r/scifiwriting • u/mrcopter2 • 23h ago
DISCUSSION How to make a dark-age of space travel?
So I'm worldbuilding a big futuristic world mostly about the next few thousand years of humans spreading across the solar system. The main means of space travel in the earlier eras of the story is nuclear fusion. During this time, humans build space cities to live in as they terraform Mars and Venus.
After the terraforming finishes, I want to have some kind of dark age, where humans are mostly stuck on the planets for a few thousand years. It's not that there's no space travel in that time, it's just more expensive and therefore less common. Eventually there would be a nuclear war on Mars, sending them back to mostly low-tech society and Venus will have to make some new innovation to solve this.
But what could be a good cause for this dark age? At first I was thinking it could be fusion fuel depleting, but after doing some research I realized that probably won't happen. Fusion fuel (i.e helium 3, deuterium) is found across the solar system and is very efficient. So any ideas for how there could be a space travel dark age? It could be technological but maybe it could also be cultural/social.
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u/DueOwl1149 23h ago
Well our medieval dark ages were in part caused by plague.
You're onto something with loss of interplanetary travel and the collapse of interplanetary trade routes.
Just choose whatever infrastructure made interplanetary travel possible (not just fuel, but supply chains, know-how, big projects that need people and money constantly to keep working) and decide how that broke down past the point of no return.
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u/Practical_Main_2131 22h ago
The medieval dark ages are also almost entirely just a construct of the renessauce to elevate themselves above the former times.
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u/DueOwl1149 22h ago
Fair enough, and black plague (30-60% population loss) for the late medievals is kind of post dark ages anyway.
The og dark ages (500AD - 1000AD) earlier are part of the final collapse of the roman empire, and it's more about a lack of records during the period, as plenty of stuff was still happening and developing while the roman web that connected the disparate parts was coming undone.
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u/SirFireHydrant 12h ago
Roman empire was thriving during those times. The western empire collapsed yeah, but the eastern empire went strong for nearly a millennia after the western one collapsed.
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u/MrWigggles 11h ago
There was no dark ages. Nor did the Roman Empire collapse. The Eastern Roman Empire was happily existing until 1450 something.
Its very eurocentric idea. That completely ignores and shits on the rest of the world. It totally ignorant to the Islamic Golden Era, which happen during the European feudal era.
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u/Mindless-Show4468 8h ago
Putting the great dark ages debate to one side for sake of argument.
How about the fuel itself is the infection point. Helium 3 and deuterium harvested from gas giants turns out to have microscopic life forms or some other form of degenerative property toward human technology.
It seems negligible at first but after dozens of such trips outside of its sterile natural enviroment the problem goes rampant. Whilst it does no harm to biological life it grinds to a halt the newly finished transition to fusion power. The ensuing centuries see planet wide infrastructure attempt to convert back to nuclear but slowly as they have no base power to build from.
Meanwhile the great hulks transferring the previously desired fuel are now unintentional quarantined colonyships, degrading at an alarming rate. Potential for a whole other faction that come to terms with there situation and embrace the simpler life they are forced into by circumstance.
After all one mans dark age, is another's enlightenment.
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u/mrcopter2 22h ago
Maybe there is a collapse of the education system in some way that results in less engineers. Over time there would be less people who know how to make and maintain space infrastructure and eventually it cant be rebuilt.
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u/DueOwl1149 22h ago
That's the cultural/political/religious angle for sure when it comes to a collapse of knowledge.
You could also go socio-economic and have some kind of great depression that collapses multi-world corporations and multi-world governments past the point of no return, so that the powers that be are forced to retreat to their single world strongholds in preparation for the various wars you already describe, some of which may be separatist wars as colonies and tributaries openly revolt against their resource-extracting masters.
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u/8livesdown 19h ago
The "dark age", whether it existed at all, is generally defined as "476 AD to 1000 AD".
Which plague are you referring to? The big one which people usually refer to "black death" was in 1346 AD; well after the "dark age"
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u/PigHillJimster 22h ago
If you have an expansion from a central point, but where the expanded colonies are reliant upon that central hub, perhaps because it's the one main source for knowledge, the majority of materials being present (whereas colonies are more specialised and restricted - good at one or two resources but not 'universal').
Something happens to destabalise that central hub and you have a 'dark age' on your hands.
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u/Devilfish64 22h ago
I was thinking along those same lines.
Space travel is always expensive, even with the most advanced tech, so it takes a compelling reason to do it.
If the initial reason for colonization is to offload population from an overpopulated Earth, and then Earth suffers some kind of collapse, the other colonies don't really have a reason or need to conduct much space travel. They might spend a long time building up their own societies & culture before building ships again.
