"What's inside the box? C'mon! Whaaaat's inside the baaawwx?" - Brat Pitt, threatening Kevin Spacey in the motion picture Se7en (1995)
At a USS, I found some Ancient Artifacts floating abandoned. I scooped them, but then I thought: what's inside the box?
Here's the thing: it's got to be stuff from Earth, and nothing more.
Here's why:
1) The game takes place around the year 3000ish. I don't know the lore, but how long would it take to colonize the hundreds of systems by the year 3000 from sometime past 2015 when we can only demonstrate one inhabited planet? Something less than 1,000 years to do all this. Possibly a lot less.
2) Earth humans are the only species out there.
So based on that, since there are no other races to make things, they have to be made by Earthpeople. But not any Earthpeople from 2015 thru 3000, since that's only a few hundred years and not old enough to qualify as "ancient". Antique, sure, but not ancient. By western standards, ancient times pre-date the fall of the Roman Empire. By eastern standards, you go farther back, likely around the Chinese Unification. At least 2-5 millennia.
3000 minus 2000 = 1000, so seeing as there weren't humans in space stations back then, there would be no-one producing ancient artifacts off-Earth. Since there are no other species, we have to conclude that no ancient artifacts are produced until the year 1000 or so, meaning that the only source of them would be Earth.
In theory, stuff you are looking at right now this minute could very well be floating in a tube around Ross 356 a thousand years from now. Likely, that's what happens in the game: some shlub in the year 3101 goes digging through the Earth Dirt and finds your used X55 Rhino with the blown-out potentiometers. He sticks it in a tube and markets it as antiquities. One ton of this junk ends up with a value somewhere 2/3 that of a ton of superconductors.
Of course, I mentioned antiques and not ancient artifacts. Likely, you don't have anything ancient around, but maybe some of you do. I know somewhere in my house there's a Constantinian Roman coin I got as a gift. It's maybe worth $10-$15. But if it got pillaged in the year 3000, it's value would likely rise to something on the order of $10.25-$15.25.
So: any ideas of what's inside the ancient artifacts box? Does my reasoning make sense? (yes, yes it does, by cracky!) What are your ideas for what the people of year 3,000ish would consider valuable from our age, enough to ship it half way across the galaxy?
Finally, would you just blow up the ancient artefacts? They're not super-valuable, and you don't get them in large numbers, so from an economic standpoint vaporizing ancient artifacts isn't going to bankrupt anybody. On the other hand, are you a cultural sociopath willing to annihilate the entire surviving collection of The Jackson Five Christmas Album on CD and LP, or the stash of ET: The Video Game Atari cartriges?
At a USS, I found some Ancient Artifacts floating abandoned. I scooped them, but then I thought: what's inside the box?
Here's the thing: it's got to be stuff from Earth, and nothing more.
Here's why:
1) The game takes place around the year 3000ish. I don't know the lore, but how long would it take to colonize the hundreds of systems by the year 3000 from sometime past 2015 when we can only demonstrate one inhabited planet? Something less than 1,000 years to do all this. Possibly a lot less.
2) Earth humans are the only species out there.
So based on that, since there are no other races to make things, they have to be made by Earthpeople. But not any Earthpeople from 2015 thru 3000, since that's only a few hundred years and not old enough to qualify as "ancient". Antique, sure, but not ancient. By western standards, ancient times pre-date the fall of the Roman Empire. By eastern standards, you go farther back, likely around the Chinese Unification. At least 2-5 millennia.
3000 minus 2000 = 1000, so seeing as there weren't humans in space stations back then, there would be no-one producing ancient artifacts off-Earth. Since there are no other species, we have to conclude that no ancient artifacts are produced until the year 1000 or so, meaning that the only source of them would be Earth.
In theory, stuff you are looking at right now this minute could very well be floating in a tube around Ross 356 a thousand years from now. Likely, that's what happens in the game: some shlub in the year 3101 goes digging through the Earth Dirt and finds your used X55 Rhino with the blown-out potentiometers. He sticks it in a tube and markets it as antiquities. One ton of this junk ends up with a value somewhere 2/3 that of a ton of superconductors.
Of course, I mentioned antiques and not ancient artifacts. Likely, you don't have anything ancient around, but maybe some of you do. I know somewhere in my house there's a Constantinian Roman coin I got as a gift. It's maybe worth $10-$15. But if it got pillaged in the year 3000, it's value would likely rise to something on the order of $10.25-$15.25.
So: any ideas of what's inside the ancient artifacts box? Does my reasoning make sense? (yes, yes it does, by cracky!) What are your ideas for what the people of year 3,000ish would consider valuable from our age, enough to ship it half way across the galaxy?
Finally, would you just blow up the ancient artefacts? They're not super-valuable, and you don't get them in large numbers, so from an economic standpoint vaporizing ancient artifacts isn't going to bankrupt anybody. On the other hand, are you a cultural sociopath willing to annihilate the entire surviving collection of The Jackson Five Christmas Album on CD and LP, or the stash of ET: The Video Game Atari cartriges?
