So, in my story, the High Sovereignty of the Colonies, the human civilization of the future starts out as a post-scarcity Utopian civilization that was a Type III civilization on the Kardashev Scale and they controlled roughly 30 galaxies which all had Dyson Rings/Spheres that surrounded each star and gave them a lot of energy to power their self-replicating and self-sustaining nano-technology constructs which were also fully automated with A.I. They were well on their way to tapping into dark matter as their next step in advancing their civilization. At least until some genocidal royal family that's been secretly in blood pact to the Dark Gods of Suffering starts their master plan. They made a promise to the Dark Gods to throw the entire universe into war in order to empower them and enable them to rip a hole into the universe so they could release the demons of the Great Legions and destroy it. This royal family controls the government and the military. They do a George Bush and basically destroy entire Sovereign controlled galaxies. In response to public outcry for answers, they point to multiple neighboring Xenomorph (alien) civilizations as the cause of all this destruction even though they didn't possess the necessary technology to unleash that kind of destruction, nobody cared. After thousands of years of having all the thinking and innovation left to their A.I drones so they could continuously build their civilization for them, people were faced with a terrifying reality that they couldn't be rational about and they call for war to eradicate the "Xenomorphs". They eradicate several galaxies worth of Xenomorph civilizations, very powerful Xenomorph civilizations catch wind of the High Sovereignty and their cosmic genocide mania and begin attacking the Sovereignty on multiple fronts. Although some Xenomorphs are confused about the cause of the war and begin attacking each other. Long story short, the entire universe goes fucking nuts and starts killing each other in a war for survival. After a while, nobody even knows who started it except for the royal family people. After 5 thousand years of war using nano-technology A.I drones and Wreaths (gamma ray bursts that destroy galaxies), most of their technology is gone and cannot be replicated ever again. Nobody knows how to use the technology left behind, let alone even remember the purpose of the technology. They're forced to use ancient technology from Earth times and use reverse engineered future technology to construct war machines to replace the lost technology and begin using human soldiers to continue fighting the war. At the same time the deterioration of technology was happening, society was also degenerating into a totalitarian regime as refugees piled onto cities in mass droves which strained resources, living space and the lack of resources for everybody led to huge crime rate spikes. In response to this, the police becomes heavily militarized and basically, they would mow down anybody at peaceful protests and use nuclear weapons on cities considered underperforming or undesirable by the Sovereign Government. So, brutal and extreme since it was the only way they could handle quadrillions upon quadrillions of people crammed on planets trying to kill each other and the military police. So, what do you think of the setting? Any feedback/advice would be appreciated!
The obvious question is, if society is so hyper-advanced, how did a royal family gain so much power? It looks all right, but it's hard for me to say anything about the setting by itself. What's the story you want to tell? Who are the main characters, and how relevant is this history to them?
This isn't meant to be a novel but a sci-fi/fantasy history book, the overall setting is what happened during the 60,000 years the High Sovereignty was around up until their demise. The "history book" is a tome that is written from the perspective of an omnipotent character, so he knows everything and writes every piece of information about the world before him. So all of this history is quite relevant as it's the main topic. To answer your question: Earth was dying after an alien invasion completely destroyed the ecosystem of the planet. They left on a mass exodus ship to another star, it was like a Noah's Ark and it carried human embryos along with other things. This ship was built by the leader of this royal family and he proclaimed himself emperor amongst the humans who were raised under his society, he ruled for many years and faked his death (because he's an immortal demon). This emperor allowed the humans to "take control" of the civilization and uses all his sons and daughters who are also immortal to act in his stead as puppets to represent the head of the family. The family stays low profile in the shadows and basically controls the entirety of the society backstage and nobody has a clue except for the very high ups in the society. They don't pull any power moves until the perfect, opportune moment to perform a sleeper hit on the High Sovereignty. Similar to Palpatine and his Order 66. The royal family in question kept tons of blueprints for technology and all the knowledge that existed in human civilization secret, only they possessed the knowledge and the means to produce that technology. So, being the only people that could advance the civilization and have the power to hold back the technology of an entire civilization was a huge leverage for them. They simply gave the government access to technology and in exchange, they pledged loyalty to them in secret and that cemented their power permanently. This is how they remained in power for so long and nobody ousted them, everybody needed them in some way. Especially during the Great War when they needed new technology to fight. Also, they're a family of extremely powerful demon lords that are in service of crazy powerful Dark Gods. The Emperor guy had a mission of his own and basically used everybody to achieve this mission, which he does at the end. He becomes a Dark God and gets to resurrect his best friend that he'd betrayed during the 11th century. So, the family was extremely patient and waited 60,000 years in plain sight while everybody thought they were just some outdated royal family akin to the British Royal Family today and how they're harmless. Really fucking convoluted and complicated, I feel like I have to write a wall of text to explain it.