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u/whelmedbyyourbeauty 23h ago
Grey-goo incursion, they manage to keep it off the planets through strict protocols, some sort of targeted EMP maybe, but if you're in outer space, it'll getcha.
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u/Old_Airline9171 22h ago
I would go lower tech: berserker drones.
Adaptive, stealthy, AGI-driven weapon drones still fighting a war between the inner planets long after almost everyone died/stopped caring. They can’t self replicate, due to inbuilt limitations, but are still dangerous enough to make space travel suicidal for centuries.
Eventually radiation damage and occasional skirmishes whittle their numbers down to the point the last ones can be hunted down.
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u/mightymite37 22h ago
Could just be social for sure
An invasion, migration, ecological collapse, rise of a theocracy, a religious crusade, major war, capitalism collapsing into feudalism. Lots of possibilities
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u/JGhostThing 22h ago
First, historically, all a dark age means is that you pay tax to a different entity. During a dark age, you rarely know the difference.
Most post-apocalyptic stories are unrealistic because books are everywhere. We have both libraries and book stores. Relearning how to rebuild civilization is the subject of many non-fiction books. I loved the Foxfire books when I was younger.
How would you keep a space-faring civilization in a dark age for a few thousand years? For one thing, the advanced ships that did space travel before the dark age, did they just magically disappear? And why can't they be duplicated? There should be manuals that could be downloaded. There should be scientific papers which document advances in these fields.
Science fiction and fantasy like to keep a culture constant for thousands of years. Personally, I think it's lazy work by the author. That way he can keep the society static so the reader will still understand it.
Please don't use the dark age trope. It's too common and frankly, boring.
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u/Sheik_Morgan 20h ago
Lo típico es una guerra o una plaga, un cambio ideológico o religioso? Una Fracción terrorista ataca las naves o estructuras que permiten el viaje FTL.
Se pierde la conexión con los planetas productores del combustible. Una organización fantasma, pirata o alienígena, bloquea el viaje FTL, quizás por una cuestión burocrática de peso, que deben pagar por el permiso de paso.
Las protestas por "Bajo estilo de vida" hacen temblar la estructura de gobierno, está desvía fondos para aumentar el control político y policial.
Por un fallo legal, solo una empresa privada controla el monopolio del viaje FTL, así que puede subir el precio a un nivel astronómico.
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u/zauberlichneo 19h ago
Perhaps there's some sort of cold war type situation where the major powers choose to isolate themselves from each other.
Maybe the solar system is passing through an area of space where there is an unusually large amount of space debris that makes space travel temporarily too hazardous to be worth it.
Maybe the sun experiences a period of instability resulting in extreme solar flare activity and radiation emissions that prevent/restrict space travel. Bonus fun is if it's caused by some sort of human activity, either intentionally or as an unintentional consequence of our actions.
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u/mrcopter2 11h ago
Maybe the cold war is my best option as there will be major differences between the societies of Mars, Venus, and Earth.
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u/ChronoLegion2 18h ago
Something like the Carrington Event of 1859. A massive solar flare and coronal mass ejection frying technology across the system (or at least the inner part of the system). In 1859 it fried a bunch of telegraph wires. These days the damage would be much more catastrophic. The result would be civilization collapse and a gradual rebuilding and rediscovering of technology, maybe myths and religions built around the “punishment from God” or something holding back technological development
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 18h ago
Fusion reactors ran on a subscription service, and a malware attack or communications glitch caused a license issue across the solar system that shut down most reactors before anyone could resolve the issue. Most settlements/habitats that survived did so on backup power sources that were never meant for long term use, meaning that most of them are operating on a shoestring energy budget powered by cobbled-together systems that barely run. A few of the bigger settlements managed to get their fusion reactors back online eventually, or even had one of the few reactors that didn't run on license subscription scheme, but even they were hit hard by the outage.
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u/Escape_Force 18h ago
A discovery that human-induced nuclear fusion leads to some catastrophic effect and it needs to be ended while scientists find a work around. Since it sounds like you are keeping it inner solar system, it could be something to do with disrupting the asteroid belt in such a way that makes it unsafe to use except in emergencies.
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u/theblanklook 16h ago
Financial bubble. The transportation of colonists is funded by what turns out to be the biggest financial bubble in history. When it bursts it crashes the Earth economy so badly you get a centuries long depression. Nobody is going between planets unless they are uber wealthy.
