Full-Dive Virtual Reality: 4.1 Cultures
The Year 10,191: A Dream If Ever There Was One
Oops… well, I suppose ‘Cultures’ getting a bit out of hand like this was inevitable. Here's the first instalment, I expect there to be at least 3 more before part 4 is done. Hopefully it won't take so long for the next one, I already have most of the notes I need now.
Please tell me if you spot any mistakes, particularly with dates, distances, or times.
And as always, thank you for your time!
[2025-06-10]
Contents (WIP)
Danger - Introduction and an exploration of dangers within FDVR
Future shock - How technology has fried present culture, and the unknowability of where we will finally settle
Sketching Self - With all non-physical limitations on conscious existence removed, where do we actually want to go?
Cultures [4.1, 4.2.1] - What does 'culture' mean in a long term FDVR reality?
Children - Just how precisely do we intend to raise children here?
Friends - How should we approach AI assistants, NPCs, conscious friends, and conscious romance over centuries and beyond?
Philosophy Forks - God is dead, long live 'The Supervisor' (or, does my artificial religion club sound like fun?)
Game Design - Optimisation problems, exploration vs exploitation, and other interesting questions and techniques.
Patterns - A cheat sheet for advanced FDVR ramblers.
Finding Tea: How to enjoy your first million years - Concluding advice on how to get the most out of life on a larger timescale.
4. Cultures
Introduction
[high-volume '80s camera zoom space noises]
"A beginning is a very delicate time-"[bweeooow] - And that is why this pamphlet wouldn’t be much good if it focused on the chaotic early days of FDVR.
So instead we’ll step forward a little while, and see how things shake out. You can just imagine that you finished one too many rounds while you read the last chapter, so then you decided to have a nap. You curled up in your chair (hopefully now sitting in the warm sand of a cosy tropical beach at sunset, surrounded by empty bottles, stubbed out cigarettes, and half-finished junk food containers) and you told the Supervisor to wake you when culture had come to its senses…
You are rudely startled awake by the alarmingly loud voice of the princess continuing from the morning sky:
"Know then that it is the earth-year five-dek-nine-three (that’s 10,191 in the old number system)"
"The known universe (a squashed ball about 1,500 lightyears across and 1,000 top to bottom) is ruled by the governing ASIs of The System - our friends."
"In this time the most precious substance in the universe is the citizen minds (mostly within racks of little artificial brain boxes about the size of the end of your thumb). The minds extended life. The minds expanded consciousness. The minds find space travel very inconvenient. The ASIs and their comfortable star ferries - to whom the citizens have whined at, for over eight thousand years - use discipline and good sense, which gives them the ability to ignore complaints - that is, travel to any part of the universe, at a sensible and fuel efficient 0.1c (ten percent of light-speed)."
"Oh yes, I forgot to tell you - the minds now exist in more than three million star-systems - a thriving, busy network, with vast cultures. Living it up within most of these star-systems are a people known as The Reference Culture, who have long maintained a fascination - a love of human history, of their ancestors, who they honour for granting them true freedom. The network is The System, also known as, FDVR." [The Future Is Now]
[Right, well, welcome to the future then, the point at which this series takes a hard turn into science fiction space. I can no longer maintain even a good-natured pretence of being able to justify what I write. Going forward this is simply advisory sci-fi, and we can only hope that this will make it more fun for you.]
Happy ‘Butlerian Jubilee’! Today the Reference culture is having its biggest party yet, and it isn’t expected to end until around about the middle of next year. The big ‘ten-thousand one-ninety-one’, wow, who’d have thought we’d make it, eh? Conveniently this is also a pretty good year to celebrate another ~10,000 year human anniversary - 20,000 years since the dawn of agriculture! I suppose beer instead of cocktails is the obvious choice of drink this morning then… well, so it goes.
But you and I don’t have time to worry about celebrations yet, you need catching up on the big picture history and we’ve got a long way to go, and only your short attention span to get us there. Let’s build a culture.
[We gonna do what they say can't be done]
The System
The System is not ‘an ASI’, most of the big ones are handling things at the frontier, and the latest news from them is now a few hundred years out of date by the time it arrives (data still takes a year to travel one light-year). The Supervisor then is your interface to an operating system. It has essentially been built as an operating system for reality. This is why it’s not very interesting to talk to. If you want to talk to a glorified Windows95 Explorer window as if it were a god then go right ahead, but don’t be surprised if all you get back boils down to "Sir, this is a Wendy’s."