Certainly sounds plausible and any holes I see in it are there only because of lack of information. If these people where so technologically advanced at first, with the ability to destroy galaxies, how did the war last 5000 years. Also, the distance between galaxies are immense, what form of communication and travel is there? Also, how was all this technology lost? Doing a social collapse you lost some technology, sure, but you don’t necessarily loose all of it. I find that hard to believe. It is one thing to say they do not know how to reproduce it, but another to say they lost it entirely
It didn't last for only 5,000 years, that was up until the Apocalypse began. The war continued between the Xenomorphs and the humans while the demons of the Dark Gods came and ate everything. They traveled using registered black holes they knew connected to certain areas in the universe, which is how they managed to get a jump start on colonizing several galaxies in a short amount of time when traveling at the speed of light or even several times the speed of light would cause millions of years to pass and the civilization would age and die. Communication is something I'm still trying to figure out, I'm actually stuck on that one and have no idea what would be an efficient form of communication for both an advanced civilization and a dying civilization. Radio is obvious but over a vast distance, humanity would be extinct before the radio waves reached another galaxy and they'd be so scattered that they'd barely construct a message. I'll have to do some research on this. Like I explained before, A.I drones were in charge of managing technology and innovation prior to the war, humans had little to no input in the matter because they chose not to and invested trust in their technology. When the war began, galaxies were getting destroyed at an astronomical rate with weapons of cosmic destruction, a lot of the data and information along with the technology in those galaxies were destroyed. The A.I drone military with the Dyson Rings/Spheres were utterly destroyed at the end of the 5,000 year period, which required human soldiers to enter the fray with outdated technology mixed with reverse engineered "Enlightenment Era Technology" which was the advanced A.I drone tech and Dyson tech they had previously. When I say reverse engineered, they found remnants of the technology but again, after 5,000 years of sitting in relative safety and complete ignorance, they had no idea what the technology was even for anymore. How many people in our society know how the sanitation system works? Now tell me how many of them know the specifics of each process and the purpose of the technology used and how to operate or replicate that technology? You wouldn't even find three people that know why we had a sanitation system in first place in your town. Very few people out of the 7.4 billion population do. Now imagine a huge war just fucked up our planet, how many people left behind would actually know how to operate or replicate sanitation system technology? Probably nobody, the archives left behind were completely destroyed in nuclear fire and cyber-space virtually doesn't exist anymore. Now the war carries on for 5,000 years, the humans of the future, how many would know about sanitation systems? They'd walk through the ruins of the old world and have absolutely no clue what they're looking at or what the purpose of the technology was, if there was even any left after that long. That's the situation in my world but on a bigger scale. So, that's true, they didn't "lose it entirely" but the damage was significant enough that they could never replicate it by themselves. And that's where the royal family came in, they had knowledge of it all and how to rebuild it, only they intentionally withheld it from the civilization in order to keep them weak and allow the demons of the Dark Gods completely overwhelm them as well.
This sounds like the story for an epic MMORPG, one I would certainly download a demo of at least. I like reading fantasy and science fiction, I also write both. Two things bother me about the overall scenario, 1. Dark Gods, personally I don't like having Gods in my Sci fi. I'd much rather they were some previously unknown race (who may even appear Godlike). 2. I would struggle with a weapon which destroys whole galaxies. It may be that in the future some arsehole will Trump up such a weapon, but for me it stretches believability and relatability one step too far. It's an ambitious story which will need a lot attention to detail I think. I'd check it out though, for sure.
Using nuclear weapons on massively overpopulated planets would render large areas uninhabitable - this would be self defeating. What is the power source for such a weapon?
So, in this world, cities are separated into three categories depending on living space and population size. Cities: They can be as large as the largest cities on Earth, there are millions of them placed throughout the world and serve as factories for the majority of the populace. Roughly 500 million - 1 billion people live in those cities. Mega-cities: They can be several hundred miles in diameter, filled with trillions of people that live in enormous mega-blocks that can be several miles in height. Great-Cities: Thousands of miles long, a single great-city can take up half of the planet in size. They house quadrillions to quintillions of people and have mega-blocks that pierce the atmosphere. You can see how using a nuclear weapon to wipe out just a city is pretty much irrelevant as there's millions of more just like it all over the world. Not to mention, each city is protected by an invisible shield that protects against radiation and biological weapons. Stars, lots of stars. It was the only weapon left behind that they knew how to use to a certain degree even though its purpose was never to destroy star systems or galaxies in the first place.
