Can an entire planet remain isolated and stagnant?

Question

For context, there is a planet that is kept isolated from the larger civilization of star systems it should be connected with—in terms of communication. A base population is already present on the planet. On the remaining celestial bodies of this star system are a third party’s personnel, transport, etc. Warp tech is present so that the whole atmospheric re-entry and exit can be skipped, but it and other such advanced tech is only accessible by the third party.

This third party wants to keep the aforementioned planet isolated for the main purpose of extracting humans to do specific labor. I want this planet’s populous to be unaware of the larger context around them without breaking worldbuilding through said planet advancing too far, discovering the third party that limits them, etc. Is it possible for an entire planet be exploited without its inhabitants knowing it’s being exploited? Can the planet be kept both isolated and technologically stagnant enough so that this operation isn’t interrupted or ruined?

Edit: Thanks for the replies, they’ve been really helpful in figuring this out! Just want to pin down a couple more points. To do that, I’ll clarify the aforementioned “labor.” The peoples taken from this exploited planet would participate in something like the Abbasid’s “ghilman,” but adjusted to swap literal slavery for wage slavery.

Does this setup necessitate that the exploited planet’s people are (as per @L.Dutch) at “barely subsistence level?” Does that mean their society is something akin to dark ages Europe or remote regions of Africa? Given the most voted-upon answer as of writing this, I’m thinking of making the planet largely dependent on primary economic activity, with little secondary, and fewer tertiary activity. Would this best suit the exploitation system described in my original question, or is there a higher threshold of development that would allow the system to function at maximum effectiveness?

Answer 1

It's possible, and I think it has happened with some countries/populations in our history: didn't somebody trade glass beads for valuable exotic items?

Technology and knowledge need to start somewhere to spread, if you prevent the spark to happen, you will not have to worry about fire spreading. And it helps keeping the innovation low if you can control the society and the standard of life be at barely subsistence level: like the Romans said "primum vivere, deinde philosophari", first worry about living, then about making philosophy. If you are too busy worrying about reaching the end of the day alive, you will have less time to investigate advancements of any sort. This will result in your society being stagnant.

Answer 2

Tunnel world

They never see the sky. They do not know about the sun and the stars. If a tunnel breaks through to the surface that is worse than a deep tunnel breaking thru into lava - water pours down into the tunnels. They need to be careful about digging too high.

They do not know they are on a planet. The concept of "planet" would be a struggle for them.

Tunnels also make it easy to harvest the humans.

Answer 3

Welcome to Paradise*

You are worthy. You are valued. You will work for your kin, and they will work for you. Anything worth having is provided by the Powers that Be, to whom the best and brightest may ascend. Praise be unto their unknowable wishes. (Hope that the destruction from their displeasure doesn't happen near here.)

---

No need for a low standard of living

... just low opportunity to tinker. All production is handled by black-boxes, and nobody knows how to operate more than one. You provide the black boxes. Therefore anything someone makes is either inferior to what you provide, or you know which drone to harvest next.

If you have sufficiently advanced technology (relative to them), you can educate your population to consider it good that you're watching invisbly, and send in a drone with a spotlight to mark someone as favoured. They will visit the temple to ascend (with a celebration) and you now have a willing labourer with unusually high tech-skills. You tell this volunteer that their efforts help to maintain Paradise for those at home.

Just in case, you discourage travel (and nuke-from-orbit anyone who tries) and apply tracking implants liberally. Also possible is inhibiting vitamin production and then providing salt-licks in the town square, just in case. There is no need for trade. Dissenters can be excised without anyone knowing why, and so "heresy" cannot spread. They'll also lynch any outsiders who land, if you tell them to; and hand in any gadgets which they find (and can't recharge anyway).

---

As for not being discovered, it's easy to hide (lots of planets exist) unless someone traces your supply-chain. Of volunteers. Who exactly is unhappy with this situation? Will your labourers eagerly testify that they'd prefer that their home remains the same, and beg for it to be declared an ecological preserve under [controlling organisation]'s stewardship?

It doesn't have to be a planet, artificial structures don't have to exist in a natural orbit and are therefore harder to detect accidentally.

Answer 4

A leaflet from the establishing and maintaining a cult manual - institutionalized religion with complicated rituals and a strong emphasis on community living and conformity/traditions.

Strengths:

• suppression of individuality - to the point in which even the idea of monogamous relations and small/individual family is non-existent
• maintaining a division of labor that can support the community in spite of their best members being 'harvested'
• reduced cost of dissent surveillance - they'll do it to themselves
• dial in the level of well-being and heath that you need your laborers to be at the moment of harvesting them

Weaknesses - that will need to be addressed (not necessary fatal)

• hard (but not impossible) to justify the 'harvesting of laborers' - will it be a reward or will it be a punishment? I mean, one needs strong and compliant humans as workers, so you'll need to promote such values. But then it will be hard to socially justify 'harvesting' those that are probably also the best the community can have.

Additional material to draw inspiration from - the list of new religious movements - pick the ones that popped-up relatively recent (in the '60-'70-ies as the earliest).

Answer 5

Encourage widespread virtual reality retreat.

Using brain implants, which are a twenty years in the future from today technology thing, you could have people spend most of their time in virtual realities, living on welfare.

Make society shitty.

This could be encouraged by ensuring that their society was unpleasant for most who stayed out, with lots of racial, political, gender and religious strife encouraged by their propaganda machines. Being able to control social media and generally use superior technology to hack most computers helps with this.

Most people could retreat to virtual reality worlds, to escape continual cruelty on social media and in real life, and constant bitter fights that the third party inspired.

Any who they wished to recruit could be trained with targeted advertisements to such virtual reality worlds to invite them into training games, or encouraged to return to real life and granted power and prestige.

Answer 6

Two possible scenarios:

The local rulers are in on it.

Yes. With the help of the rulers just about any level of deception is possible. There is no space research because "everybody knows" space is too expensive, it will never give a return on investment.

You can fool all the people all the time.

Still, there will be a number of people who will know the truth and somebody just might say the wrong thing where the wrong ears can hear.

The local rulers don't have a clue.

Much harder. I would still call it possible. The third party will need to have secret agents in place to keep things in order.

You can still make most people believe space is not worth it, though there will always weirdos who try. The secret agents will need to "discourage" the wrong kind of research.

There will be a limit to how much exploitation you can do before the local rulers catches on.

Answer 7

I feel obligate to mention Safehold series by Weber here. Religion is the driving force behind stagnation there. A religion that was specifically designed to stagnate everything.

Successful? Safehold is a society that is held in stagnation for about 900 years on a planet in the middle of nowhere. There is at least one other society 'around' (quite far away tbh), but it never finds them. Thus, an isolated and stagnated world.

Longer Explanation of Safehold:

Exposition:

Humanity lost a war against aliens (the aliens have vastly better technology), flees into the far reaches of space. Humanities last colony decides the only way of surviving is to make sure that the colony never reaches the point where they emit any detectable signal (or alter planet atmosphere in a recognizable way) from space.

Religion

People are taught the prescriptions written expectations of what is allowed and disallowed. Everything that is against the prescriptions is punished by the order of Schueler (think inquisition). Part of the prescriptions is just simple things like nutrition where the "punishment" is scurvy.

Implementation

Colonists have memory wiped.

The writings are attributed to the "angels" (old Earth military who mascaraed as Angels for a while). The military (angels) guide the first few generations. Then they "leave" for heaven. The "angels" built "religious miracles" like a temple with climate control etc. The culture is strongly against change as it might eventually go against prescriptions. Science is nearly non-existent as all needed science was given to the colonists by "angels".

Mathematics is bound to roman numerals...... So no real sense of math exists (multiplication is hard, everything else is impossible to compute with numerals).

Society has enough to build sail ships (think Pirates of the Caribbean), but nothing else. Also, the book notes the obvious flaws that should have been excluded (the story is about changing the society, so the flaws were needed).

Pertaining to the question

Safehold is a crafted example of specifically designing a society and world where innovation is seen as evil based on religion. With the right building steps, your world could be similar. Have the "angels" group not die off and everything would work out similarly. Or, as needed have the divine "writs and prescriptions" change to fit your specific needs.

