Outside Context Problem

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An Outside Context Problem or an OCP is any problem outside a given group's (organisation, society, culture or civilisation) experience, with an immediate, ubiquitous and lasting impact upon it. An OCP is "outside the context" as it is generally not considered until it occurs, and the capacity to actually conceive of or consider the OCP in the first place may not be possible or very limited (i.e., the majority of the group's population may not have the knowledge or ability to realize that the OCP can arise or assume it is extremely unlikely). An example of OCP is an event where a civilization does not consider the possibility that a much more technologically advanced society can exist, and then encounters one. The term was coined by Iain M. Banks in his novel Excession:

"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."

For a small civilization dealing with their own problems, suddenly being threatened by a much larger, more technologically sophisticated civilization would be an OCP. There have been some examples of cultures encountering such problems in the course of human history, such as the scenario alluded to by Banks: the discovery of America, and the subsequent conquests of South and Central America by the Conquistadores. Another real-world historical example of OCP would be the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's "Black Ships" to Japan in 1853, which eventually precipitated the Meiji Restoration and radically transformed Japanese society. It was an event that was almost unimaginable to the Japanese until it actually happened.

A possible example of an OCP that may affect our current civilization would be an unexpectedly appearing threat of another asteroid (or comet) impact on Earth. Another conceivable OCP example would be the arrival on Earth of space-travelling extraterrestrials. A technological singularity would be another clear example of an OCP, though it differs from extraterrestrial contact or near-earth object collisions in that modern humans would likely be able to determine its approach, although we could never anticipate its outcome.

Science fiction literature has many examples of OCP situations. Some examples of stories in which OCPs are an important feature are: