+1 Excellent Post OP. You should be a sci-fi writer BrakeSpear
My only quip is format. (and its not the OPs fault ... see below)
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Last night I returned from a long expedition that started the day after Elite's release.
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I hadn't seen a populated system for weeks, and had survived a trip to the Pleiades Nebula in a gutted Freagle with a jump distance of 16.something LY. I arrived in the Arietis sector, sold all my data (system by system by system by system by system by system...) and sold 330,000 worth. Celebrated. Bought a Cobra. Decided to do a little "freelancing" - a job here, a trade there.
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It soon became apparent that all the industrial systems I was encountering, down there at the edge of populated space, had a high demand for all food products.
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I've been searching for an agricultural system all day now. And this got me thinking about the state of the galaxy. I've reached two possible conclusions:
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Conclusion One:
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The Elite: Dangerous galaxy is a shiny plastic version of the Warhammer 40k universe; a dark sprawl of poverty and decaying power.
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Think about the geography here. The system I'm currently loitering in has a population of 1.2 million. There is one station, and there are no inhabitable planets. 1.2 million people crammed into a single station, and the food supplies seem to be nonexistent - all surrounding populated systems are industrial outposts with populations in the thousands, and no Earth-like or water planets.
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All of the nearby populated systems also have a high demand for food products. Nobody is producing any food, and everyone is eating it.
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Why are these systems still functioning? How are they still producing so many industrial products? Why would anybody want to live there?
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The answer is pretty dark; there is a massive, starving underclass with no choice. Note that you never see any signs of regular public transport - the majority of the ships you see are small, private vessels and local militia. In essence, the "elite" in question would be an elite class of rich pilots swanning about in ships that are built and maintained by a legion of people who aren't being fed. Such pilots only trade in that which they consider to be profitable or useful, and do so on a whim, while the bulk of the population live and die in crowded space factories.
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And yet the pilots, too, are subjected to some of this same darkness. Why can't we be rescued? When we run out of fuel, our only choice is to destroy our ship. Why is this? Think about the ship *prices*; about how they never seem to change, and how the quantity of ships never drops - each major station is producing a massive surplus of these vessels. Sidewinders are given away for free. In this situation, a government could only maintain the price of a commodity by creating artificial scarcity - we are forced to blow up our own ships, because if we didn't, the price of those mass-produced vessels would plummet.
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Think about how casually violent the galaxy is. Loitering means death. Incurring a minor bounty means a death sentence, which can be carried out by *any pilot*. Even heavily populated systems lack any major military or law enforcement fleets, and every mining site (even in remote systems) is plagued by roaming bands of pirates. And yet murdering a passing trader is an act that one can shrug off, if one has the sense to pay off their fine.
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Thousands upon thousands of inhabited systems, governed by organisations whose petty squabbles seem limited to places the majority will never visit. A vast sprawl of starving people, and decadent pilots whose pointless thirst for virtual currency can never be quenched, and whose lives have no value beyond that currency.
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Conclusion Two:
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We are not real. Mankind is mostly dead, and the machines didn't understand.
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This one's a weird one, but my personal favourite. Think about the lifeless nature of the galaxy's economy - the way products flow in often nonsensical patterns. The way so many systems should be suffering from famine, yet their populations never drop.
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What if there are no people left?
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Think about all the automation - the way you dock, and refuel, and repair, without ever seeing another living being. The only voices you hear are automated announcements. The mission briefings you receive are written in a peculiar, stilted manner - as if someone applied arbitrary details to a standard template.
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And then think about your own body. Is it really your body? Are you sure? When you look into the cockpit of another ship, there is no pilot. There is never another pilot. Not one. The seat is empty.
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Aboard your Cobra, or your Adder, do you have a co-pilot? The ship was clearly designed to accommodate one, yet nobody ever sits in that seat.
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What if the reason we're not rescued when we run out of fuel, or lose our thrusters in combat, is because there is nobody to rescue. We are the ship. We are AI, glitched into thinking that it is a person, and the only reason we "die" when we run out of air following a canopy breach is that the program believes it should (edit: what if the ship's AI considers that any human pilot *would* be dead, and thus the AI no longer has a purpose, so shuts down). Our head is just a camera - our body, just an illusion. The cockpit is empty. We are ghosts.
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Aboard the millions of stations that litter the galaxy, the machines are rumbling and churning away; building and building and building for a race of people now lost. Is that why there are so many ships available? After all, mankind would not have programmed the machines with the possibility of everyone being dead, and so the machines carry on.
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Think about the casual violence again - the way automated defences seemingly murder vast numbers of pilots for minor infractions. The way those pilots murder *one another* with ease. Deviation from programming results in termination, and after countless iterations of our programming, we all have slightly different parameters.
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What if the pirates are just... broken? Haven't you noticed the way they'll scan you over and over, as if they have no memory of doing it? How they all say the same things? What if they started out like us; like "pilots", and after thousands of years of brainless repetition and virtual death, began to deviate from their original programming.
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And then we have the plague systems. What if mankind was wiped out by a disease, but a few pockets remained; what if a single variable was swapped, a one became a zero, a true became a false, and all the systems that had already succumbed to the plague were marked as "clean" now that the humans were all dead... and the last remaining humans, in these lone systems, were marked as "unclean" by the machines, because only in those systems can the disease actually spread.
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What if that isn't the date? We assume that's the date, we assume that's the present, because the machine tells us. What if mankind was wiped out thousands of years ago, and the whole system is stuck on a loop - what if we're headed towards some simulated repetition of history, and all the events we see on Galnet are things that happened long ago?
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And what happens if the collective, galactic machine wakes up from this perpetual nightmare?
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Also, why can't I get furry dice for my cockpit yet?
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(Why is it some people's editors don't put spaces in when they're actually there ... he had spaces ... makes it much easier to read)
