Hello Amethyst Angel 🌼 . Thank you for entering this month's contest.

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Grill a Christian  (13+) Time & Eternity. Circular, linear, or multiversal? How should we measure time's passage? #2327636 by LightinMind

As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Saving Planet Ultima" . Congratulations on your victory in this month's contest.

Did you answer the question?

You focused on how faith might address the challenges of being a multiplanetary species, and specifically how it might minister to the technocratic challenge of an AI-based theocracy that had stifled the possibility of real human interaction and community with God and each other. Your story showed how it was possible to recontextualise faith even to the false utopias that man might build on other worlds.

Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?

The story was distinctively your own.

How consistent was your argument?

You argued that technocracy had stifled the faith and interaction of human beings on the planet to the point where it was degrading the capacity to be a human being. People lived out their lives in tiny bubbles in which their most meaningful interaction was with their personal AI, itself connected to the larger AI governance of the planet. The answer was to restore real community with God and each other, starting with a prayer meeting.

My thoughts on the substance of what you said

Right now, I am especially interested in how the British dismantled the Qing dynasty in China in the 19th century. The Chinese have a long history of state dominance. This is a state dominance that exists to a considerable extent under a theologically speaking empty sky. This dominance was not externally challenged to any significant extent except by the theologically disappointing Mughals in the 13th century and the Christian British in the 19th Century. So in both cases, the reason was military, and in the case of the British, arguably, the superiority of Christian civilisation as a cultural idea also had a considerable impact, challenging the very core of Chinese society, for example, in the heretical Taiping Rebellion led by the "brother of Christ" that may have cost as many as 100 million lives. But your story was more akin to the story of how Christians converted Rome, with small congregations of devout Christians leading the way. The story was pleasant and easy with no bloodshed, and one would hope that the citizens of Ultima would receive the Good news of the Gospel with aching hearts rendered open by loneliness and a grace released by prayer. It seems this AI was less inclined to feed people to lions or burn them at the stake for public spectacle than to isolate them in clinically cold bubbles controlled by its server farms.

I have read various psychological texts recently that speak about how human affirmation and reinforcement maximise productivity, e.g., the Hawthorne effect. People need to know they matter to others and that their work is meaningful. I suspect that an AI would notice the general decline in productivity over time and also high suicide rates in such a culture as Ultima. In some ways, your words were a challenge to the times we live in also as technological isolation has reduced the quality of real human interaction.

I liked the recontextualisation of the Lord's prayer in this line:
”Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Ultima, as it is in heaven…”

Part of my question was to do with why we should go into space in the first place. You did not address this, but assumed that it would be possible one day via wormholes and that it would happen quite simply. That assumption was never justified in this text, and no theological reason for human expansion was given. Indeed, the impulse to build the cityscape of Ultima in the first place seemed more atheistic and utopian and Christianity only came later. Looking at the example of Spanish conquests in South America and the British colonisation of North America, the role of religion in justifying the annexation of territory and providing the resilience for early settlers to overcome in their first Winters in the New World was crucial. I doubt that Ultima could have ever thrived in the first place on such an empty rationale as the one provided by soulless AIs.

I liked the imagery you used of this cold, sterile world with its steel cityscape. It lacked life, and the presentation of the life of Christ in the Gospel had an added effect in such a lifeless landscape.

Another part of my question related to how the human design could cope with transport to another planet where radiation, gravity and alien toxins might well extinguish it in short order. Jeff Bezos envisages O'Neill cylinders spinning to provide 1G gravity with radiation shielding and the provision of ideal Earth-like conditions - Musk, by contrast, thinks we could live on Mars. Your answer, which married the two ideas, was to craft a world in which technology answered all of these attacks on human survivability. The AI in your story answered the question of survival, but provided no conditions in which humans could thrive and grow as people in personal relationships with each other and God. Your protagonists answer that desperate need in bringing the Gospel to Ultima and attempting to open up the reduced bubbles of human existence to the wider possibility of love and joy that comes from connecting with others.


Mechanical issues

Very well written.


Thanks again for entering.
LightinMind

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My Philosophy of Rating and Reviewing  (E) How do I assess people's work when reviewing? #2259390 by LightinMind

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .