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.

Populating the World: Cast of Characters…

Character creation is just as arduous, if not even more, than world creation. Once the walls and the decor are in place, the actors have to be cast, rehersals have to be made, costumes have to be sown, flesh and blood must be conjured out of the words in order to make the characters more than unidimensional caricatures of past clichés.

The main character I have in mind for this story is in part a walking cliché: a somewhat recluse scientist, called by destiny to become the unlikely hero that will save mankind. However, by placing him as the narrator, and having him be painfully aware of the absurdity of his position, I hope to be able to flesh him out a little more, and to connect a bit more to the reader. I am aware that this is in itself somewhat if a gimicky cliché by itself, but I’ll run with it, and see if it goes anywhere…

The two main storylines of the book are separated by three hundred years, so the cast of both storylines has to be distinct and completely separate. This limits the number of characters I can introduce and use in each story, otherwise it’s just going to become a jumble of characters that’s gonna be too confusing for the reader to follow.

So the part of the story set in the 30th century will be told through the eyes of the narrator, who is personally involved in the events. The part of the story set in the 27th century will be told by the same narrator, telling the story of what happened through his expertise as an historian. This means that the 27th century storyline can be a series of short “historical” stories of specific important episodes, but it could also be the story of one character, as told by the narrator.

I’m still not sure which way to go…

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.

Earth 2979: The Terran Republic, the Kuiper Alliance, and the Neutral Worlds…

Terran Republic

One of the two main powers of the solar system in 2979, The Terran Republic is the seat of the historical power. It is comprised of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, as well as the Jovian and Saturnian systems. It is ruled by an elected president who serves 10-year terms. The population of the Republic is a little over 50 billion people, with 15 billion on Earth alone, and 10 billion on the moon, where a large part of the Earth population took refuge after the Comet impact.

Centuries of war have transformed the worlds, but the people have not changed. The Martians are still proud of their heritage and their culture, even if they lost their independence in the War. The Jovians and the Saturnians have kept their identity, even under the Terran military regime. The government of the Republic is centralized on Earth, at the seat of the old League of Worlds in Sumatra. Bureaucracy has taken over everything, and the mass of people and information to manage means that administrations are very inefficient. After two centuries, actual power and services to the people have trickled back down to the regional planetary governments.

Daily life in the Republic is not much different now that it was before the war, and technological progress has had mostly military applications: faster ships, more powerful weapons, more efficient communication systems. On regular routes, travel times between worlds has been cut in half since the 27th century, and express services, private ships and military crafts can reach speeds four times as fast, with the discomfort of smaller living spaces and increased gravity due to acceleration/deceleration.

The controlling body on Earth is no longer the Media, but the Military, and they in turn control the media. Content has changed since the peak of the Media’s power in the 27th century, and most of the content available in the 30th century is smutty, innate, tasteless junk, or thinly veiled propaganda for the Republic. State Religion is the New Temple of Jerusalem, and other religions are tolerated, but not encouraged, and public office and positions of power withing the military are only attainable by New Templars.

The Kuiper Alliance

The Kuiper Alliance is the other main power in the system: a loose association of all the worlds of the outer solar system. Even with the better means of transportation, distances between worlds can be massive, and many people never leave their world. Those who do travel for months to get anywhere, which in hardly a basis for a solid and coherent government.

The seat of the Alliance is on the southern hemisphere of Yggrdasil, and the population of all the outer worlds now adds to roughly 40 billion, with 5 billion on Yggdrasil itself. The diversity of cultures, religions, political systems that was the hallmark of the Kuiper worlds before the War is still present, and the Alliance is very adamant in keeping that diversity alive. Of course this means that among it’s population are extremist groups which want to adopt a stronger stance towards the Republic, but the Stalemate holds, for the most part, even if minor conflicts arise from time to time.

Each world is ruled as it’s inhabitants see fit, but since the war, most are controlled by military dictatorships, feudal-type monarchies, ruthless warlords, anarchists and religious fanatics. The only thing that holds the Alliance together in any form is the threat from the Terran Republic. The Council of the Alliance is overseen by the High King of Yggdrasil, direct descendant of the old European Royal Families.

The Neutral Worlds

Uranus, Neptune, their Moons and Asteroids are the only worlds that never got implicated into the war, and try their best to stay out of harm’s way. Man battles have been fought in their space, and ship salvage and building has become over the decades quite a specialty of the Neutral Worlds. They furnish both sides with ships and weapons, and are left alone for the service. They are prosperous and peaceful themselves, Triton is one of the richest worlds of the System.

The idea here is to have no clear cut good or evil, just people fighting for their homes…

Earth, 2784: The Stalemate…

After a century of bloody warfare, both sides are growing desperate. The Kuiperans, out on the edge of the Oort comet cloud, devise a devastating plan: striking the Earth with a comet. They rig a comet with engines, and divert it’s course towards the inner solar system. They set it on a course that would miss earth at both crossings of the Earth’s orbit, but a strategic burn at the right time near perihelion diverts the comet just enough so it would hit the earth straight on. With the bulk of Earth’s long range nuclear missiles deployed near Jupiter and Saturn’s orbits, they cannot react with sufficient force to annihilate the large comet. Earth forces manage to intercept the comet with several low-power nuclear warheads, reducing it’s mass with two thirds, and vaporizing a good portion of it’s nucleus, they are unable to destroy the engines, and the necessary firepower to damage the comet further did not have time to reach it’s target…

On May 28th 2784, the remains of the comet hit earth. The largest chunk, a 40km diameter monster that contained the fusion engines, hit in the Sahara desert. The direct devastation caused by the impact was incalculable. More than half of the Earth’s population died as a direct effect of the impact, mainly from the devastating earthquake that collapsed many of the worlds’ sturdiest infrastructures.