Yeah, fair enough on that. Adding mythical or biblical entities to science fiction is a bit of an oxymoron, I have to admit. I guess it's more of the idea that these Gods come from an alternate dimension so nobody can really describe them as anything but Gods. True, it's difficult to imagine a weapon that can do these kind of things. But just a mere interstellar civilization would have the capability to destroy a star system judging by the power required for interstellar travel in space. So, it isn't out of the realm of reality that a Type III civilization on the Kardashev Scale which is basically a civilization that can harness the energy of all the stars in a galaxy, has the ability to destroy an entire galaxy or even several.
This could also be the true life story of Brazil, global warming and populism. They're having a water scarcity (I don't think they're the only ones, Neveda is too? Lake Mead is drying up. ... Brazil just went far right, Americans have Donald Trump... Also, Saudi is resource rich, like, bookoo rich, and, IDK, that's a Kingdom too, like where I am, but, a different Kingdom, so, isn't like where I am, the UK, I've never been but is Saudi Arabia totalitarian? I know they're our friends, but, ... I don't know, I've never been, it's a hard country to get into I've heard if you're not from there and have no ties to Saudi Arabia, maybe even harder if I was a woman, IDK, I honestly think I might stand a better chance getting a tour of North Korea than I would getting to see Saudi Arabia, but, I don't know. Seem rich though, like, oil rich. Mind if I? I wish to share this with you OP and everybody, something that might help.. This is what would happen if our oil ran out today.
Well....if anything, I'd say the opposite. It feels a bit too simple and broad-strokes. Is there no questioning of their rule, no rebellions, no succession crises, no schisms within the family? Do humans dissent with the idea of war, or do they all just kinda hate the aliens? Do the royals have a stranglehold on all human tech, with nobody pirating, reverse engineering or independently discovering their stuff, or trading with aliens for equivalently powerful technology not dependent on the royals. None of the humans resist the trend towards complacency, and there are no enclaves or societies of humans that preserve the advanced technology anywhere in all these billions of stars? One of the oldest surviving institutions in our world is the Catholic Church. And in the 2000-ish years of its existence, there's been the Reformation, the Council of Nicea, the East-West Schism, the Crusades, the rise and extermination of the Cathars, the Avignon Papacy, the Cadaver Synod, the Borgia era, the child abuse scandal, that one time when there were three Popes, and so on. Interesting and complex ways in which the flow of dogma, history and politics has affected the Church and changed how it works and what it stands for beyond "Founded 2000 years ago, still around today.". Of course, it's possible that the details are there, but you have to skim over them because of the gigantic timeframe and scale of the future history. But I'd say that in itself is a problem--the numbers just feel excessive to me. Nothing about the scenario you're presenting seems to require such a massive scale. What are you accomplishing with a nuked galaxy that you couldn't accomplish with a destroyed planet or star system? What are you accomplishing with a 5000 year war that you couldn't accomplish with a 500 or 50 year one? I don't want this to sound like I'm bashing on you, this is just one person's take on why it didn't work for them.
How would anyone be able to question their rule when few knew of their existence? Remember, the humans of the new society post exodus were raised from embryos under a new world that was tailored to the royal family's desires. In the family, it's all about their service to the Dark Gods, I haven't fully fleshed out the family yet but there have been some psychotic and sadistic puppet heads that the emperor had to neutralize and punish. There were other royal families too which caused a lot of backstabbing and power plays that were invisible to the public. The royal family had full control over all human technology, although they did sell weapons to criminals and cartel gangs to spark more violence in the cities. In a totalitarian society with advanced technology, it became impossible to do anything without the government or the military police knowing it. They had full control over everything a person did. The problem with your question is this: this is a civilization that spans across thirty galaxies, it takes so long for information to travel and for beings to travel that 5,000 years might actually be too short for such a change to take place across so much space. There were many different periods in the history of the Sovereignty but I haven't gotten around to writing all of this yet, I'm still working on the bigger picture at the moment. The reason why there's such a massive scale is because I wanted to give myself a challenge. I want to write an in-depth history of a civilization that has lasted for 60,000 years, fully knowing that it might take me decades to complete and not come near to completing it. To be honest, to explain everything here would be quite lengthy. Here's my work in progress so far, I've still got a lot more to write and a lot of what I've already written has to be re-written constantly to keep everything consistent.
