Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Comments on What could be a believable reason for technologically advanced underground people to not notice the end of surface war for hundreds of years?
Parent
What could be a believable reason for technologically advanced underground people to not notice the end of surface war for hundreds of years? Question
Consider the following scenario:
We are in a far future. Technology has advanced quite a bit.
A large, devastating global war has broken out. One faction decides to hide from that war underground; thanks to their technology they can create an autonomous society that's completely separated from the above-ground societies. There still exist a few connections to the outside world, but those are well hidden from the outside, and have protection technology to keep surface people out who might accidentally discover those.
The war has now ended hundreds of years ago, and the people on the surface have lost all advanced technology. However for some reason the underground people didn't notice the end of the war, and still believe it is going on.
My question now is: What could be a believable reason that those underground people, who never lost their advanced technology, would not notice the end of the war for hundreds of years, and nobody ever went to the surface to look, despite the entrances still existing and being usable?
I don't think that anyone can really answer that without first answering how they expected to know in the first place. …
1mo ago
The war was devastating but nobody thought it would be so bad they'd nuke all advanced technology from their memory. Eve …
1mo ago
I've read one novel with a similar setting where the answer was: a small number in the government know the truth, but th …
1mo ago
They can only see a cut-out of the reality Depending on their technological capabilities underground people might hav …
1mo ago
An alternative Maybe they did notice the war had ended, but still chose not to leave the safety of their underground so …
1mo ago
Philip K. Dick would posit[^the-defenders] that the surface war is all done by robots. The robots lie about what is happ …
1mo ago
The underground society may be technologically advanced, but they are still humans, and humans have a tendency to create …
1mo ago
Vault-Net has control It was considered at some point to install an AI that would help the underground people to have …
1mo ago
If they are acting rationally, it's not possible. It is only logical for them to monitor the progress of the situation t …
1mo ago
First, this scenario is highly implausible. Surely the people that went underground intended to pop up again once the w …
1mo ago
They lost the key The outside gate was rather "low tech" like a vault door. Then over time need arised to add layers …
1mo ago
Undergrounds is a garden of Eden The people undergrounds love to live there. They have all they need and have not dev …
1mo ago
Post
The underground society may be technologically advanced, but they are still humans, and humans have a tendency to create their own explanations for visions and experiences they cannot scientifically explain. They believe there are supernatural forces on the surface. These supernatural forces are a threat, and will wipe out the underground society if it discovers their presence. They hide underground in fear of what they believe lingers on the surface.
Before or during the surface war, one human faction realized a way to use their technology to create illusions; these illusions sparked fear and created theories of supernatural forces amongst the other factions. The other factions failed to research them within the time they had available, and therefore never learned they were artificial. One or more of them hid underground, but left monitoring equipment on the ground that transmits to the society now deep below.
The "supernatural" faction now used their illusions to fight the war. Eventually this faction perished, but their technology continued running on its own. Because of this, the underground society's equipment also continues reading the signals, reinforcing the view amongst the people below that the surface is too dangerous to revisit, and that any attempt to establish contact will lead to their discovery. The information they can read from the surface, is not sufficient to learn more, and so the only safe assumption is that the information they are able to read, indicates the fatal threat lingers.
If there are survivors left above the ground, they have either come to peace with the illusions, or they are living in fear of them, but not in harm. They have failed to locate their sources, as they no longer possess the technology themselves, that would be necessary to find it.
1 comment thread
1 comment thread