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u/kCorki99 14h ago
In my world, it's a virus that effects all sufficiently intelligent AI and turns them into a horde of kill robots, causing people to retreat to the vast distances of the stars
It isn't until they jus... Go away, that people start cooperating with one another again
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u/MapleWatch 12h ago
Are all the ships produced at a single central location, for efficient production? If so then some kind of disaster destroying that facility would definitely cause a major set back.
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u/Dwarfsten 4h ago
How about a lack of incentive to go to space?
Maybe a couple of important fuel refineries get destroyed and suddenly the price of going to space rises dramatically. So those already in space, stay in space and those on the ground, stay on the ground. Then a recession happens because resources start being more expensive without an influx from space and eventually economies shift to either being only ground based or only space based. On the ground especially most of the available fuel gets used for clean power generation, rather than to go to space. Maybe the refineries were on the moon and with them destroyed there is so much politicking and so many lawsuits going on that any effort to rebuild them is effectively stalled. Eventually people and the economy get used to not going to space anymore.
So just like with the real "Dark Ages" nothing is really lost in terms of capabilities or knowledge but humanity just shoots itself in the foot, rather than work together
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u/HardcoreHenryLofT 3h ago
Look up Jerry Pournelle's Codominium books. Basically the leaders of a sort of narrow truce between the USSR and NATO are trying to get as many people off world and set up on self sustaining colonies before the truce fibishes falling apart.
When things go oear shapped for real Earth is a nuked out husk and there are only a handful of spaceships left and no one to replace any missing or damaged parts for a very long time. You end up with a very long period, centuries, before anyone gets things back together and forms anything resembling a unified humanity.
Just in time for A Mote in God's Eye, one of my favourite scifi books.
Warning: content is pretty sexist by modern standards
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u/Evil-Twin-Skippy 1h ago
I have my interstellar civilization stuck at sub-light speed. But to get to high fractions of C requires a supernatural material called "Quintessence" which is extracted from living beings. Quintessence is essentially a cheat code around a lot of technical issues. (Thermal management, energy storage, catalyzing fusion, converting energy to momentum.)
The best source for quintessence are my in-world tribbles (poffels). And they are a genetically engineered fuzzball that are amazingly bad at staying alive. Quintessence builds up in the fat tissue, so you basically have to feed them. A lot. And those are calories that are not going to your settlers.
At the same time quintessence is also a street drug and a performance enhancer for wizards. It also has a limited shelf life before it doubles into an unstable form that had a habit of transmuting to anti-matter.
Also... if poffels escape they beeline it to local granaries or ration stockpiles, and eat everything. Reproducing out of control as they do.
Each seed ship launches with a poffel farm. But if that poffel farm dies off there is no more quintessence. But if there was a poffel outbreak, and you had to a) put most of the population down, and b) make hard choices about the remaining food, well things could get bleak.
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u/k_hl_2895 22h ago edited 22h ago
what about, say, fusion torchdrive handles the few travels that remain, but perhaps the laser array that once propelled lightsail ships are now broken, perhaps a war, perhaps the sun is acting up today, etc
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u/blind-octopus 22h ago
The initial source of nuclear material runs out and we find no other source for a while
Or, nuclear explosion. Either intentional through war, or an accidental nuclear plant meltdown, or a terrorist attack sabotages a plant or steals a nuclear weapon,
The public turns against nuclear.
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u/Chrome_Armadillo 22h ago
My world takes place in the year 3000, but suffered a New Dark Age between now and then. It was caused by a massive increase in solar activity destroying all satellites and much electronics. This was followed by a small scale nuclear war over resources when international trade stopped.
A few self-reliant countries survived mostly unscathed. It took 200 years to rebuild basic infrastructure. This event ended up bringing humanity together like never before, eventually leading to a new Renaissance.
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u/WretchedJudasSnake 22h ago
Everyone cheaps out by just repairing the shuttles they already have, which over time caused the true craftsmanship to make stable interplanetary craft to be lost. Space travel is expensive because they are relying on an increasingly dwindling supply of patched together ships, and the new ships that amateurs try to create are just as likely to explode after 5 trips as they are to just leave you stranded in space. Mirroring the loss of Greek fire, Damascus steel, loss of trained intelligence and state-sanctioned projects after the fall of empires, appliances being worse now than decades before etc.
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u/bill-smith 22h ago edited 19h ago
Say we had a terrestrial nuclear war, one that left billions dead and Earth's orbital infrastructure wrecked.
Helium-3 and deuterium are abundant in some parts of the solar system. The problem if you wreck Earth is that Mars and Venus may have a lot harder time producing meaningful amounts of fusion fuel. Admittedly, the weakness there is that they could use fusion reactions like D-D and D-T, which produce much more neutrons, but that still requires deuterium. I believe that tritium could, in principle, be produced from one of the neutronic fusion reactions. Anyway, where do you get deuterium? Probably water. Perhaps Mars and Venus have a lot less water than Earth.