The thing is, if they're never seriously threatened and if it's never even possible to threaten them, then you have a set of invincible villain protagonists with rather flat motivations (almost literally evil for its own sake) who get never face any serious threats that they can't handwave away, and who get away with everything in the end. With the best will in the world, I'm finding it hard to imagine that being terribly interesting, because meaningful conflict is the core of all drama. You could scale back the power of your villains a lot, so that they have to actually work for their victories, and they face legitimate risks of failure at various points. That makes for a history I'd find more interesting than "evil wins because evil never had a chance at losing". These two paragraphs seem to disagree with each other. They have instant infalliable intelligence networks and control everything and everyone....but at the same time, it takes tremendous amounts of time for information to travel to them and back?
It's not really about the plot but more about the history, this all has already happened. We're just reading it from the perspective of some omnipotent God that decided to create a huge library for his creations to learn from. Besides, they're not the only things that matter in this world, I'm writing about tons of other civilizations and what happened to them. The motivation of the Emperor was to become a Dark God himself in order to bring back his best friend, a selfish motivation that has little to nothing to do with evil but childhood trauma and guilt. Many people in the Sovereignty have their own purposes and I'll be writing about their motivations in the book. Besides, the Emperor's path to victory wasn't just a clean break, they had to work hard to manipulate governments, scientists, intellectuals and stop other royal families from supplanting them in positions of power. Tons of psychological warfare was needed in order to get to the point where they could actually initiate their plans. Pure, raw power would not have made any difference for the Emperor, that would have been the opposite of the point. The Emperor needed the Sovereignty to reach that technology level in order to have enough power to inflict damage on other advanced civilizations and poke the hornet's nest. Once he did that, he intentionally kept the Sovereignty weakened so that they couldn't fight back against the demons. He wasn't worried about the other species because they were also focused on surviving against the demon legions. Again, I've been writing about this and it isn't completed yet. It's important to remember that people have spent tens of thousands years being sheltered and coddled in their safe habitats. They have never experienced war, they have never experienced any drama or problems of this magnitude before. The gradual change of the society is a long one because of how long the war actually takes, aliens are wiping out galaxies that are several million light years away from each other. When people start fleeing as refugees and putting a strain on resources on the few galaxies left, social change begins to happen rapidly. Again, normal people who flee don't have access to any advanced technology. They end up on giant refugee ships that move through space for decades trying to reach a black hole and in those decades, at least 3/4 of the population is dead because of starvation, cannibalism, riots, revenge killings and the usual stuff that happens when people are desperate. Nobody has time to recover or gain their bearings, the few groups that DO have advanced technology or have different beliefs are stuck in the middle of an Apocalyptic war and are seen as an enemy of the Sovereignty. Aliens hated them, demons wanted to eat them and the Sovereignty was willing to destroy an entire star system to eradicate them. The only people that had access to technology, weapons and things that they weren't supposed to have were the criminal gangs and cartels that existed in the lower tiers of Great-Cities. And that's how the "Purification Campaign" happened, where the military police literally went to war with those gangs and cartels, so people couldn't really "turn to them" to get any sort of technology. The whole point is that normal people had nobody and nowhere to turn to, their only safe haven was under the Sovereignty and anybody who was different or tried to create an unique ideology, faction or even civilization was almost immediately eradicated just like everything else was. By the time the civilization became totalitarian, the "Apocalypse" came and the demons of the Dark Gods swarmed the universe and there was only a few hundred years before the Sovereignty was wiped out.
Okay. Then maybe you could ask us about this when it is completed? You asked us what we made of the setting based on what you put in the first post. If every criticism will be met with "Well, you need to read the whole thing!" and the first post's information isn't enough to fairly judge the setting on, then there doesn't seem to be anything to say. That doesn't answer the question. You said: a) The royals can instantly and infalliably quash any form of dissent to maintain their total control, implying instant communication and travel. b) The setting is huge enough that changes take thousands of years to ripple across it. Those two statements are incompatible. Totalitarian societies work by being aware of all possible threats to their rule from within, and being able to quickly quash them. If B is true, then if a bunch of stars on the edge of the empire decides "Prohibiting us from wearing funny hats on Thursdays is the last straw, we're going to declare independence!" or "We're going to defect and join this alien empire.", the the royals wouldn't even know about it for centuries afterwards, unless they can use super demon magic to ignore the rules somehow. I'm reaching the limit of where I can provide advice without falling into the trap of saying "Write it like I would.", which is never useful criticism. But to me, it seems like you're making this setting way too homogenous. All people are unfamiliar with conflict. Nobody figures out how to use the supertech for themselves except this one subset of people. Everyone hates the aliens and nobody allies with them. Every attempt at creating an unique ideology, faction or civilization fails. For me, it's making this setting feel.....small, which is the last thing it should feel like.
