where death is trivial, what isn't worth fighting for? Fighting is dangerous; we refrain in large part because the cost of failure is death. If it wasn't - if you could fight for a cause, a relationship, a reputation, and be immune to final death - wouldn't you?
Besides, "death is not final" is not the same as "death is without costs". Resleeving costs money or favors, time lost in Lack, opportunity cost, and mental stress.
We are actually very far from immortality.
>>48236997
This. You can't have space science fiction without faster than light travel, unless you intend to restrict the setting to the Solar System.
>>48241655
The Solar System is a pretty big place, bigger than any human can explore. It's more that scientists keep ruling out the fun shit that science fiction authors want, so they have to invent a device to take us somewhere those scientists aren't likely to get their fingers on for a while.