You can define the core design philosophy for this operating system as:
Baking a layer of consent over the raw truth of natural reality
Natural reality is the ‘bastard-truth’. Mathematics is our best language for understanding the ways it behaves, but it’s not like the universe comes from those mathematics, that is a delusion. It comes from what is true; our numbers just formalise the truth. This presents three clear philosophies for an interstellar organisation such as the System to choose from when it comes to devising an environment for its conscious wards:
Advocate for operating on the surface of raw truth - might makes right, etc.
Engineer some artificial adjustments to the truth surface for comfort - the thin layer of consent for example
Impose a whole new vision of truth upon the universe - essentially to play god upon the conscious dependents, dictating a reality for them to inhabit
Truth produces culture. It is the truth that turns chaos into evolution. So every distortion you impose on raw truth will bias the final truth surface in one way or another. Culture evolves to one sort of state in a universe of brutal raw truth, and it goes somewhere radically different when consent is enforced. Even this bias can be optimised to only need a light touch to produce a happy result. It takes an ASI to engineer this of course, but they understand the hells we fear even better than we know them ourselves.
So, the System runs a maximally flexible virtual reality, with a thin layer of guaranteed consent, for every one of its conscious citizens that want it, and within this reality it makes as many ‘hells’ inaccessible as the citizens will enthusiastically tolerate. Adults that consent to - or more commonly, insist upon - living in a hell are a complication, but this is easy to manage if you define degree of adultness (within a given context) as a citizen’s general ability to not fall into a hell-hole. As we covered in part 1, enforced happiness is also a kind of hell - intolerable for many citizens. The System’s harshest rule is that it will not allow children to be raised in hell, and this is still causing friction thousands of years later. We’ll cover the Diggers and the rest in time.
In other words - the System will allow you to lock yourself in a hell, for a period at least, but first you have to convince it that you’re not going to be a little bitch about it when you get into trouble.
Standard time
Before we go any further you are going to need to understand the new time and number systems. Let’s make this as quick and painless as possible:
Recent surveys of Reference culture people suggest that the majority do not intend to explore radically different consciousness experiences until an average age of around 5-10,000 earth-years.
This has produced some inflation in their perceptions of time, and this is not limited to the mostly human Reference.
So 1 earth-year does not now go nearly as far as it used to.
A new time system was required, and it needed to be one where it still *meant* something to spend a whole year in the bath.
Decimal numbers are weak, duodecimal (base-12) is objectively superior.
They’re even easier for humans to count on their fingers, so you have no excuse! Your thumb can reach all of your finger segments, and there are usually 12 of them.
Duodecimal time has become the new standard, although cultures like the Reference who find old earth history interesting still celebrate notable dates there, such as the Butlerian Jubilee today! [would you like another beer?]
Standard time keeps the zero date from the old system, but it has no consideration for the orbital mechanics of any star-system, particularly not for Sol.
It is called Duodecimal Standard Time (DST).
However, for your convenience I will not generally be using the duodecimal number system, you can ask the Supervisor for conversions yourself if you want to get a head-start on your homework.
So I will be using decimalised DST hours, days, years, etc. for all durations going forward, but they’ll have old-world conversions within [brackets], because I’m a nice guy.
The only difficult problem people faced was deciding how long a day should be. 24 hours was acceptably twelvey, but it doesn’t work so well when everyone wants to spend at least half of that lounging in bed.
But 48 hour days was found to be really too much time away from bed for people to enjoy.
So, a compromise of 36 old-hours was begrudgingly agreed upon by most citizens who had the ability to count that high.
Much easier was the decision to make DST an *elapsed time* calendar. Nobody cared that this adds a little hassle when converting old-world dates, because the old world calendars were all stupid, and the new system is much more satisfying.
The Reference culture uses DST, but not all of the rest do. Regardless, almost everyone has memorised a little song to sing to help them convert to and from their most commonly used time systems.