The most important take aways are avoiding the need for innovation, limiting science/math capabilities, and making life hard (labor intensive work around the planet leads to less free time to think).

Answer 8

Out of sight out of mind

If the system was in the middle of nowhere (other nearby systems are uninhabited or its dangerous to pass through the space around the system), then its less likely you'll get visitors from other systems wondering where all this human labor is coming from. This means its much less likely the inhabitants will ever find out that other beings exist. The third party could also spreads lies like all the people on the planet are cannibals, its always raining, and they ran out of coffee. Thus no on will want to visit the planet even if they where willing to risk the journey to the solar system.

No one wants any technology

The third body then just needs to install itself as the religious leaders and declare technology to be the work of the space-devil and thus no one should ever think about making any kind of technology. Anyone found with something more advanced than a wheel shall we put to death, lest they bring the wrath of the space-devil upon the local population.

Answer 9

The Old Man's War trilogy by Scalzi does something like this. Earth is kept isolated from the universe, so they can be farmed for colonists or soldiers.

Answer 10

Fill the planet orbit with debris to physically isolate the planet.

The third party could fill the planet atmosphere with space debris/asteroids to prevent any ship or communication from leaving. So even if the the local populace have some level of scientific and technological advancement, they can't leave without warp tech or something to protect you from the debris (i.e : shield system)

The debris/asteroids could often shower the planet, making it harder to form a stable civilisations and slowing down progress. Harvest could also be perfectly explained by the locals as just another villages, cities, tribes being whip out by an asteroid (Just leave a big crater once you finished harvesting your future workforce).

Answer 11

I agree with other users that keeping people at barely subsistence level is effective. But another reason why Africa never developed even though it is the birthplace of our species lies in the widespread tropical diseases. They kept the population density low thus limiting the communication between tribes and the cultural development. If you need a big source of human labour rather than a planet you might have a system with several small planets in the habitable zone each capable to support a small population. If each planet also contains zones separated by impassable mountains or toxic seas to limit the communications and cultural exchanges it would be even more effective. The speed of the development in high density areas like China compared to isolated areas like Australia is enormous.

Another effective design would be a planet where for some reasons there are only barren deserts or dense jungles. Thus the population would be forced to live in areas where the communication is limited and develop slowly like the tribes in the Amazon.

However you cannot completely stop cultural evolution in this way, but there is last trick.

This third party wants to keep the aforementioned planet isolated for the main purpose of extracting humans to do specific labor.

If this third party kept secretly observing the population they could simply take away the brightest for the work they need.

Answer 12

Use a long term aerosol that creates a permanent cloud layer over the planet. The sun is a sullen glow through the haze. No stars are visible.

The spaceport is surrounded by a killing field. It would be sufficient to have a band of highly radioactive land around it. Come and go from the port by a 20 mile long tunnel. The land around is inhospitiabl enough that no one normally would travel there.

As examples, consider if it was located in the Empty Quarter in Arabia, or on a small island mid Pacific, or north of treeline in the Canadian archipelego.

From the space port, 3rd party do their recruiting based on local transport. (Sailboat, steamship?) You need to decide what level of tech to keep them at.

E.g. if they start developing aircraft, you have local agents that ensure that aircraft have frequent enough failures that they are uneconomical.

Answer 13

All you have to do is convince the inhabitants that the speed of light is only 300,000 km/sec (186,000 miles/sec), and that nothing can propagate among the stars faster than light. They will not develop much interest in interstellar journeys that take longer than a single individual's lifetime.

A simple local superluminal-denial field generator hidden somewhere in the system's Oort cloud will usually do the trick. You can often pick up one of these for a song on g-Bay (except on Kura-Khalifa where singing is illegal).

An extremely convenient technique, although not strictly necessary, is the introduction of a "UFO cult": a popularized conspiracy theory that holds that aliens regularly visit or are secretly resident on the planet. You have to gen this up as a bunch of nuts whose faith never wavers but whose evidence somehow evaporates under serious examination.

If anyone stumbles on the truth, the other inhabitants will instantly assign him to this cult and disregard his evidence. He can then be removed or neutralized at your convenience without raising too much of a fuss.

Earth (Sol III) has been sequestered this way for millenia.