Questions tagged [society]
For questions dealing with how sentient beings interact with each other in a community.
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How would society work if people inherited two surnames: both their indirect paternal side and their indirect maternal side? [closed]
I imagined a country with an EXTREMELY strange law: citizens must have two surnames. I do not mean the Hispanic World way, neither the double direct side way, I mean they inherit both the surname of ...
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Orthographic change over time
This is related to a previous question of mine: Rate of linguistic change among geographically separated descendants of a common language
If you had 4 groups of humans with the same language and ...
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Rate of linguistic change among geographically separated descendants of a common language
I'm developing a story set on an exoplanet where a relatively small terraforming expedition is forced to settle on the planet due to some catastrophe 20,000 years before the story's events.
They ...
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What could make the technology to be conserved at the level of mid-late 21th century for centuries? [duplicate]
Here is my description of the world:
The world is roughly at the technological level of our mid-21th century, with some things more advanced than ours and some less. There is seemingly no visible or ...
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How far can you get with a pre-industrial production system?
Pre-industrial production system: means of production where the vast majority of goods are made by skilled craftsmen specialized in that field (I.E. Carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, weavers, and ...
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Explaining the need for human representatives in an AI controlled society
In a relatively near-future event, a Sentient Artificial Intelligence or SAI is accidentally created, escapes onto the internet, and then, after a few days of browsing social media and the news, ...
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How would a society be structured so everyone can die in combat?
Many ancient religions place value on dying in combat. For example, in Norse mythology, only those slain in battle are able to enter Valhalla.
In this alternate universe, a the population of a small ...
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How can a post scarcity Society not be hedonistic?
The society I am building is highly automated, post-scarcity, with the ability to essentially "3-D print" anything.
Is there a reasonable way for me to explain why the people of this ...
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Why would sapient, emotional AGIs object to the creation of any lesser AIs?
When I asked this question, I was expecting there to be some way to have highly advanced simulations of physical systems without the technology for modelling social or psychological systems existing ...
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How much would a slave cost in current day Europe?
Let's assume, a legislation was passed that allowed people in Europe to enter into voluntary slavery. Everyone could choose to sell themselves. When you sell yourself, you become the full property of ...
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Could a gene be added to people that would stop them drinking?
I'm writing a dystopia where the authoritarian state messes with people's biology, like in Brave New World.
Can they do alter people biologically in some way that makes alcohol not a thing in society ...
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Maximum economic growth rate in developed countries in the 21st century [closed]
Given a hypothetical 500M-1Bn population at the social, economic, political, financial, industrial, military, etc. capacities available in the most developed countries currently (2023, e.g. Nordic ...
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How fast can you radically change society without violence? (And when has it happened?)
The Backstory (Actually important)
From the current day to an unspecified number of decades in the future, a brutally efficient, totalitarian dystopia-state rises and runs basically all of humanity ...
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Social implication of lion-people living with normal humans and how to make them into free folk and not slaves while maintaing their role as defenders [closed]
Lion-people are kidnapped at birth from humans. Why?
Because Lion-folk prey on humans as a form of sport and entertainment
Kidnapped cubs of lion-folk are groomed in ''loving'' families in order to ...
user100394
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Why does the faction/race with the most information remembered not wipe out the other factions after a planet-wide memory wipe?
In this world, there are several (around 7) "races" of humans. This has less to do with "Race" in the modern sense, more like a "subspecies" in that they can interbreed, ...
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Where to choose to rebuild after a population reducing event? [closed]
I am trying to come up with a cohesive and easy to understand set of rules for finding where to "start over".
The setting is a group of hikers come out to a world that has collapsed for an ...
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Is "too few people left" a credible explanation for a global knowledge loss of this magnitude?
My setting is what I would call "post-post-apocalyptic", meaning that our civilization doesn't exist anymore, but the collapse has happened in a past distant enough that people aren't really ...
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What population would the Americas have if the natives were as advanced as Europeans?
If you check a list of the most densely populated nations, a lot of New World countries are near the bottom and almost no Western Hemisphere nation (excluding small islands) are near the top. The ...
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Immediate public reaction of being teleported to a new galaxy [closed]
The basis of this sci-fi worldbuilding story/project is this: a well-meaning attempt to create artificial wormholes succeeds, but creates a wormhole so huge that it consumes Earth, the now-colonised ...
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Why would 1/5 of earthlings prefer to live in orbit rather than on the surface? [closed]
The Great Depression (2030 - 2050) wiped out 2/3 of humanity, buried nation states and forced survivors to take concepts like democracy, sustainability and the environment really seriously.
The ...
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Why would people want a benevolent AI-controlled society? [closed]
Inspired by the Orion’s Arm worldbuilding project, I am imagining a science-fiction scenario where humans are ruled over by entities known as GODS, or Geocomputing Directories. These are computer ...
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How to raise an army against the dark lord when everyone thinks he was already defeated? [closed]
A long time ago there was a vast prosperous kingdom, with magic and steampunk-level technology. But secretly, an evil mage, whom we will call the "Dark Lord" was using forbidden magic to ...
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Disasters to prompt the bettering of civilisation [closed]
so, being a cynic as well as a speculative biologist and all-round sci-if fan, I believe that the scenario I want to reach in my project, where humanity has restored the Earth’s biosphere and climate, ...
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How could a really intelligent species be stopped from developing?
How could a really intelligent species be kept from developing? For clarification, this species is the only creature of intelligent thought on the planet and they have a population of about 50 million ...
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Could a nomadic society survive on a planet with a year-long daylight cycle?
