What could be the justification for having isolated domes all over a planet with people living inside them and not knowing about the real world?

Question

To elaborate a bit further: let's say there's a planet in which some higher power installed several giant "domes" where people live. Each of these domes, which are the size of a small city, contains a totally different primitive civilization, with different traditions and even languages. Each dome city is unaware of the others, and also unaware of the fact that they're inside a dome (they're kept inside via some high tech stuff that makes it a real life loop, so that's the entire land for them).

The 'higher power' occasionally sends people to these villages, where they present themselves as a different thing depending on the dome, and while down there they use all kinds of advanced technology to trick the villagers into thinking that they have (or are) supernatural entities (for example, in some domes they present themselves as your average fantasy saga wizards, while in other dome they are seen by the villagers as ghosts).

In order to keep developing this world I have to come up with a reason for this weird setup. The outside of the domes is habitable but barren, and the 'higher power' people usually come down from space to carry out missions inside a dome.

I have one possible explanation for this setup and the meaning of the missions, but I have some issues with it, that's why I wanted to get some more alternatives before choosing a final one.

My justification:

The higher power is actually a group of sociologists that try to replicate different types of civilizations and they send enforcers to apply some type of input to the civilization, measure the output and try to model them / predict behaviors.

A problem I see with this idea, besides it being too close to far fetched for my taste, is that at some point the domes would be 'unusable' from a sociological perspective, as the 'enforcers' can push the people in it too far and destroy their delicate balance as a civilization. Why would an advanced civilization go through that effort to ultimately have the civ destroyed if one of their hypothesis happens to fail in a big way?

Answers can be either new and totally different from mine, or to elaborate/give more support to my justification.

EDIT: Thanks to all of you for your answers! Each one helped in a different way. I choose as answer the one that made me think the most about my justification and expand it in a believable way.

Answer 1

The humans are test subjects.

The higher power are aliens trying to understand the capabilities of the human race. Their motives are either pure research or something hostile such as preparing for a fight, and they have no empathy for the individuals in the domes. The aliens' society is very long-lived, so accidentally destroying a human civilisation now and then is no big deal to them - they simply re-decorate the dome, wipe the memories of the few survivors and use them to start a new experiment. Some of the researchers might even have friendly competitions to see who can make the weirdest social structure last the millennium.

Answer 2

Rescued.

I am reminded of the Bottle City of Kandor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandor_(comics)

Kandor (commonly known as the Bottle City of Kandor)1 is a fictional city spared from the doomed world of Krypton in DC Comics' Superman titles. Before Krypton exploded, the futuristic city was captured by the supervillain Brainiac, miniaturized by his shrinking ray and placed inside a glass bell jar.

So too your domes. Each dome contains a people who are the last of their kind, spirited away to safety before the cataclysm that destroyed the rest of their people.

I like the idea that the would-be wizard and demigod pretender entities who mess with the dome city people are not the same entities who rescue populations and built the dome cities. The would-be wizards and ghosts actually do not know much about the rescuers. Sometimes they worry those entities will show up and get angry at them if they figure out what is up. But so far so good! The wizards and demigod pretenders live in the moment.

Answer 3

It's a zoo. An alien race has been capturing humans from different cultures, for hundreds of thousands of years, and the domes are their cages, a recreation of the exact ecology, weather, air quality, etc of their particular time.

It isn't an experiment, any more than our own zoos are. The aliens are intelligent, and naturally curious, and they know that these cultures will change and go extinct if not preserved. So they wait for the peak of some culture, the height of the Roman Empire, and capture some humans and recreate it. Reproduction and all.

The "visitations" are for guidance, and preventing the culture from changing. They don't want Rome to crash and burn, just like we don't want our zoo gorillas to go to war over territory. But they are smart enough to correct the stray thinkers early; cause them to change their mind, or die in a mysterious accident or from a disease that culture cannot address, etc.

Each little culture is a zoo exhibit; the alien visitors can don an avatar and walk amongst the people as one of them, and experience the culture as one of them. It's an entertainment, you can be one of the apes in the exhibit, on the hunt!

or if you are a fan of barbarism, you can be a Roman Gladiator, fighting and dying in the Colosseum! (Just your synthetic avatar dies, like in a video game, but it is still great fun.)

Answer 4

Welcome to Alpha Complex!

