CONCEPT
Solaria
The Spacer world in Asimov's The Naked Sun — twenty thousand humans on ten thousand vast estates, each served entirely by robots, where physical human contact has become culturally unbearable. The fictional limit case of automation dependence.
Solaria is one of the fifty Spacer worlds humans colonized before Earth retreated into its Cities. Its founders chose a low population density — twenty thousand humans on a habitable planet larger than Earth — and supplemented human labor entirely with robots. Each Solarian lives on an estate averaging ten million square kilometers, served by hundreds of robots, rarely meeting another human in person across a centuries-long lifespan. The arrangement has produced a culture in which physical human presence is taboo, reproduction is managed by geneticists, and the capacity for cooperative action has atrophied to the point where solving a single murder requires importing a detective from Earth.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Solaria is not a dystopia in the conventional sense. Its residents are longer-lived than Earthers, better educated, materially unprecedented in their wealth, and — by their own reports — content. The novel's argument is not that they are suffering; it is that the