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Fake Sci-Fi

A pervasive flaw in sci-fi worldbuilding: adding advanced technology, but not accounting for how it would change society. In fact every popular sci-fi universe does this to some extent. Let's look at Star Wars for an example.

The Star Wars universe features interplanetary travel, ships that can engage in cool-looking space battles, robots that are apparently people, and human cloning. But how has their way of life changed? It hasn't. There are still farmers, childbirth pains haven't been solved, wars are still fought with infantry, and in general, they seem to have less automation than we do now.

Here are some things that could probably be done given the other technologies we see:

reviving the dead (they have human cloning)

genetic enhancement (extra strength could be a game changer in lightsaber duels)

brain implants that give everyone portable access to the internet and some sort of built-in AI assistant like modern phones have only much better

brain implants that allow people to turn off their perception of pain (we already have painkillers in real life)

For that matter... why not just live in virtual reality? If they're that much more advanced than a society that can already tamper with perception to some extent, why do people need to deal with physical limitations at all?

This is actually such a big obstacle that I can't think of a single sci-fi story that's really solved it.

In my teens, I came up with a story (that I wrote 7 chapters of) with a workable but kludgy solution: the human soul's "death detector" is a lot touchier than it is in real life, and so any sort of tampering with someone's brain causes their soul to leave their body (death) permanently. That solved the problems of elimination of pain and genetic enhancement. As for computers implanted in people's brains, they couldn't actually be implanted for that reason, but they did have little wrist-mounted devices called companions that were a vestige of it.

Consciousness is immaterial

But that was still really unsatisfying.

I think there *are* good ways to do this by embracing the implications of advanced technology and exploring the conflicts that would still arise, but they're anything but obvious.

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