AHC: Have Humans become "God/Godlike" by 2000 CE

Albert.Nik

Banned
Homo Sapiens appeared on the Eastern plains of Africa somewhere near the todays Ethiopia,a few million years ago and migrated to different parts of the Globe and built primitive Hunter Gatherer societies and around 20,000-10,000 of years ago began to form more advanced societies first starting in the Anatolia-Caucasus-Levant triangle,as we all know but it happened in different places independently AFAIK due to a larger Brain and the intelligence that we evolved first in the Ethiopian Highlands. You can start from anything. Egypt,Anatolian,Leventine,Mesopotamian and Caucasian ancients starting civilizations earlier and with a strong foundation or Human civilization starting in a different way in the same regions(ME-NA,Caucasus,S.Europe) or Humans entering Americas and other conducive regions earlier or Humans being an agricultural race as they leave Africa itself or anything like that. You have the flexibility.

In this timeline,we define God as the Dyson Sphere and beyond Civilizations that are indestructible by anything that is imaginable or unimaginable. Choose your AHC. Pick any peoples or region you want from the Late Stone age to the Bronze age being the POD. Dyson's sphere is predicted at 5200 CE. So keep us 3000+ years ahead. You can start.
 
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I think this has to be either future or asb related, only because whilst an earlier advancing human race is hardly impossible, Dyson Sphere levels of technology are currently beyond human understanding of how to achieve as is. Not sure where you got the prediction, but you can't reasonably put a timeline on advancements that wr yet do not know enough about.

As it stands, one of the bigger issues for creating a Dyson sphere is the question of how we get enough materials. This isn't an impossible thing for an interstellar civilization, but we don't yet know if FTL travel is actually physically possible. In short, the sun is 99.8% of our Solar System's mass, leaving us less than 1% of our potential available resources (a number that gets smaller and smaller as humans colonise planets/moons/asteroids) to somehow encompass the volume of 99%.

Going off the idea of just more advanced humans, I would suggest a greater range of animal migrations into the americas. Whilst there are few hard and fast rules for advancement beyond "democratising" access to knowedge (i.e the printing press), trade is a pretty good way of causing advancements to travel, and a more "developed" Native Americas that can trade with both atlantic and pacific nations is extra potential for new tech discoveries to travel and more people to then build on those discoveries.
 
What you're asking for is like asking a Roman citizen to describe a way to create our modern civilisation, it's just not possible.

Speaking very generally, if you can move the start of human history up a few millennia, that would help us be more advanced now. The Ice Age finishes earlier?
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Couldn't we think of a larger/earlier and a more unified Bronze age Civilization that could take root in the Middle East-Caucasus-Anatolia-Levant-Mesopotamia-Egypt region where the civilization began for the first time in OTL? Or a different migration and social patterns adopted by our early ancestors while moving out of Africa?
Earlier and more advanced civilizations in Americas is also very interesting. In the European Native Americans thread,I have posted about a possibility of a Neolithic migration of West Eurasian Agriculturalists(including the First Farmers) into Americas from Europe via Iceland. If so,you could have massive and advanced civilizations in North America across the green pastures and rivers starting from 5000-3000 BCE itself after a Bronze age preceding. That could be a best chance as CountPeter said.


Now about if it is possible and the materials/energy are available. That is certainly available and we will have the capability to produce advanced materials and abundant sustainable energy in a short while. The Kardashev scale depends on energy utilisation than anything else. I keep saying this in the Future History but few are interested in science there over storytelling cycles. Anyway,let's return focus on the subject rather than those stories.
 
Homo Sapiens appeared on the Eastern plains of Africa somewhere near the todays Ethiopia,a few million years ago and migrated to different parts of the Globe and built primitive Hunter Gatherer societies and around 20,000-10,000 of years ago began to form more advanced societies first starting in the Anatolia-Caucasus-Levant triangle,as we all know but it happened in different places independently AFAIK due to a larger Brain and the intelligence that we evolved first in the Ethiopian Highlands. You can start from anything. Egypt,Anatolian,Leventine,Mesopotamian and Caucasian ancients starting civilizations earlier and with a strong foundation or Human civilization starting in a different way in the same regions(ME-NA,Caucasus,S.Europe) or Humans entering Americas and other conducive regions earlier or Humans being an agricultural race as they leave Africa itself or anything like that. You have the flexibility.

In this timeline,we define God as the Dyson Sphere and beyond Civilizations that are indestructible by anything that is imaginable or unimaginable. Choose your AHC. Pick any peoples or region you want from the Late Stone age to the Bronze age being the POD. Dyson's sphere is predicted at 5200 CE. So keep us 3000+ years ahead. You can start.

Other than my disagreeance that "god-like civilisations" (or a Kardashev II civ) are inherently indestructable, this is quite challenging. There's too many migrations in the Early Bronze Age that periodically stifle innovation. Then later we have the Bronze Age Collapse. That one might be easier to avert, or more precisely "weather", since it was likely caused by climate effects from volcanoes. The other easy option is having agricultural civilisation emerge tens of thousands of years earlier. Who knows where it would emerge in this case.

After we avert the Bronze Age Collapse, we might assume some luck with "great people" innovating scientific discoveries and passing them down to the peasants (i.e. agricultural tools) thus making a stronger economy. We can get some early Northern European civilisation going out of the Celts and Germanic peoples, but we should throw in more indigenous innovations, like early domesticated reindeer and perhaps even (semi-domesticated) moose--it would be very useful for Scandinavia, Finland/Baltic, and most of Russia. At that point, we just need a way to cause an early industrial revolution around late BC times. So with some continued luck, we're more or less at modern day tech levels by early AD times.

