New collab, as discussed in this thread. Have fun, folks.
Project Heimdall / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Project Heimdall.
The aliens do not come in peace. At least, that's what we're assuming. Why? Well, first, the Foundation would probably assume hostility first and shake hands in friendship later.
So Project Heimdall policy is to destroy any alien spacecraft that come near Earth as soon as they're detected, and apologize to the aliens later if it turns out that they're peaceful?
I strongly suggest that everyone involved reads this TvTropes article. It is basically the Evil Overlord list of planetary invasion. Full of ideas and pitfalls to avoid.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HowToInvadeAnAlienPlanet
Hostile Extraterrestrials (HEs) will possess no technology forbidden by the laws of physics.
Since both Dr Wondertainment and The Factory can mass-produce anomalies, I don't think this would be a reasonable assumption. I think better rationals for this point would be: 1) you can't do any planning if you throw into the scenario "the HEs might have lots and lots of unknown anomalies, which being unknown could be capable of anything", and 2) if the HEs have mass-produced anomalous technology and weapons then Earth/humanity is unavoidably screwed, so we should focus our planning on scenarios where there's actually a chance of avoiding becoming screwed.
[With sincerity rather than sarcasm] Sounds like the basis of a dissenting article right there. If you did a good job with writing it up, I'd probably even upvote it myself.
I'll reiterate my out-of-universe reasoning for the assumption, though:
Basically, this means we're aiming for "hard" science fiction. Why? (Especially when so much of this wiki is "soft" science fiction?)
- There are a surprising dearth of alien invasion stories which have any sort of grounding in real-world science.
- The goal here is not to worldbuild anomalous science fiction aliens and technology or claim alien origin of existing SCPs. Do NOT use SCPs as the hypothetical aliens or alien tech. No, not even especially not 682.
- Who knows what sort of aliens might exist, and how they might better understand the universe and its natural laws than humanity? But don't sell humans too short. The Foundation is one of the world's foremost scientific entities and has access to entities which defy conventional understanding of scientific laws. And yet the Foundation still operates under the basic assumption that the scientific laws known by the non-affiliated scientific community are correct (or at minimum less wrong than any other known alternative) except in a tiny handful of cases. The point is, SCPs are anomalies which may be impossible to replicate, no matter what galaxy you're from.
- There's plenty of reason to be downright terrified of scientifically plausible extraterrestrial threats; from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes more sense to develop plans for fighting the devil that you know first.
- Perhaps most significantly, assuming hard science for aliens and their technology keeps all collaborators on the same page.
Also, there's no indication that Heimdall is the only contingency planning the Foundation is doing related to extraterrestrials. They might probably would have other contingency plans for the various "what-ifs" of soft-scifi alien invasions. Beyond the aforementioned reasons, I'm trying to avoid incurring the wrath of Senior Staff by opening the floodgates to bad articles on lolphysics that are only tangentially related to what this site is actually about.
Are these going to be written as documents or as tales or both?
Meh.
I really don't think this is the right place for stories about alien invasions.
Admin, SCP Wiki
Would it be in terribly bad taste to have a personal character involved in an added story in a non-critical role? (Mostly because after several weeks of DMing an off-the-rails Dungeons and Dragons campaign, my ability to create new and interesting characters on the fly is becoming strained)
/forum/t-511485/project-heimdall#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06