As retaliation, Earth sent his most powerful, fastest and stealthiest missiles to five of the small Kuiper worlds. The force deployed was sufficient to annihilate those worlds, not just human installations at the surface, but actually break the dwarf planets in smaller rocks.

Each side was outraged at the horrors commited by the other side, but could not risk another similar strike. Gunships and fighters stopped the battles, a ceasefire treaty was singed on Titan, and each side went behind their lines, biding their time.

The Stalemate was reached…

Earth, 2979: The war.

The first contact with alien life in the 27th century has shaken humanity to its core. The state of Martial law that was declared on Earth with the approach of the Alien ship became permanent. The inaction of all worlds when Earth was under threat brought a toughening of Earth’s policies towards the other worlds. Old rivalries resurfaced, and arms buildup commenced. Mercury and Venus quickly sided with the Earth, mainly because they were still directly dependent on Earth. As Mars and Earth escalade the show of force, the Outer Worlds stand idly by, considering the matter as petty bickering between Earth and Mars.

After a deadly war, Mars is conquered, and Earth reassesses its position of power. The Media corporations become propaganda machines for the Earth Military, now the reigning totalitarian power. The Outer Worlds are given an ultimatum: bow down or be conquered, Earth will not be threatened…

The Outer Worlds mount a massive offensive against the forces of the inner solar system, but the myriad of worlds beyond Neptune do not feel concerned. Their isolation makes them safe from the deadly war around the sun. Refugees from the inner worlds flee always outwards, towards the Kuiper belt, and most find refuge on the outermost large world: Yggdrasil, which quickly grows to be one of the most populated center of humanity outside of Earth itself.

As the totalitarian forces of Earth expand their influence, the Kuiperans try to organize, and develop new technologies to travel faster between their worlds. Yggdrasil become the “shining beacon of hope” (yeah, very Babylon 5, but it’s just the buildup towards the 30th Century situation…), where resistance to the Advancing Terrans is organized. Earth’s influence reaches Jupiter, then Saturn, then stops it’s expansion, stretched too thin to efficiently move outwards. Yggdrasil takes on the role of the rebel, the troublemaker, the disobedient child, and Earth is the monolithic totalitarian power. Neither can move forward, neither can step down, so after a century of warfare, a stalemate is reached.

That stalemate between the two factions is the situation at the end of the 30th Century, a stalemate that has now lasted two centuries. Each keeps to his own, each builds up military power, and no one gains the necessary edge to annihilate the other without being annihilated itself. All humans alive are born of parents that are born of parents that have known nothing but the war. All humans have lost close ones, and have vowed revenge on the monsters of the other side.

What was a rebellion for freedom, a resistance to a totalitarian and oppressive regime two centuries ago has degenerated and corrupted into a chaotic mess where warlords reign, and what was a militaristic totalitarian regime degenerated and corrupted into a chaotic mess of debauchery. Uranus and Neptune, which stayed relatively neutral during the whole conflict are still relatively organized, and are making efforts to bridge the gap between worlds.

The worlds that the colonists who left in 2654 return to in 2979 is very very different, and the colonists find themselves in the middle of the conflict, while holding the secret of Alien technologies that all sides covet to gain the edge they need in the war.

Earth, 2654 : the Nemesis uncertainty…

One element that I’m not entirely certain to include in this universe is the presence of Nemesis or a similar body, far from earth, but still within reach… I’ll include a description here, and I’ll think about what I want to do with it later…

Nemesis is the companion star to our sun. It is a small brown dwarf, 10 times as heavy as Jupiter, but about as big. It orbits the sun on a relatively high eccentricity orbit that brings it in and out of the oort cloud at periodic intervals, disturbing the orbits of comets, and potentially sending them towards the inner solar system. In orbit around this world is a rocky and icy world larger than the Earth, Yggdrasil. In 2654 it is only starting to be colonized, being so distant (about 50 times more distant than Neptune).

It is fast becoming the de facto capital of the Kuiper worlds, even if the seat of the organization is on Neptune. The Kuiperans see Yggdrasil as a true outer world, whereas Neptune is starting to get corrupted by the problems of the inner solar system.

Now, the element that I’m not sure about is the brown dwarf Nemesis. Yggdrasil can exist at the same spot without it, but it adds a solidness about Yggdrasil’s position. Nemesis might not be a true star, but it is the symbol of the Kuiperans’ strive for independence from the inner worlds. Nemesis is the focal point of growing tensions between the outer and inner worlds, and might just be a good plot device for the development of my story.

I’ll see what I do with it…

Earth 2654, Space Travel

The traveling from one world to the other in the Solar System relies on two different transportation “networks”. First a large number of unmanned shuttles, slow moving and inexpensive, that use traditional orbital mechanics to move cargo from one world to the other. