Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-3257939-20151009080148/@comment-24891101-20151011024240

Live: Because otherwise you have to throw all your expectations regarding fiction. Is that character about to turn into a werewolf? A unicorn? A robot? A planet? You have to have a baseline. That baseline is our world, because otherwise your intuitions don't work at all. Plus, a you start modifying things, so many other things change, and you need to account for those changes. It is too complex a system to properly model, otherwise.

It is also an application of Ockham's Razor; we have no evidence that a world which has given rise to things like our own (people, ecosystems, societies) is unlike our own, because otherwise those things would not emerge. Because those things exist, it is assumed that the processes which led to them are broadly similar, unless we are told otherwise, because there is no justification for assuming otherwise.

You throw out too much if you can't have starting assumptions. And if you contest every single little detail that is not explained to us, those are what you are challenging.