The Alien World, 2954: The Academies…

As I explained before, the settlement on Lalande is composed of 17 distinct copies of the original moon base. Each holds a university and research center which, on the moon, was called simply the Aldrin Academy.

Now the 17 Academies are just called “The Academy” when referring to the local version, or “Academy XII”, for instance, to refer to the one that can be found in moon base XII. All academies are independent and distinct, and have a separate administration. This is a strict requirement that came into force after the troubles caused by the Guild of the Old Earth.

The Academies are in a constant state of friendly competition, on education and research, but also on the sports side, and the Academy Leagues of many sports are closely followed by many citizens of the moon bases. Sometimes friendly competitions flare up, but rarely to the point of violence. Students and professors participate in conferences on various topics and in exchange programs between the academies.

The Academies cover all topics relevant to life on Lalande: engineering, medicine, teaching, law and politics as well as of course a large part of research on the Aliens. Despite almost non-existent success in communicating with the aliens or interfacing with their technology, a general portrait of the biology of the Aliens and of their crop species have been drawn up. Scientists know how the Aliens work, biologically, but are still at a loss to be able to understand their behavior. They still seem highly intelligent, even after 300 years of unsuccessful communication attempts, and humans have managed to tap some of the technology of the aliens to bring some advances in energy use and production, in medicine, and in part in space travel.

Alien World, 2954: The Guild of the Old Earth

Among the colonists of Lalande, once the long trip was over and that they were settled in their Moon base “habitat”, a group formed that was advocating a return to Earth as soon as possible in order to share the technologies they could salvage from the Alien world. The group called themselves the Guild of the Old Earth, and rose to power quickly among the colonists.

As years passed, it became evident that communication with the aliens was all but impossible, and that the technologies they used were very closely linked to their distributed computing biology, and was hardly understandable, and even less applicable, by humans. The Guild held true to it’s aim, however, and became a major driving force behind the university research centers, trying to crack the communication barrier with the aliens and to understand their technologies, in order to stage a return to earth and a transfer of technologies for the benefit of all mankind.

As the colony grew, and new moon bases were built by the aliens, multiplying the university centers, diverging opinions started to form. Some wanted to sever the ties with earth completely, some wanted to use the alien technologies they were deciphering to rule the solar system and a third group wanted to keep true to the original aim of the Guild: using the Alien technologies for the benefit of all.

What stared as diverging academic opinions became bitter disputes, and almost degenerated into civil war as the Guild was split into three factions. Moon base copies were isolated, each under one of the factions of the Guild, and armed conflict was averted when the Council of Mayors dissolved the Guild and reuniting the Moon bases.

To this day the Guild is outlawed, but rumors of secret societies surface once in a while, and the three factions are still reflected in the opinions of populations and academicians.

Alien World, 2954: The Prometheus…

The human colonists plan a return trip to Earth, three centuries after the departure. After studying the Alien technologies they have managed to reverse-engineer some of the essential systems, mainly the engines. The return ship, called the “Prometheus”, is much smaller than the Alien ship that took to colonists to Lalande. It has room for the 800 members of the expedition who have private or family cabins. The length of the voyage back means that families are expected to form and break during the course of the voyage, and kids will be born on the way.

The ship thus has a full-blown clinic, a daycare and school center, in addition to the space needed to grow the food for the whole crew. The majority of the volume of the ship is occupied at launch by fuel and the engines, but as fuel tanks are emptied, they are to be “reclaimed” for human occupation.

The pride of the Prometheus is the Nova engine. Adapted from Alien technology, it is one step further than simple fusion drives, using extremely high pressures to push the nuclear reaction further, creating Iron from Hydrogen, and simulating the energy release of a supernova explosion, further pushing nucleosynthesis and creating heavier elements, on the one hand, and releasing phenomenal amounts of energy. The technology for this is highly secretive and only a handful of crew members know how to work the engines.

The high tech engine is the inspiration for the name of the ship: just as Prometheus brought fire to humanity, thus the ship is bringing back the Nova engine to mankind.

The Alien World, 2954: human-alien relations…

From the first contact the the Aliens, back in 2654, humans have realized that they were very little like the aliens they had imagined. They seemed highly intelligent, since they obviously had very advanced technology and were able to travel at great speeds between stars, but they didn’t exhibit any exterior sign of communication, either between them or towards the humans.

The complete radio silence of their ship on approach and their lack of response to all attempts to communicate with them seemed to indicate the same lack on communication capability the hypoteses of the scientists were varied, but the one that got the most attention was that the aliens were some kind of advanced animal, shaped purely by evolution, which evolved their advanced technologies over long periods of time (they could, given the age of the universe had a headstart of many billions of years over Earth life). However, the construction of an exact working replica of the nearest moon base inside their ship hinted at something else. They were clearly adaptable, capable of creation, but the apparent lack of communication didn’t match the concepts that mankind considered essential for the development of an advanced civilization.

Over time, humans studied the aliens they were in contact with very closely: they were very docile, and lent themselves to all examinations very candidly. What was discovered was a little disconcerting. The aliens did not indeed communicate through ideas and concepts, which means that they were incapable of holding a conversation, for instance, the were all connected together through a network of electrical impulses. Their prodigious intelligence came from the fact that each individual was part of a distributed computing network, in a way. Computer metaphors for living brains are far from ideal, but where the human brain was designed as a central processing unit dealing with only the inputs and outputs of it’s local system, the Aliens were designed as the myriad of processing units inside a super computer.

So, taking that metaphor, humans tried to find the terminal and the language they could use to tap into the Alien living network, and try to communicate to the higher, hive mind. But the computer metaphor didn’t hold, unfortunately. The Aliens were connected in the same way the neurons in the human brain are connected. It’s the whole system that gives the whole it’s emergent properties of intelligence and consciousness.