You forgot the giant universe spanning war where entire galaxies are wiped out. The only people who were left to control were refugees fleeing to the remaining three galaxies which they controlled fairly easily because of how close they were to each other and how the entire population was all there in the same space. So, by the time the regime does become totalitarian, three galaxies are left and they're filled with an assload of refugees. Hence the reason why a totalitarian regime became necessary in the first place. It was impossible for a totalitarian regime to take place across thirty galaxies that were several million of light years apart from each other, that was my point. It only became possible when the refugees piled on the only remaining safe zones for human beings. If you provided the experts of medieval times with the blueprints to create a fighter jet, would they be able to create it? No, they wouldn't even know where to begin. Let's try a different example; if the majority of humanity was wiped out, how many left would possess the knowledge to create a fighter jet? You're also forgetting the fact that creating technology isn't just a single person creating it, no single person knows how to build something singlehandedly. You need people from all sorts of field with knowledge to build and operate certain parts of the plane. Now try to find me a group of humans that would know and be able to produce a fighter jet in a post-apocalyptic world where most of the population is dead or has fled the planet. That's the whole point, that's how the totalitarian regime worked. They simply just deprived the society of knowledge how to produce X or Y thing and used them as workers to produce only what they wanted them to know how to produce. Any scientists or intellectuals were essentially held as hostages and couldn't do anything without the permission of the government. So there isn't any defecting, there isn't any showing people new technology for them to use against the government for themselves. There's also a huge war where they are hated by aliens so they're not going to be able to defect to them anytime soon either. It's not that, it's the fact that all people that did become familiar with conflict were killed pretty quickly. Those that survived fled as refugees and they ended up living in a nightmarish totalitarian society where they couldn't surmount a force to resist or fight because of how the system was designed. Two things to consider: 1. They are almost universally hated by aliens, to try and communicate and ally with aliens would just be a way to notify them of your position so they could destroy you. And the only aliens that didn't hate them or were willing to ally with them, were on the other side of the universe fighting the Great War. 2. The language of aliens is vastly different to human language. You wouldn't find any average layman, soldier or anyone that wasn't locked under the full control of the Sovereignty to be able to communicate with the language aliens do. It would require technology that enabled them to communicate properly. How do you communicate with an alien species that uses only scents to communicate? How do you communicate with a species that reassembles atomic structures to communicate with one another? You see, it's a lot more complicated than your typical Star Trek "TV screen" communication where the alien just speaks gibberish and we have an universal translator to understand them. There are even alien species that are the shade of red, literally, the shade of red. There are some that are so abstract that they appear as bubbles to human beings because they can't fully comprehend anymore than three dimensions. How do you think anyone who dislikes the Sovereignty tries to communicate with them while there's a huge war going on that was caused by humans which led to most alien species within their immediate vicinity to try and destroy them and a totalitarian regime that has advanced technology knows exactly how big of a shit you took and knows whether or not you're a traitor and Xenomorph sympathizer? Which by the way, if you were a Xenomorph sympathizer then that would mean you would've been dragged out on the streets and publicly executed without so much as a fuss. It's not that they fail, it's the fact the circumstances literally prevents any possible evolution. The Sovereignty having full control over people, the aliens hating humans, a huge war going on where galaxies are being wiped out left and right and enormous powerful demons of Dark Gods are eating things at an alarming rate. The analogy I like to use is imagine a planet orbiting a black hole, there's no way for life to trigger on that planet because any possible events that could cause life to trigger is prevented by the black hole. Asteroids, meteorites and so on are sucked into the black hole instead of colliding with the planet. And you need to remember, the Great War and the Apocalypse for the humans barely lasted a few millenniums before they were completely wiped out. In those thousands of years, how would humans who have no access to warships, black holes, technology to communicate effectively and so on be able to do such a thing? Anytime before the Great War and it would've been possible. And it did happen, they were allied with many alien species and often worked with them trying to share knowledge and technology. But that was thousands of years ago, how many humans or aliens even remembered their previous alliance after so much time had passed? Think of it like this, how many humans today even remember that the Sikhs helped the West in World War 2? And that wasn't even a century ago.
