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Terminally Dependent Society: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
An entire ship, city, society, planet or galaxy that depends on a single piece of [[Phlebotinum]] to survive. This piece of phlebotinum can take any form: It may be a [[Master Computer]][[hottip:*:Or [[Truth in Television|The Internet]] that [[Big Brother Is Watching|sees all]] and [[The Evils of Free Will|plans everyone's day]], a [[Hive Queen]] or [[Fisher King]] keeping the subjects in a [[Lotus Eater Machine]], a [[Genius Loci]] that maintains a [[Ghibli Hills]] [[Utopia]], or a [[The Lifestream|spiritual source of life]]. More mundane depictions might use it as the energy for [[Faster
Then it breaks down. Or disappears. Or becomes sentient and decides to [[Kill All Humans]], [[Deus Est Machina|play games]] [[The Computer Is Your Friend|with them]], or worse, [[My Beloved Smother|smother them with love]]. Or it [[Assimilation Plot|absorbs all lifeforms into itself]] and [[A God Am I|becomes a God.]] And everyone who depended on it is now doomed. The technology that was used before the machine was invented has long since been forgotten, or the dying life source makes the citizens magically ill, or it's simply grown too strong and humanity has become too weak to fight back. This is especially common when the Phlebotinum is [[Powered By a Forsaken Child]].
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* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode "Revisions", the computer was sending people to their deaths one by one as the power available fell below the levels required to support the population. It also altered their memories to make sure no one knew what was going on. Also interesting because the computer tricked the population into thinking they couldn't live without being constantly connected to it through an internet-like link, making everyone think they were even more dependent on it than they really were.
** The Goa'uld are completely dependent on their queens to reproduce. Similarly the Jaffa are, for most of the early seasons, dependent on juvenile Goa'uld inside them.
* In the ''[[
* The 2007 ''[[Flash Gordon (TV)|Flash Gordon]]'' TV series featured Mongo as a [[Hydraulic Empire]] controlled by Ming, who had The Source, the only supply of drinkable water on the entire planet (except for the polar caps, which he controlled through a usurper in the polar regional government).
** And that Source appears to be slowly running out. Which is why he's trying to develop interdimentional travel to {{spoiler|steal Earth's water}}.
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== Real Life ==
* There are a little over seven billion people on this planet; before the nineteenth century it was a few hundred million, reaching the one billion mark around 1800 and still less than two billion in 1900, and ''more doubled in the last 50 years''. Without our advanced technology, most of us would ''die''. '''Horribly'''.
** [
*** By extension, oil, whose production is believed to have peaked.
*** And all the monocultured staple crops such as corn and wheat. If disease or climate change devastates them...
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* As seen in [[Crippling Overspecialization]], many animal species are terminally dependent on a specific food or environment, such as giant pandas (bamboo) and polar bears (the vanishing sea ice).
* Easter Island. The palm forests were wiped out not by over-logging, but by introduced rats.
* A government that takes advantage of this is known as a [
* Raise your hands, tropers: how long could you stay sane if the internet up and disappeared?
* Earthlike planets actually cannot support life without liquid water on its surface. If its parent star actually starts to leave the main-sequence stage, said planet's temperature will actually exceed that of the boiling point of water, and the results will be self-explanatory. Also, plate tectonics cannot exist without liquid oceans. Guess what happens in about 1 billion years!
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[[Category:Older Than Television]]
[[Category:Terminally Dependent Society]]
[[Category:
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