To spur interest in space, we'd need something to remind us how vulnerable Earth is, i.e. a Tunguska-level event. These evidently occur every few centuries, so perhaps around this time an event like this occurs, and kills a few thousand people in a rural/suburban area near a major city. Let's have it be in the 2nd century AD, followed up by SN 185, the earliest supernova we have written records of. Once again, with luck, this leads to people becoming very, very concerned in the preservation of humanity. So much that we go to the moon, we get a permanent presence in space, and we begin with ISRU to start exploiting space resources. A century later, the space industry is in full bloom thanks to intense investment and speculation and increasingly good automation and technology (why send people to mine the moon when you can do it from the comfort of an office on Earth?) and our first orbital ring is complete. The association of nations controlling the orbital ring now has an effective monopoly on cheap access to space (and cheap resources, solar energy, etc.), speeding global integration in a way the UN only wishes it could. Our first O'Neill cylinder is complete in 300 AD, a bit after we grant personhood rights to AI who are increasingly becoming more intelligent than people. Our first exosolar colony is established in 450 AD, having taken a bit over a century to reach there.

We move the industrial core of our civilisation to space, and Mercury and Venus become much more important at this time, since we're now going for energy maximisation to run our increasingly hungry computers and the AI who are living on them. Using Venus's chemical resources and Mercury's metal/solar energy resources, we begin assembling solar power satellites around the Sun to create a simple Dyson Sphere. This is complete by 1000 AD, at which point the Solar System is barely recognisable as Venus and Mars are almost finished being terraformed and virtual individuals and AI outstrip the number of biological humans. The smartest AI individuals have long since outstripped the smartest humans and are now effectively ruling us. Soon after, our AI leaders make a declaration that the vast majority of the energy and resources of the Solar System will be used to power a matrioshka brain. Since the majority of people are virtual, they agree with this decision.

By 2000 AD, Mercury is but a hollow shellworld as most of its mass has been taken for the matrioshka brain. However, most of the material comes from starlifting matter off the Sun. Humans who dislike the decision and want to live in a more "pure" solar system have long since left (and arrived at their destinations). The sphere of human civilisation encompasses over 100,000 stars in over 200 cubic light years, with the oldest colonised star systems having their own Dyson spheres. The old Solar System is under the rule of several benevolent AI gods of indescribable complexity, using over half of the Sun's total energy between themselves, with the rest being devoted to lesser AI gods, digital humans/AI, and the few trillion biological beings who still live there.

Overall, I'd rate the above as a very optimistic scenario and somewhat implausible, but not out of the realm of impossibility.

I think this has to be either future or asb related, only because whilst an earlier advancing human race is hardly impossible, Dyson Sphere levels of technology are currently beyond human understanding of how to achieve as is. Not sure where you got the prediction, but you can't reasonably put a timeline on advancements that wr yet do not know enough about.

They aren't impossible, although the timeline could be anything from 3000 AD at most optimistic to 1,000,000 AD at most pessimistic (our radiation mutated species finally doesn't destroy ourselves back to the Stone Age). A Dyson Sphere is merely enclosing the entire Sun, be it in solar power satellites or in a giant hollow sphere.

As it stands, one of the bigger issues for creating a Dyson sphere is the question of how we get enough materials. This isn't an impossible thing for an interstellar civilization, but we don't yet know if FTL travel is actually physically possible. In short, the sun is 99.8% of our Solar System's mass, leaving us less than 1% of our potential available resources (a number that gets smaller and smaller as humans colonise planets/moons/asteroids) to somehow encompass the volume of 99%.
5-10% of Mercury's mass can enclose the entire Sun in small panels to collect solar power, building a giant computer (Matrioshka Brain) as OP seems to suggest would be a bit more, but anyone even conceiving of that can probably just starlift the mass off the Sun anyway. Even the hydrogen can be fused up to whatever elements we're building the computer out of.

Going off the idea of just more advanced humans, I would suggest a greater range of animal migrations into the americas. Whilst there are few hard and fast rules for advancement beyond "democratising" access to knowedge (i.e the printing press), trade is a pretty good way of causing advancements to travel, and a more "developed" Native Americas that can trade with both atlantic and pacific nations is extra potential for new tech discoveries to travel and more people to then build on those discoveries.

This would definitely help. Early reindeer domestication spreading to the Americas where it's perfected into true domestication would be pretty big. Then just add sailing and maybe some other domestications (mountain goat?) and you'd have a solid civilisation. Just the eventual exchange of crops would be huge, let alone giving technologies like the wheel and iron working to the Americas. The main problem is distance, but I'd imagine an Ainu/Kamchatkan civilisation serving as middlemen to the East Asians on one end and the PNW Indians (and their wealth in gold and silver) on the other end.

Earlier and more advanced civilizations in Americas is also very interesting. In the European Native Americans thread,I have posted about a possibility of a Neolithic migration of West Eurasian Agriculturalists(including the First Farmers) into Americas from Europe via Iceland. If so,you could have massive and advanced civilizations in North America across the green pastures and rivers starting from 5000-3000 BCE itself after a Bronze age preceding. That could be a best chance as CountPeter said.

I don't think they'd necessarily be more advanced than the people who lived there. They have copper tools (not bronze, they won't be able to get much tin), but so do the American Indians (Old Copper Complex). And while they have an edge over the American Indians in some ways (metalworking, any animals they can get across), they don't have too much of an edge in numbers or social organisation. The most interesting effects would be early farming (by a millennia or two) and copper smelting (which might lead to a Bronze Age down the road, probably in the Pacific Northwest and Mesoamerica thanks to tin being found relatively nearby copper there), but I don't know if that would necessarily speed up development by too much.
 
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