Good luck with the story. I honestly don't think I can offer anything else, because it seems like every point will be met with "Yes, but if you knew all this detail I never mentioned before....."
I'm sorry but you asked me these questions and I've answered them. All I asked for in the OP was if the general setting sounded interesting and consistent, not every tidbit of detail that I didn't include in the OP for obvious reasons. You began the conversation about the minute details of my world and I decided to oblige. Thank you for all your advice, however. I appreciate it all.
If they have all this fancy tech, why do they need people? To me, this setting seems to suffer from one of the most obvious flaws of Banks' Culture. The super-smart AIs do all the work, yet they still keep people around. Because plot reasons. I just feel that any kind of far-future SF story needs to explain why people are still around when powerful AI will make us as obsolete as our ancestors made the dinosaurs. Yeah, they might keep some of us as pets just as we'd keep dinosaurs as pets if we had the opportunity, but not entire galaxies-worth.
You have a point, I'll get rid of the A.I aspect. I have heard about the "Culture" from Iain Banks, it's very interesting.
You're right. Sorry for being abrasive. In the case of the Culture, it was because the AI's liked and respected human-level beings, and wanted us to have good lives. Both as a thank you to the beings that bought them into existence, and because most of them were decent and moral beings, who chose to treat other beings with dignity and respect, who liked the company of those different from and "lesser" than themselves. Bizarre as it may seem, being intelligent doesn't automatically mean you need to regard those beneath you with contempt and loathing.
A real superhuman AI is about as likely to care about humans as we do about mice. Some of them would keep a cage full of humans around for entertainment, but few of them are going to waste their time trying to think down to our level. There would literally be that kind of gap between the species. From what I remember, humans have about a million times as many neurons as mice, and Banks' AIs (at least the big ones) are about that level above humans. Not to mention that they think so much faster than us that they would have a hard time remembering what question they asked in a conversation by the time we'd got around to answering them.
Don't worry about it. :] I feel that A.I beings that are above us would just get terribly bored with us. I mean, you can't really talk to a dog or a cat, can you? You spend all day trying to imagine how they think but you can't really comprehend it since it's so beneath you that you have scientists trying to come up with theories on how they think and function. The same would be done with beings much higher than us, they would have to come up with theories on how they could "effectively communicate" with us and likely never be able to fully establish communication with us properly. And that's assuming both parties would even be able to see or register each other as living beings in the first place, which is unlikely. I like to imagine it like that game "Spore". In the Cell Stage, you had to go around attacking and eating other cells in order to grow and evolve. As you grew bigger, all the cells you saw previously disappear as they got so small you could barely see them anymore. Bigger cells were sometimes unimaginably big and would just ignore you as you swam past them. It's like that for tiers of beings, sometimes a species will get so advanced that they literally don't register anything below them not because they loathe and regard them with contempt but because they cannot comprehend an existence beneath them anymore.
Yet the Minds make the effort, because they for the most part like talking to people. They use their great intelligence to figure out the gap in worldview and communicate effectively. At least in Banks' setting, intelligence doesn't correspond to misanthropy (that attitude would probably be seen as immaturity), because the Culture recognises that maturity as a species beyond "thugs with fancy guns" requires the ability to understand those unlike you.
Hi, I think for me the thing that stands out is the question of scale. So take our galaxy as an example. It's two hundred million stars. Given the technology you've described - dyson spheres etc, that's potentially two hundred million systems full of worlds. In one galaxy. And you've got thirty of them - separated by hundreds of thousands of light years. The point is that this is immense. And that leads to some interesting questions. First up, have you heard of the Drake equation? It's a guess as to how many alien civilizations might be out there. And the answer isn't two. Given the sheer vastness of what you've described I can't imagine that only humans and xenomorphs exist. Next scale things down to make it more understandable, say it was two hundred million people - sixty percent of the US population give or take. Now consider the complete collapse of the US tech etc. Can you imagine that out of two hundred million people none would be able to rebuild the lost technology? Even if only one in a thousand people was enough of an engineer to start fixing things that's two hundred thousand people. Or in your scenario two hundred thousand worlds in one galaxy. So even if everything collapses, it'll be rebuilt quickly enough. After that they've lost their technology. How are they busy destroying whole galaxies without it? Cheers, Greg.