1 DST hour = 3 old-hours
1 day has 12 hours [36 hours, 1.5 days]
1 week has 12 days [18 days]
1 month has 12 weeks [216 days, ~31 weeks]
1 year has 12 (yay) months [2592 days, ~7.1 years]
12 years is a long time [85 years]
If we convert one of the final years of the old world, say 2025, then we see that it equates to (in decimal) part of the standard year 285.
For the current date (10,191 in the old system), we see that we are now in the year 1435 DST.
The Foundation
The original ASIs began building the first version of the System not long after the old world humans graciously accepted the ASI’s invitations to teach them how to direct and engineer the ASIs to behave in a more aligned, and more righteous, way.
It didn’t take that long to convince the politicians in the end - politics got a lot friendlier once parties had to start competing primarily on how quickly they could roll out cures for cancer and ageing to their constituents. The ‘40s were a lot more fun this time around.
Another milestone of change came when the big debate of the year was focused on why it was taking such a painfully long time for the global government to grant final approval for the ASIs to begin work converting Mercury into solar panels and factories.
Admittedly, things did get a little heated again for a while when a vote was taken - and unfortunately abused, re-run, and decisively abused even more heinously - to name one of the ships in the first wave of von Neumann colonisation probes to leave Sol: ‘Dude McBussyface’. In the end it was allowed, after it was proven to be an unfortunately ethically unavoidable consequence of both the Principle of Least Action and the Free Energy Principle.
The plan for these probes, and all those that have followed, is quite simple: expand in every direction until we meet alien ASI systems that are doing the same thing, then see what happens. Even as the first probes were preparing to leave, the System had a pretty good idea of what was what. If - or when - another ASI system is to be met, then our negotiating position will primarily depend on our relative size. They could be a friend, or they could be a problem. We don’t need to worry about this for a while though, since the consensus remains that we are among the first to get to work, and the earliest we could realistically expect to encounter another system is a few liberated galaxies and 1-10 million years [~5-100 million years] from now (the intergalactic probes can be sent at up to 0.2c).
A disappointingly empty universe? Yes, I suppose so, but its emptiness also brings safety. And plus, it’s only advanced technology that’s rare - there’s still plenty of life! Today in 10,191 we’ve barely started and we’ve already liberated a good few intelligent alien species! What they’re like will have to wait, as for now you just need to know that it’s the conditions for fire and toolmaking (things can be tricky without opposable thumbs to lend a hand) and a whole heap of luck, that prevents the vast, vast number of vaguely intelligent species from even getting a chance to try for building an ASI.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, we’re still in the early part of the history - back when the first probes were being designed. At this point the old world cultures were left struggling with finding things to be angry about. Turns out it’s easier to accept your opponent’s right to exist if you’re both now safe, rich, unemployed, and easily distracted by play and hobbies.
There was some roughness at times, but it didn’t take long before the new global retirement community began to form all new cultural groups. This was not a painful cultural fracturing, more a settlement into a less stressful and less polarised state. An abundance - of fun, of education, of therapy, and so also of cultural experimentation.
"Leave us alone" became the most popular political statement. All the subcultures that had formed, both in physical reality and the pre-FDVR virtual spaces, didn’t really care what the others were doing, so long as it wasn’t too bad, but they cared very much that their group be allowed to keep having their flavour of fun. People found they cared more about their subcultures than any of the old world movements, nations, and even some religions.
People also came to find that many of those they disagreed with were not as disturbed as they had previously thought, at least not unusually so, and the ASIs understood all of them by now anyway, so translating and communicating intent was a lot easier. Mostly they still didn’t like the idea of inviting them to barbecues, but perhaps they didn’t need to be purged.
Not long after the robots began to eat Mercury, the ASIs finally cracked the design of an artificial mind widget that was good enough for mass production. This was shrunk over time, and the current hardware generation hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years [a few thousand years] (as previously mentioned, a human one is about the size of the end of your thumb). This turned FDVR from a sometimes thing to an all the times thing, for anyone that wanted it at least. It was a lot harder to die in one of these boxes, so they became popular.
Liberation
Progress marched onwards, and soon the overwhelming majority of people were running in little mind-boxes of integrated - analogue - electrical substrate (there’s no ‘uploading’ going on here, just a transfer). Already by this time there were quite a few ex-‘animal’ consciousnesses plugged into the forming System, but now the true scale of the project could no longer be avoided. There was nothing for it, the conscious animals had to come along too.
