Nimrod Shalem

Comment Threads

• SFreader commented on PSA: 5-Point Writer's Block Checklist
  What could also happen is that some portion of the spacefarers might decide to go all out in protecting their heritage. This has happened several times in the past and in fact still happens when large groups of an ethnic group are displaced. Basically, this cultural group fossilizes into place ... no changes for whatever reason are ever allowed. (Just think of some of the super-orthodox sects.)...
• Scott Sanford commented on PSA: 5-Point Writer's Block Checklist
  Good point. Imagine some of the old farts of the Orthodox Americanists ranting about The Kids These Days even as they try to keep anyone from talking about the news from Earth, where those damn heretics have not been Keeping The Faith correctly and think they know something just because they live in America......
• DeMarquis commented on PSA: 5-Point Writer's Block Checklist
  @failed-teacher: It isn't really like any form of immigration at all, at least from their point of view. They dont really perceive themselves as going to the destination system (even though they are)- they are living on a ship, which is their home, which just happens to be traveling through space. By the time they arrive at their destination, the aliens offer to hire any humans who elect to stay, and most of them do, but that's entirely voluntary. The rest stay on board, taking alien tech back to Earth. Psychologically, think "Villages in the Sky" not free merchants or...
• failed-teacher commented on PSA: 5-Point Writer's Block Checklist
  Starting this century and extending several hundred years into the future, the wealthiest nations of Earth have financed the construction and deployment of about a thousand ships that ply between the solar system and a brown dwarf about 10 light years out, where we have made contact with an outpost of an alien race. It's STL[snip]It will eventually turn out that the aliens are GAI's, but that doesn't have any direct effect on ship-board life until they get to the rendezvous.[snip]They dont really perceive themselves as going to the destination system (even though they are)- they are living on a...
• DeMarquis commented on PSA: 5-Point Writer's Block Checklist
  Those are all great points, and to be frank about it, I really haven't thought it completely through. I think "a little of all of the above" is probably the right one. I would imagine that most of the Americans are volunteers going for the adventure of a lifetime. The more authoritarian Chinese? Maybe not so much. Some of them might not be going voluntarily- their descendents might not have the same ideas regarding who "owns" the alien trade good by the time their ship returns to Earth. I'm also open to some environmental degradation back on the home planet-...