Friend Computer rescued the last remnants of Humanity from the impending nuclear war and communist mutants that roam the wasteland! Nobody would leave the safety of Alpha Complex under the benevolent leadership of Friend Computer! After all, there is nothing out there but wasteland! Don't forget to turn in Commie-Mutant-Traitors you encounter and remember: Happiness is Mandatory!

...

Of course, nobody in Alpha Complex knows that the world out there is not burnt rock and sand, but a striving ecosystem... they all hunker down in the bunker and believe what Friend Computer tells them. They're also all Mutants, members in treasonous secret societies and technically the whole system is pretty communistic... Oh, and Friend Computer is totally borked and mad, resorting to killing and cloning his troubleshooter so the society stays stable and backstabbing.

Answer 5

Go with part of the plot from Independence Day 2: Terrible movie but .... there is a xenophobic alien race (or their fleets of robotic hunter killers) that is fighting a continual war of extinction against any new races it finds developing in 'its' galaxy. Queue another advanced alien race or perhaps coalition of races that is fighting this enemy.

At the same time the opposing culture has a side mission which is to preserve as many primitive, developing cultures in the path of the enemy as they can. However as much as the other race/s might like to they simply don't have the military resources needed to permanently guard and defend every inhabited solar system they find. (They have to defend their own planets to have a chance of winning and a few guard ships won't cut it. All that does is 'tag' such a system as a potential target of interest, eventually leading the enemy to an attack in force which usually produces worse outcomes than not trying to defend it at all!)

So long ago the decision is made to kidnap representative sample populations from such worlds and trans locate them, their cultures & ecologies to a protected refuge world. (No 'digitizing' this time, instead physical translocation.)

The idea is that in the event their home worlds are found and possibly glassed the aliens will be able to reintroduce them later, either to their home worlds or to one with similar environmental conditions. But unfortunately for the plan to work there can be no cross cultural or biological contamination so the aliens appear as 'Gods' when necessary to the inhabitants of the domes, appearing in the form of unique 'deities' matched to best suit the culture of each dome and they never allow the inhabitants of any dome to discover the existence of the others.

Answer 6

Arthur C. Clarke used the idea of gigantic domed cities in The City and The Stars, but his did not hold primitives. Man had reached an interstellar empire then lost it, the survivors turned inward, rejecting the external world and set themselves in a post-scarcity paradise. Even going so far as to breed themselves to be incredibly afraid of the outside world.

Answer 7

The dome is for their physical and psychological protection for living on a "destroyed" Earth

The Nintendo GameCube game Custom Robo dealt with a similar premise. Putting the story points in spoilers just in case!

The entire day-to-day life of the game up to the finale takes place inside a typical modern-ish city. None of the average citizens are aware that there is anything unusual about their lives. At the beginning of the finale chapter, a high-ranking government agent asks you if the world is round or flat? Intuitively, the player answers that the world is round (since the Earth is round and it's implied that this game takes place on Earth). Your companions respond by making fun of you since everyone learned in kindergarten that the world is flat. The government agent then reveals that everyone is living in a domed city and that the real world outside the dome is the remains of the destroyed Earth.

The purpose of the dome is twofold:

It protects them from the harsh physical conditions of the outside world

The soil is not fertile and cannot grow crops. There are no animals to hunt. Water is scarce. Temperatures range in between both extremes. The dome is a safe, predictable place. You can grow crops and raise livestock there. With sufficiently advanced technology, you can control the weather. People will like to live there because it's a relatively comfortable place relative to the harsh conditions of the outside world.

It protects them psychologically from horrors of knowing the "real world" was destroyed

What would happen if large swaths of the Earth were suddenly destroyed or otherwise uninhabitable? Mass panic, for one. People will probably start killing each other over food, water, and other resources. With no good means of travel through vast amounts of barren wastelands, all remaining societies are already isolated from all other societies. The dome offers a semblance of what normal life was before the calamity. It offers order and shields them from the uncomfortable truth that the world they once knew can never truly exist again. In the process of grieving, denial is often the first step. The dome embodies the state of denial for grieving over the lost Earth. The first generation to live in it will know they're in denial, but accept it because, while it's not the truth, it offers them some semblance of their life before. After a few generations, no one (except maybe high-ranking government officials) will know that there is an outside world at all. After all, there's never going to be a good reason to leave the dome. There's nothing out there as far as each dome knows.

