Aliens have come and kidnapped the first human they came across, unfortunately, that was you. They take you to a new planet almost identical to our current Earth, but without anything man-made.
The aliens say you can have 1 million real humans to start “New Earth” and you can put them anywhere and teach them anything you want. You’ll have 1,000 years to make a good New Earth and if the Aliens like it, you’ll get to keep it, if not they will blow it up and try again with someone else. You will have access to old Earths internet so you will have the choice on what technologies you introduce and when. You live in the ship, but you can choose to pop in and out of New Earth as you please. You will not be burdened with all 1 million humans at once. You can choose to add a small number of them at a time until you get the proper resources established.
Edit: The humans can reproduce, and will unless you implement some form of birth control to prevent them from doing so. Also the first 1 million humans will start with the basic knowledge of how to human and you can pick personality traits for them, like you would a Sim, but the babies they make are blank slates.
You don’t have to try and make it a good society, you can choose to watch the world burn for 1,000 years. Up to you.
This works if everyone is willing to put in the effort to contribute, how do you handle those who are not willing or able to do so? I feel like everyone is probably able to make meaningful contributions to a society in one way or the other, but what about those that just don’t wanna? Do you think the number would be high? I’m not sure.
Why do you imagine people wouldn’t contribute? People aren’t only motivated by money - unless I’ve somehow been missing out on getting paid for doing the dishes, cleaning up trash at the park, or helping my friends move this whole time. People are so programmed by capitalism to stop any idea that comes into their head that might challenge the status quo and apply the ‘rugged individualism’ bullshit to it until they figure out how it couldn’t possibly work, while failing to realize that humans worked together for thousands of years before capitalism came along and taught us all that we should be thinking of ourselves first, last, and only.
But also you missed something important here, in the first two words:
What contribution do you imagine is required if automation can meet everyone’s needs? This isn’t the real world, we’ve got goddamned aliens in space ships flying around, there’s no reason to believe someone with that level of technology couldn’t automate away literally everything. And even if that wasn’t the case, the point of the bit I said about education was explicitly to deprogram people who are still hung up on capitalism’s ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude, if that’s required (the prompt said nothing about where these people come from, what their preconceived notions are, etc, so I was covering all bases.)
Based on this part
I wouldn’t have anything to “contribute” as I wouldn’t consider myself passionate about anything. All I would do is consume media if all my other needs were met.
We definitely have aliens in spaceships flying around in the real world.
Also I don’t doubt that technology can evolve well past anything we know because you would start pretty close to where we are now, but you don’t get magic powers you still have to have scientist and tech bros figuring shit out and inventing new shit and YOU have to teach at least the first few generations how to do that. You’re not just snapping whatever you want into existence, and the aliens are not helping you. I don’t doubt you can get to “Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!” over 1,000 years, but someone somewhere is gonna have to put some effort into it.
Why do I assume people wouldn’t contribute? It seems reasonable that at least some people will want to smoke weed instead of building houses, but idk! I literally said that I wasn’t sure and asked what the solution was because this is fun little prompt that I am curious about and want to hear everyone’s different perspectives on. I think that asking follow up questions is kinda reasonable.
This is an interesting prompt. Critically it seems like you definitely aren’t omnipotent, so whilst you can try to influence and teach the new inhabitants, there’s nothing stopping them simply ignoring you and doing something else.
Rather than some wanting to just not contribute, I’d be more concerned by a group deciding to focus their efforts on building weapons and simply taking what they want from others.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism is certainly an ideal, but it is extremely vulnerable to hostile forces until it gets large enough and willing enough to excert eqivalent force in return. Hostile forces can be military, ideological, or resource limit based. Responding to all of those, is a massive challenge.
Sci-fi writer Ursula Leguin wrote a book about an anarcho-syndicalistic society called The Dispossessed. In that book, those who ‘opted out’ of this society were barred from enjoying the fruits of the collective labor but could still live on the outskirts and start their own subsistence farm or whatever. Societal control in that story was basically maintained through personal relationships among the community (shame those who don’t want to contribute) whereas the capitalistic society control method is threaten with death by restricting access to resources (home,food,water,etc). I’m not saying public shaming is the best route, but it’s still more humane than work or die.