But humans persevered in trying to communicate with the aliens, which were evidently very interested in the welfare of the human colonists, since they constructed the replica moon bases and supplied it with ample energy. In the base’s forth copy, the aliens built an odd structure, a pedestal with a bundle of hundreds of bio-metal wires coming out of it. Engineers, computer experts, biophysicians, psychologists have all tried to work out a way to understand the connection and to build a human interface for the Alien system.

To this day, that system hasn’t yet been developed, and at each new copy of the moon base the aliens construct the same connector.

The humans are free to exit the moon bases, and the aliens sometimes come into the human colony, but interactions are never more than brief spurts of attention from the aliens. There has been a long debate on the aim of the Aliens when they brought the human colony to Lalande, was the colony some sort of experiment? Were they being kept for amusement, as animals in a zoo? Did the alien hive mind have some sort of greater plan for them? This idea of the greater plan of the hive mind rang true to many, and cults pop up from time to time who preach the benevolence and mysteries of the hive mind.

Many questions remain, but the most pressing is this: is there a hive mind? Is there a higher consciousness in the Aliens, trying to communicate with the humans?

The Alien World, 2954…

This is one of the most challenging settings of my story, because I cannot just extrapolate from today, but let’s see what I can do with it:

The Alien world is a large rocky planet orbiting the red dwarf star Lalande 21185. It is a bit larger than the Earth, but much denser, with a lot of iron, which means that gravity at it’s surface is roughly twice that of Earth. It is on a very close orbit, so the gravitational forces from the star submit the planet to very strong tidal forces, keeping the planet highly geologically active. The planet has a strong magnetic field that emanates from it’s central iron core dynamo, much like Earth’s.

The Aliens have dug an extensive network of tunnels and underground chambers where they cultivate the organisms that they use as food. A large part of the life of the Aliens is spent colonizing new worlds similar to this one: rocky worlds orbiting red dwarves, which entails a lot of space travel, hopping from one system to the other. They construct their ships on the surface of the planets, in cavities that are gradually dug out for materials. Once the ships are finished, they are sitting on top of rock spires in the middle of craters.

The human colonists arrive on the planet in the Alien ship, and the Aliens construct a replica of the Moon base where the humans come from. They thus have all the services and resources that they had on the moon in a base occupied by 10 000 people. The Alien replicas are functionally the same as the originals, so maintenance and repair of systems can be carried out by the humans.

The Aliens area highly decentralized yet organized society, and things are done as needed. When resources grow thin, they move deeper, or expand their network, abandoning the unproductive tunnels behind them. It takes millions of years to strip mine a planet, but as a planet’s resources are exhausted, additional ships are built, and the Aliens move on to another red dwarf. They have been going through the same pattern for the last few billion years, and are very efficient at it.

The human colony on Lalande has grown a lot in the almost three centuries that it has been occupying the planet. The Aliens have been keeping a close watch on the growth of the colony, and when the colony becomes too crowded, the Aliens construct another copy of the moon base for the human colony to expand in. The Lalande Colony now occupies 18 distinct copies of the original moon base. Human society on Lalande is a highly eclectic group of people, governed through an elected council. The tradition that developed was that each new copy of the base would get an elected council and a mayor, and that the mayor or each copy would sit on a high council which would take the general decisions.

Since the original moon base had a university, a sports center, cinemas, shopping district, etc, there are now 18 copies of all of these things. The colonists have kept the original design and destination of most installations, which makes for lively sports leagues, and healthy competition between universities. Some services were not available at the original moon base, many manufactured products for instance were imported from Earth or from the larger Moon Cities. The inhabitants have developed methods to obtain clothes, cultivate food, etc. The lack of some luxuries make for a rather spartan lifestyle compared to life on the Moon, but all basic necessities are available to all.

More on the Human/Alien interactions another day.

Alien World, 2678

The Alien world is, to humans, truly alien.

A large rocky moon, twice the size of Earth, orbiting a gas giant, on a relatively close orbit, close enough for the tidal forces and the magnetic field of the giant to generate a lost of thermal energy in the moon’s core, and the molten iron core of the moon generates incredible amounts of electro-magnetic energy, which the Aliens harness to power their technology.

The chemistry itself is different, and although the Aliens seem to be Carbon-based, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. The atmosphere, made of various gases unbreathable to humans, is also almost opaque to what humans consider visible light (colors and compositions to be properly calculated once I figure out a believable biochemistry for the Aliens). The Aliens live mostly underground, where they cultivate the organisms that they use as food sources.

The surface of the planet is wet, water is kept liquid by the thermal energy of the planet. A lush jungle-like ecosystem covers large parts of the land, and some Aliens live above ground, with no apparent shelters. This jungle is not made of plants nor fungi, just of organisms that are unlike anything on Earth. Likewise, the Aliens themselves are neither humanoid, not reptilioid, not insectoid nor molluskoid. They have no feature that could be paralleled to anything of Earth origin.

As the aliens do not seem to have a language, the planet has no name, their species has no name, none of the features and organisms have a name. This is of course highly unsettling for the arriving humans (not to mention very annoying for the writer, who tends to like having names to describe the things that are in his world….).

The closest analogy in the human experience of the Alien World is a world-scale termite mound, with networks of tunnels, and a seemingly auto-organizing society. The apparent lack of communication between the Aliens seem to point to an insect-like pheromone communication system where individuals are bound to a task by pre-programmed messages.

One possible place for this alien World is the Star Lalande 21186, an old red dwarf star 8-light years away, roughly in the north polar direction… (Lalande 21185 on Wikipwedia…)