Applicability to your story

It could be possible the world knew that some world-ending calamity was coming and pre-emptively built several domes across the planet to ensure the continuity of the survivors. They didn't have the resources to evacuate the entire planet and take them off-world so the domes were the best they could do with the time at hand. They planned on coming back to eventually evacuate the domes, but saw they had each evolved into their own societies in the time they were gone (interstellar travel does take a long time). Seeing that the people fared better in the domes than was expected, the dome societies were no longer considered to be in existential danger. This kind of novel situation in humanity is ripe for (morally questionable) research. Because they are self-sufficient inside the dome some group of sociologists want to study these novel societies while another group argues that the right thing to do is reunite them with the rest of the human race. They could end up reaching some sort of compromise where they study the domed societies, but as soon as the data set becomes too polluted through the sociologists outside interference to be of any further scientific value, they could end the experiment and reunite them off-world with the rest of humanity.

Answer 8

Hazardous Materials - Proceed with Caution:

Your world contains recreated primitive cultures of a species or multiple species that devastated the galaxy. But wiping out an entire species of sentient life is something your sociologists struggle with. So remnants of the species are preserved here to be studied.

If the species is deemed to have traits that make it possible for the species to function with others, they may eventually be given a home world in which to rebuild in a healthier direction. If they are irredeemable, then the sociologists have some hard choices to make...

Answer 9

If we had it all to do over again...

Long ago, Man was much greater: master of the land, the air, the sea. Master of physics, chemistry, biology, and more. Indeed, it seemed there was nothing Man could not conquer -- except his own avarice, which only grew more voracious with each triumph. And so it was that Man, lord of nearly all things, faced not only extinction, but the permanent end of all life on his home planet.

Contrary to the easy, poetic, and self-serving musings of many, this was not an inevitability of Man's "essential nature," but a consequence of certain contingent cultural ideas that had proven extremely contagious and impossible to control or eradicate once they had taken root. It was almost a kind of mental virus that took root in the minds of Men, from which comfortable seat it encouraged each of them to search within themselves and find vices that could be nourished.

And so it was that ruin became the end toward which all Men rushed, and not even the Men who sat atop it could escape. The species could not possibly be saved if the mental virus was preserved too. What was needed was a clean break -- and a clean room.

To that end a new generation was bred, raised in isolation and captivity. They were taught only the things that humans knew at the dawn of recorded history. Not even modern languages, as a hedge against Sapir-Whorf and also as protection from contamination by the doomed modern culture.

To that end the Domes were built, as essential shelters against the wrecked Earth, far away from each other and with no communication between them. Compartmentalization as protection against flaws in the new protective ignorance.

The last of the great Men died as casualties of the suicide pact their greed had fashioned from Man's much-vaunted potential, taking their warped and dysfunctional ideas with them, and leaving only the domed pocket civilizations behind.

This is how the desolate Earth came to have Domes filled with primitives, as it has now stood for many hundreds of generations.

It's impossible to say whether the "higher power" was drawn to Earth by this convenient state of affairs, or merely stumbled fortuitously upon it.

Answer 10

You flee from a superstition to be trapped in another superstition

Each dome hold a slave population producing something for the higher power. A lot of people think in a lot of different ways, it is difficult to trap them in a single superstition and keep all of them under control. But the higher power carefully observe any individual, they try to understand their attitude and their weaknesses and eventually they will find out for what kind of superstition thet are likely to fall.

Then it will be just matter of time, all those who grow sceptic of the place they live in sooner or later will try and find a way to escape. A well placed portal will let them escape to another dome and if it doesn't work they'll be able to "escape" again, but in another dome, they will not be able to escape the bigger trap.

Answer 11

This reminds me of part of the plot for The Starlost, a 1973 Canadian TV show created by Harlan Ellison. From Wikipedia - "The show's setting is a huge generational colony spacecraft called Earthship Ark, which has gone off course. Many of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware, however, that they are aboard a ship." The various domes on the ship have different cultures, as I recall, like they had just forgotten the ship and in their isolation, diverged over time. Perhaps a similar pattern of isolation with visit by a ship's crew or caretakers would be a good back story.

Answer 12

It is the ultimate tourist experience

Currently on earth there are very expensive tours who will take you to try to make 'first contact' with a people who have never been in contact with contemporary 'civilisation'.

Each dome on the planet is an extension of this concept. At the most ridiculous, the company has been operating for thousands of years, seeding pre-contact civilisations, for each of which a future Jess Bezos/Elon Musk will be the first outside person in a hundred generations to establish contact with. Cheaper tours will offer second / third etc. contacts.

It's a disgusting, abusive manipulation of societies for the benefit the super-rich.