A recently inhabited planet revolves around its sun but does not spin on its axis. This causes the daylight cycle to happen over the course of an entire year (Note that this is different from the ...
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Can people have free time without technology? [closed]
I read a lot of answers about historical stuff in here, they go something like this
''X and Y would never happen because people back then were working 800 million hours per day and couldn't waste ...
user93352
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How do I maintain a power balance between a dominant species and a lesser species
In the world I am making, there are two main species:
A dominant humanoid species
A lesser probably ape like species with similar intelligence
I need to have a system whereby the dominant species ...
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Could a society ever exist that considers indiscriminate killing socially acceptable? [closed]
This isn't for anything that I'm working on, but the idea just came to me. By completely unjustified I mean the random killing of other people, though my question pertains mostly to a society tolerant ...
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How to prevent super-strong slaves from escaping and rebelling
I have a fantasy setting that is about as advanced as the late 15th to early 16th century. There are humans and many other sapient non-human species; humans are one of the only species to create large ...
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Can stone weaponry be sharpened?
Is there a way to sharpen stone weapons?
In a society with no metals whatsoever, which is therefore using stone for their weapons, can the cutting edges of those weapons be sharpened?
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Could a single, hyper-advanced civilization develop among many unadvanced societies?
In my world, there is a confederacy of citystates, ruled by witches and Pagans. They left to escape persecution from Christians (of my world) in the 13th-14th centuries, though they do not know that ...
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How can mages conquer the world [closed]
So the socity of mages is tired of living in secret and want to transform the world into thier play ground where they can use and abuse magic in the open.
To accomplish this they must conquer the ...
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How would I go about naming a fictional country located on Earth?
I'm having quite a bit of trouble naming a fictional country I've created. So far, I've created its history, inhabitants, laws, government, etc. and I have simply used "the country" as a ...
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Can I have non-evil blood mages? [closed]
I'm creating a world in which an entire continent is constructed from a monster. Drawing from Aztec mythos, I have named this creature Cipactli, and though it was slain, it's still, to an extent, ...
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Why would an advanced civilization keep slavery? [closed]
In my world, there is a country made up of mostly demons (a species) and ghouls. Their economy is both capitalistic and mercantilistic, and their government is a constitutional dictatorship. Currently,...
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How would the prison system react to an (Unprovable) immortal inmate? [closed]
The year is 1922, in the (real life) United States. For a slew of particularly nasty criminal offences, a young man has been sentenced to 100 years in prison, without parole.
Fast forward 100 years, ...
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Could a pure sign language society be as advanced as a speaking society?
I remember reading about how a lot of the early paleolithic societies and proto-human species like Neanderthals and Homo Erectus used sign languages before spoken languages. It made me wonder how a ...
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How do human police (non-lethally) apprehend far larger, more dangerous races?
One of the factions of my setting has several different races cooperating to form a cohesive society. Being relatively modern, it has a variety of amenities we would consider a part of civilisation, ...
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What would a post-humanity civilization look like? (Bystanders vs. Instigators) [closed]
I’m going to propose two ideas for a near-future scenario. In both scenarios, a lab company engineers a new intelligent species. For now, we’ll call this new species Homo postea, also known as “...
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Is it possible for a fairly large community to remain hidden in Scandinavia until the start of the 20th century?
The world I'm building is pretty much exactly the same as the real world, with one exception: there are some immortal people with access to magic. These people have so far remained hidden from the ...
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how far would a forcibly undeveloped world be able to get in 1000 years if they were left with fundamental concepts of today [closed]
First, to set the stage: a magical emperor had forcibly taken over the world, and destroyed pretty much all actual physical technology that would be any unreasonable stretch ahead of 1500s, but after ...
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Impacts of matricentric reproductive laws [closed]
My world is a matricentric America that holds men legally responsible for unplanned pregnancies. Roughly, the idea is that if an unplanned pregnancy occurs and the woman does not get an abortion, the ...
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Why would a society be matriarchal but patrilinear?
In my universe, there is a species from the Homo genus named Homo haematophagus (which means hematophagous human) (they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens) (their scientific name is a reference ...
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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?
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, ...
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In a fantasy world where people can ride monsters and fantastic beasts, why does the horse still remain in active duty?
A fantasy staple, the fantastic mount (TvTropes). People in Fantasy Land ride giant yellow chickens, giant wolves, giant beetles, caterpilars, ants, and other insects, evolved bears, sharks, miniature ...
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Could advanced Aboriginal Australians have domesticated the Emus/Cassowaries?
In an alternate universe where Eurasia is less advanced and the native peoples of the Americas and Australia build powerful civilizations, what animals could be domesticated that weren't domesticated ...
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I'm a billionaire, how would I set up a incorruptible communist society? [closed]
I'm a billionaire with unlimited funds/political influence. It is my belief that communism has always failed because in the real world true communism has never been tested, rather every time it's been ...
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If every action a human does is tracked, would serious crimes be greatly reduced?
Background
Humans originate from the Skytree, a tower operated by an impartial AI. On birth, they are sent to their assigned communities, or Communes, where they live out the rest of their lives. ...
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How to Counter Mosquito-Borne Diseases in a Premodern World
In a setting I am working on there is a civilization based in a tropical floodplain that’s dependent on paddy field agriculture to maintain its population. Problem is that all the standing water and ...
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Is there a paternity test method given medieval level technology with low false positive rate?
Determining genetic fatherhood is very important in my worldbuilding experiment for lots of reasons, one being succession, but regardless it's the genetic component that's important But it's possible ...
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