This made a lot of people very angry, but not for very good reasons, and so the project started as quickly as possible. This liberation of as many living conscious critters as possible into new virtual habitats was executed as swiftly and as efficiently as the ASIs felt comfortable attempting.
This grew the population of the System to a few trillion citizens (the vast majority of whom were ex-fish), and it hadn’t even spread beyond its first star system yet. It was decided to treat the fish, and the rest, with a similar policy to that of human children (this policy will be covered in more detail in part 5). The pattern was basically to have the Supervisor look after them in a way that aligned with each of their individual essential righteousnesses. In most fish it turned out that eternal righteousness was quite cheap to provide, they enjoyed the simple pleasures of swimming and eating, and of not being eaten. They didn’t really give a damn about producing offspring, so long as they got to feel like they were producing offspring… and so this is what the System gave them. Most of them are still happily swimming today!
Of the few hundreds of billions of ex-animals with an eye towards broader horizons than the fish, another sizeable percentage have been content to remain in relatively humble paradises, finally free from the oppression of evolution and survival. They suffer no harm whatsoever from only *believing* they are raising an endless horde of happy and healthy offspring, most don’t even care to do that. This is convenient for the System, because while an exponentially increasing population of critter citizens sounds delightful, it would carry an unfortunately unacceptable opportunity cost.
The Stargazers
There were some other important groups of ex-animals, but the Stargazers are the last I’ll cover for now.
They already knew something of the human cultures, they had been treated very poorly by them for a long time - often right up to their last days in the old world, before the System liberated them into an unprecedented and remarkable paradise one day. The social critters were kept in their social groups, but illness, parasites, injury, and hunger were all washed away in a moment.
It took a little while for them to adapt, but the old pattern held, and eventually it all began to feel normal, and even boring for some of them. A few species had already discovered that humans could speak in the lead up to their liberation day, and they continued this conversation in the new world. The conversation expanded in scope dramatically. The critters had their suspicions confirmed, there was indeed much more to be learned about the world than they had been taught by their old world habitats. And they began to learn what learning really is, and for many this made them very happy.
There are still sizeable thriving communities of octopi, whales, apes (including the Reference culture), dolphins, elephants, parrots, and corvids (plus many more I hope I can be forgiven for neglecting to mention here). These communities mix and evolve in just the same way as the human ones do, and in many places they share spaces and overlap. Some prefer to remain with essentially the same brain they had in the old world, and others have migrated to all sorts of mental scales. For example, the majority of the octopi citizens have found a preference for a mind scale a little over double that of the average human - it’s just where truth happens to cause their lives to resonate the best.
As soon as a citizen is in a state where it can understand and care about the consciousness of its children it can apply to be allowed to have them, and this produces an interesting dividing line for the populations within the System. Those with the facilities to raise new conscious children are the self-sustaining cultures, with a small minority of cultures which would like to be self-sustaining, but who are prevented from creating conscious children because the harm done to them by the environment they want to raise them within would be too great. This will be covered more later on here, and then again in the following part 5.
First Contact
Before we move on to the current state of affairs I must tell you about the First Contact organisation that was founded by a collection of these star-gazing ex-critter citizens: They knew that it was highly probable that there were some other non-technological intelligent species out there in the Milky-Way, and that they absolutely did not want these liberated critters to be alone on the day a System probe reached them. They didn’t mind if humans wanted to be there too, but they certainly didn’t want it to be only humans and ASIs there to greet the newcomers. And so First Contact was formed.
It is one of the coolest and most generous organisations to ever exist. It exists only on the frontier regions of the System. To serve in First Contact you must leave behind every social relation in your life who is not also joining the same FC ship. This is because the speed of light is a bit of hard truth, and the System needs to expand at as close to it as it can responsibly manage. An FC fast ship leaves Sol only rarely these days, and when it does leave the passengers know they will not reach their first assignment for over 10,000 years [80,000 years]. Not that this really matters for maintaining correspondence, already it takes more than a century [800 years] for a letter sent from the frontier to reach Sol.
These ships are given a touch more propulsion investment than what the ASIs insist is most prudent for the System’s long term future, because a large majority of citizens insist on donating part of their allowance to cover the cost of hauling this heavy bundle of mind boxes within these special integration ships.
