What If? All Humans were turned into “Brutally Efficient Self Replicating Mechanisms of War”?

Midnighter13

Well-known member
So best live apart from each other or go to space ASAP?
Space. Even without chain reactions (and I agree those will be absolutely brutal) Earth will likely become uninhabitable within months, if not weeks. The only people who will live will be small groups that make it into space, and a few survivors who bunker down as deep as they can go in the Earth's crust (or maybe even mantle). Even if you had a small group set up shop in some empty areas of Alaska or Russia, people would attack them as soon as they set up enough defenses to be noticed (and if they failed to set up defenses they would suffer the effects of mass fallout across the world).

Like I said, the largest group of survivors would be 150 at absolute most. Most groups would probably be more in the 10-30 range. Mostly extended families and close friends of family who all trust each other. Those would be the groups that escape fast enough to survive and have the numbers and time to rebuild. There might be a handful of exceptions, but I wouldn't bet on them lasting more than a few months as a cohesive group.

Maybe you could get by with a dedicated and loyal military unit of a hundred or more for a while, until some of the lower ranks realize that their country is gone, so there is no real reason to obey the officers anymore save inertia. A small and tight knit religious community might make it, but such groups are unlikely to have leaders willing to take the decisive actions nessesary to lead their groups into space before the Earth is covered by nuclear fire. So cults, military units, families, friend groups, clubs, these are the organized groups that might get off Earth in time and stay as a group. There would also be plenty of individuals who would manage to escape and set up shop, only to find themselves isolated and alone without anyone around they could trust. I imagine many of those people would commit suicide, while others would try to group up. Of course given the circumstances establishing trust will be exceptionally hard.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
The Transmutation and Solar barons rule mercurial space, taking advantage of the vast solar power available to run their particle accelerators to produce rare elements and antimatter* for trade. While rich in energy and rare materials, they're chronically short on livable space, with orbital habitats needing most of their mass in heat-dissipating radiators and radiation shielding and planetbound mobile cities constrained from major modifications by the size of their original construction.

Venus has cloud cities, crafted from local atmospheric carbon turned into foamed-diamond balloons full of breathable air, each city its own phyle**. They have lots of space as their habitats can grow more or less indefinitely by adding new gasbags, forming enormous airborne structures like colonial jellyfish or coral polyps and plenty of carbon, but are lacking heavier elements they can't scoop from the atmosphere.

Earth is a wasteland of complete climatic meltdown and warfare with every single type of overpowered weapon system the existence of universal constructors put in everyone's hands. Despite the fact that they need entirely artificial habitats sealed against nuclear fallout, bio- or nano-engineered plagues and deadman trigger doomsday weapons***, there are still people crazy enough to try and live there, if only out of sheer stubbornness.

Luna controls access to earth, both to profit and to try and keep the various threats from spreading to the rest of the solar system. The lunarian phyles have dug their habitats kilometers deep into the regolith as shielding against attack and covered the lunar surface in cameras to watch for the approach of spacecrafts towards earth and Moon-Is-A-Harsh-Mistress-style mass drivers to shoot them down if they don't pay their tolls and wait in quarantine to make sure their crews aren't carrying various engineered doomplagues. Most lunarian phyles are themed halfway between militarist SCP Foundation organizations and knightly orders protecting the rest of the solar system and mob protection racket.

Mars was never successfully terraformed since having a hospitable environment would be an unnecessary risk. Artificial habitats need maintenance, so if a conflict kills everyone aboard, they'll fail. On the other hand, a phyle on earth or a terraformed planet that destroyed itself, the diseases and/or killbots could spread unencumbered by the protection of hundreds of kilometers of hard vacuum, radiation, empty space, etc, between habitats.

The gas giants all have their own balloon habitats, similar to venus with their moons being dismantled for raw materials.

Pluto was blown up when a dispute over its status as a planet led to some asshole using von neumann machinery to convert one third of charon into a mass driver firing another third as reaction mass to crash the remaining third into pluto.

There've been plenty of interstellar generation ships launched, but none of them have kept up communication, save for an unintentional example when a particularly nasty mutiny involving antimatter fuel led to an explosion visible from sol.

* Convenient energy storage mechanism, out far enough from the sun to render solar ineffective. Also goes for a high price on the arms market.
** Rumors of pirate/municipal darwinist habitats clad in radar-resistant shielding to hide themselves from their prey lurking deep in the atmosphere, just above crush depth have never been proven. Those lost habitats probably suffered some form of mechanical failure or got caught in storms, if they crash-landed on the venusian surface, they'd be scorched into unrecognizability as having been artificially constructed in short order.
*** After a decade of not receiving commands to not do so, a deadman switch activates and an automated nanofactory in a bunker powers up and starts spewing quadrillions of insect-sized slaughterbots programmed to automatically target anyone without subdermal identifier implants of their long-extinct creator's phyle.
 

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