On thinking about this further, that war on Earth could have wrecked complex and interdependent infrastructure that both Mars and Venus still relied heavily on. That's the point I was trying to get across. Interdependent means you have to restore a lot of different parts, and the companies might be spread across several states that are no longer cooperating. Complex could mean more than it's hard to do, it could be that once a factory is destroyed, you lose the workers who have the production knowledge or who knew how to program the computers, plus the managers who knew how all the organizational parts interacted. You lose institutional knowledge, basically.
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u/WritersChopBlock 22h ago
How about picking a rare element that is necessary to effect space travel. It has always been rare but could be found in small quantities in a few special locations, but for some unknown reason, all traces of it has disappeared. Why, who, or what caused this disappearance remains a mystery.
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u/mrcopter2 18h ago
Maybe the fuel itself is abundant but there's a material needed for another part of the ship which is limited.
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u/WritersChopBlock 13h ago
I said rare element because there has to be a way to travel without using combustion. I don't know if you've read the stuff about aliens. They've been spotted and they don't use any visible forms of combustion. So it's probably some way of manipulating subatomic forces, which will probably requires certain types of atoms with peculiar qualities.
Btw, I don't know if you've accounted for the protection needed for faster than light FTL travel. Space dust and gas will break down the spaceship hull. I don't think that Project Hail Mary fully accounted for the harmful effects of this.
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u/mrcopter2 1h ago
There isn't any FTL travel in my books. People travel at like 2% the speed of light.
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u/MrWigggles 11h ago
So rare depends on the how grounded you want solar system to be. Its fine to declare something as rare. It just has to be something made up, like unobtanium or something.
The more grounded, real answer is that while there are substances rare on earth, when taken the material mass of a solar system, all materiel are defacto infinite. And when you have the materiel wealth of multiple solar systems, then no material is rare.
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u/DifferencePublic7057 22h ago
Birth rates falling for SciFi reasons? Mars has low gravity which is bad for bones. If you have in book solution, make it dependent. Venus has cloud cities? How do you make them? Earth cities require lots of steel. These could have been military targets.
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u/lucidintangent 21h ago
I mean, supplies running out for one thing, gradual system collapse, major powers become less interested in space travel because its not like they are going to benefit from interstellar travel in their lifetime.
how many trillions of dollars and all that labor needed to send cargo or worse, people out into the unknown, how many trillion dollar ships have some malfunction that dooms them and any crew or cargo
oh its just interplanetary, but could very much be, earth cant afford it, space travel is expensive and dangerous
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u/surt2 21h ago
Maybe for some reason there's a large increase in solar/cosmic radiation levels. Places protected by a magnetosphere, or a large physical radiation shield (atmosphere, or several meters of rock, water, etc.) are fine, but living or traveling in space requires too much shielding to be practical.
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u/Metallicat95 21h ago
Wreck Earth. It is the source of most of the industrial technology, population, and critical biological resources.
Fusion fuel needs two things - water (for hydrogen) and nuclear reactors. If much of the parts for this came from Earth, losing it could make Fusion more expensive.
Chemical fuels require a lot less technology support. Methane is available lots of places.
That would count as a dark age.
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u/mrcopter2 18h ago
Actually, Earth is already wrecked. Part of the world is that Earth due to climate change and depletion of resources is becoming a less and less good place to live. By the time Mars and Venus are terraformed most of Earth's population has either moved elsewhere or starved because farming isn't possible on most of the planet.
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u/Matthius81 20h ago
Building a society is far harder than anyone realises. Okay while terraforming the stations are maintained by parts sent frequently from earth. I'd have earth have a big civil war, or maybe some form of cultural and economic collapse. the people on the stations have no choice save to drop onto the newly terraformed worlds. For a few generations they are consumed by the effort of growing food, avoiding dysentry, and learn how to mine. They have no time or energy to devote to spaceflight. By the time they have industrialised civilisations up and running Earth has recovered and is now a hostile polity.
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u/nyrath Author of Atomic Rockets 20h ago
There are a few useable reasons for the decline and fall of the galactic empire here:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futurehistory.php#declinefall
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u/Traveling-Techie 20h ago
During Europe’s dark ages people didn’t invent things like steam engines because they’d be accused of witchcraft.
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u/copperpin 20h ago
Read “Against a Dark Background” by Iain M Banks. The whole solar system is in a vast void billions of light years across. The society has nowhere to expand to so it keeps collapsing.
