I’m not sure what you mean, either in-universe or in the real world.
In-universe, the Culture isn’t all powerful. Periodically they have to fight a real war, and there are other civilizations and higher powers. There are also any number of ways and places where Culture citizens can go in order to experience danger and/or primitivism. Are you just saying that you wouldn’t want to live out your life entirely within Culture habitats?
In the real world… I am curious what preference for the fate of human civilization you’re expressing here. In one of his novels, Olaf Stapledon writes of the final and most advanced descendants of Homo sapiens (inhabiting a terraformed Neptune) that they have a continent set aside as “the Land of the Young”, a genuinely dangerous wilderness area where the youth can spend the first thousand years of their lives, reproducing in miniature the adventures and the mistakes of less evolved humanity, before they graduate to “the larger and more difficult world of maturity”. But Stapledon doesn’t suppose that his future humanity is at the highest possible level of development and has nothing but idle recreations to perform. They have serious and sublime civilizational purposes to pursue (which are beyond the understanding of mere humans like ourselves), and in the end they are wiped out by an astronomical cataclysm. How’s that sound to you?
It sounds like Stapledon’s scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.
I’m not sure what you mean, either in-universe or in the real world.
In-universe, the Culture isn’t all powerful. Periodically they have to fight a real war, and there are other civilizations and higher powers. There are also any number of ways and places where Culture citizens can go in order to experience danger and/or primitivism. Are you just saying that you wouldn’t want to live out your life entirely within Culture habitats?
In the real world… I am curious what preference for the fate of human civilization you’re expressing here. In one of his novels, Olaf Stapledon writes of the final and most advanced descendants of Homo sapiens (inhabiting a terraformed Neptune) that they have a continent set aside as “the Land of the Young”, a genuinely dangerous wilderness area where the youth can spend the first thousand years of their lives, reproducing in miniature the adventures and the mistakes of less evolved humanity, before they graduate to “the larger and more difficult world of maturity”. But Stapledon doesn’t suppose that his future humanity is at the highest possible level of development and has nothing but idle recreations to perform. They have serious and sublime civilizational purposes to pursue (which are beyond the understanding of mere humans like ourselves), and in the end they are wiped out by an astronomical cataclysm. How’s that sound to you?
It sounds like Stapledon’s scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.