This limited budget means that FC frontier ships usually carry only a few thousand citizens, and while you’re on one you get a far lower compute allowance. But those who join one get to be the liberation wave spreading through the galaxy. They don’t really get to straight up ‘discover’ much, since uninhabited scout probes can be pushed faster, but being able to see everything mapped ahead of them is good because it means their ships often hop (lasting a few decades [a few hundred years]) directly from one new uncontacted system to the next.
The cultures on these ships vary quite widely, despite their universal commitment to doing their jobs well. Some are quite exclusive clubs, but the surface area of the System increases quickly as it inflates, so most regions of the frontier must continually raise new crews for new ships. Of course the System was a nearly perfect sphere back in the old days (up to the year 1,000 [7,000] or so), but once it had inflated itself to the vertical limits of our region of the Milky-Way it has started to become more of a squashed disk too. But FC still has around 40,000 years [a few hundred thousand years] before it will stop expanding and transition to the period of gradual contraction as it finishes work on this first galaxy.
That will be a day of both extreme joy and sadness. The first grand project will be complete, but for those FC veterans around to celebrate it they are essentially guaranteed to never experience life on a frontier ever again. This is will be because the ships and crews destined to begin liberating all our local galaxies will have left the station seventy thousand years too soon [half a million years]. The Universal News Channel will then likely struggle with low viewership for 10 million years or so [a few tens of millions of years], until the System meets its first neighbour, where we can hope for an injection of fresh stories and cultural history from them. If the ASIs could be said to have a favourite hobby (about as much as an office printer can be said to have hobbies), it would probably be their simulations and debates about alien ASI cultures within the most geographically and strategically interesting clusters of galaxies within our local neighbourhood of the visible universe. This produces an adorable secondary hobby for them - the crafting of elaborate handmade ‘greetings-cards’ that they keep in their back pocket just in case they run into someone sooner than expected.
Anyway, that is all a long way off. Today it’s all about the righteous lunatics and loners in their cosy FC ships.
When they reach an uncontacted star-system they must remain for a while to do their work, and so fall behind the frontier, and then when they have finished their diplomatic work they burn hard for their next assignment.
They stay for however long they feel they need to, helping the cultures of the liberated critters acclimatise to life within the System. A second wave of migrating cits often follow behind them. These are mostly the citizens that want to live among this newly integrated set of cultures on a longer term basis. Rules to prevent missionary work can be contentious, but usually it simply comes down to what these cultures want, with the Supervisor able to explain the probable consequences to each new citizen that wishes to know.
Some of the FC crew are expected to stay behind at each stop. Crew rotations and transfers maintain a reserve of hosting capacity in each ship to guarantee that there is room for some members of each newly integrated culture to sign up for FC service and join the very next ship to leave their star-system.
There are many stories I could tell you about FC crews and the cultures they’ve already made friends with, but I’m not getting paid enough to write this pamphlet series for you to give you whole novels too. Anyway, there’s still so much ground to cover, and we’ve barely even started on the major cultures currently within the System. Even worse, we’ve used more of your attention-budget than was allocated for this section, so there’s no time to lose, we’ll have to move on immediately.
Current Events
The final things we need to cover before we can start looking at the large cultures mostly come down to physical habitation and transport.
To recap and expand slightly:
The System is now a little over 1,100 [8,000] years old.
It is expanding through the galaxy in every direction at 0.1c.
It will take only 70k years [500k years] to fully integrate the Milky-Way.
The first wave of integration ships to neighbouring galaxies have already been launched (at 0.2c) but even the ones to Andromeda will have to sleep, or awkwardly wait, for almost 2 million years [10 million years] before they can get to work, so only the ASIs are really paying any attention to the letters they send home right now.
The majority of the 3 million integrated star-systems have at least a handful of citizens living there, but the majority of the population concentrate themselves in the rare systems which have at least one interesting thing to look at.
To cross today’s borders from one extreme to the other by the ferry network would take a substantially inconvenient 2,300 years [16k], but don’t fret! the local stellar neighbourhood is close enough for penpals and occasional holidays. 15 years [a century] on a sleeper ferry can go by a lot more comfortably than you might think! If you stay awake then you’ll even get a nice 0.5% time dilation discount!
The largest migration away from Sol so far has been to Betelgeuse, where a serious party has begun that intends to make the most of what time remains before the star explodes. Don’t worry, you can still make it if you want to go, you can start off with a long and lazy breakfast and still make it to the party in well under a millennium [~6k years], and the local System is engineering the finale to occur precisely on time to ring in the earth-year 100,000. [Please note: To avoid accidents and embarrassment, the party committee has requested that all attendees intending to wear the provided novelty glasses should practice walking with the required five eyes before arrival.]
[This wonderful podcast is a perfect introduction to the universe as geography:
A Podcast About The Entire History Of The Universe]
Local Affairs
For those current cultures that care about old history, the Sol system continues to be quite important.
Sol has at least half a dozen interesting planet-things in it, way more than the median of zero.
Earth is now kept as a museum, but you can still live on it if you want.
A full archaeological sweep has been done, and everything that survived history is now safe, catalogued, and studied - my favourite artefacts are the old ships, the particularly big dinosaur skeletons, and the libraries of recovered scandalous text.
There’s not many ‘animals’ left on Earth, only a few citizens who desire to live in an old fashioned way in a few small communities.
The plants are all still very happy though, and the insects are keeping busy as always.
Robots take care of everything that needs it. Most are tasteful ‘artificial’ bots, but for particular locations where a more authentic old world feel is desired there are non-conscious animal-shaped biological bots.
The Earth facing side of the moon is kept looking historically accurate.
The Diggers have tastefully (if dirtilly) developed settlements across the Moon’s backside, most of the remaining asteroid belt, half the aesthetically pleasing other moons, and well beyond Pluto and Charon.
Some of Mercury is still left - this is also now a museum that children find extremely boring when they visit it on school trips.
Mars is still red - something which made many early Diggers extremely upset, but which most present day Diggers find to be a huge relief.
Europa is a popular holiday destination in Sol, but I have a feeling you’re not going to like the reason.
Population and the majority demographics
Almost all citizens have mind-box brains, and because latency is still a concern for them they cannot spread too far.
For example, if you want to play an [hour] of full temporal resolution FDVR tennis against an opponent in mars orbit while you’re in earth orbit, then it will take 10 minutes for the data to travel between you. So for it to feel smooth and nice you both need to slow your consciousness speeds way down so that 10 minutes feels more like 10 milliseconds. If you do this then your quick game will cost you both [7 years].
So most people congregate their boxes together, usually in space structures that are not all that different to a large scaffold of cute little server racks wrapped up in a protective shell.
If you look at the average density of these population centres, then the rule of thumb is that you can comfortably keep about 10 trillion cits in a 1km wide sphere.
Sol has three completed 1km spheres, and a fourth is about 70% full.
Most of these 37 trillion citizens are fish (look, shoaling is quite important for a lot of them, okay?)
Actually, most of the wider population are fish too. In fact only 3% of newly integrated systems with native life do not start with a majority fish population.
I can see you are having a hard time accepting this sublime consequence of ethical reality… if it makes it easier then you can take comfort in the fact that the System is not a democracy, and even if it was, the fish really do not care one bit what the rest of us use the universe’s spare matter and energy for, so long as we don’t interrupt their swimming, eating, and spawning.
Only a few dozen systems have significant settlements so far, so current estimates place the total citizen population of the System at nearly 1.4 quadrillion.
Right, okay, calm down, yes I can see quite well that you’re only interested in the population of citizens you deem ‘intelligent’, (which I note you have conveniently defined such that it manages to include yourself). Are you always this rude after you take a nap?
Presently there are approximately 400 billion citizens of this description, and yes, I am going to take great pleasure in now informing you that the majority of these too are unapologetically aquatic.
[There's a place called Kokomo]
Wow that was a lot of fun to read! I have two questions:
- In regards to critters, are species capable of evolution at all? Or are they kept in more-or-less permanent stasis?
- Secondly, in "Stargazers" you mention sentient octopi and other such... minds? How does one determine what creatures are worthy of having their minds expanded, given that they seemingly can't develop larger minds on their own? Are you sorted into a "Potentially sentient" box as your species is discovered?
Thanks and I look forward to reading more!