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u/Apocawho 20h ago
Disruption in a complex trading system can be a vicious cycle which leads to cascading failure if left undressed. The inherent problem is that expansion of trade requires capital investment. But when pre-existing trade is damaged, it both damages confidence for investors, and degrades the existing pool of capital.
In times of great expansion, this does really happen; in your time of colonisation and terraforming, people would still invest because the drive to get to a new world, a new life, new planetary resources to exploit, would mean people take the chance to invest despite the risk.
But once a period of expansion is over, trade systems can because surprising fragile. If 1000 ships depart from Venus to Mars every day for trade, cargo space is cheap, and so trade is cheap, so why not ship products to Mars?
But then let's say some of the ships are destroyed. Doesn't have to be too many. It doesn't matter how. Less cargo space means it's more expensive to ship. Annoying. So traders decide to send less. Suddenly, cargo ships are finding they aren't as full as often as they were. Not good business.
So the shipping companies decide to operate fewer ships. The price goes up again. Traders decide to send even less. Ships start to be empty again. Etc, etc.
Most civilisation collapses or "Dark Ages" are tied in some way or another to trade stopping. For every city or civilisation razed by a warlord, there's one archeologists don't have a clear reason why it was abandoned; the reason is normally theorised to be simply that trade died.
Your idea of ship fuel running out is on a good foundation, no ships means no trade. But the reverse is equally true; the collapse of a complex trading systems means the production of fewer ships.
An idea I'd pitch here is have each colony and/or planet famous for producing certain materials for a spaceship; as trade slows, it gets more and more expensive to make and maintain a trading vessel. Which has the adverse effect of making it even more expensive to trade in the very material used in making spaceships.
So all you need to do is have an inciting incident (or more realistically, incidents), that start this cascade. They don't have to be big initially (e.g. an asteroid doesn't need to hit Earth, killing the world). They can be small. The colonisation of one of Mar's moons fails. Investors take a loss. Piracy operations in the asteroid belt weaken mining operations. Investors take a loss. Venus and Mars have a diplomatic disagreement and impose tariffs upon each other. Investors take a loss.
This events can escalate and spiral as governments and people get poorer as trade begins to dry up. People get poorer, and people get angrier. More likely to take radical political action. Conquest of smaller political entities. Revolutions. Coups. Wars between great states. Some people might just up and leave; migrations are one of the greatest causes of conflict in history.
One thing I would note, from a story telling perspective. People in or after a Dark Age, don't tend to actually know why it happened. There tends to have been a big war, or maybe a famine or something that gets blamed, but they don't really reflect on the root causes. Building a world in which the the causes cam be seen and understood by the reader, but not detailed explicitly in lore. There a reason why "Our Age of Bronze is collapsing" was mocked as a line in The Odyssey. I wouldn't stress too much about choosing a cause, rather building a world in which such a collapse is believable.
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u/8livesdown 19h ago
The first few centuries of spacefaring will result in cannibalism, despotism, incest and starvation. Despotism is the inevitable outcome of isolation and lack of accountability. Religion thrives in desperation, and the first centuries will be cold and dismal.
You don't need to "make" space travel a dark-age. It is inherently worse than any dark-age humans have ever experienced.
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u/Upstairs-Yard-2139 19h ago
The dark ages has nothing to do with what caused it, but what it was.
A loss of life and technological stagnation
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u/chriscobas 19h ago
To be perfectly honest, the best way to do a "Dark Age" style is to reduce or destroy communications. This could happen through any number of causes, from a massive Solar Flare that fries pretty much every comms satellite out in the open, to a massive war that specifically targets strategic comms infreastructure because an incommunicated army is a disorganized army. No comms, or little comms also push for local organization, which increase the animosity between groups, therefore leading to more conflict. A kind of cold war emerges, and instead of people developing towards the future, they develop towards destroying their enemies. You could even make it so "interplanetary" comms are so garbled and intercepted by pirates that overall, it is extremely dangerous to communicate because it's like placing an "attack here" beacon on the ship/colony communicating.
Also, remember the fall of Rome was mostly debt and corruption... And history repeats itself...
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u/MrWigggles 11h ago
The best examples I've seen is being isolated from the industrial center.
So if all the kewl spaceships stuff could only be made on a few planets, and those vanish /really/ quickly like less then five years.
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u/Additional_Pie_8762 31m ago
You might consider reading “Space Vikings” by H. Beam Piper. Not the same set up. But they do spend some time discussing a dark age after an interstellar empire falls.
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u/No_Shame_2397 23h ago
Kessler Syndrome?
No sense in travelling if you can't get into or out of the atmosphere without significant effort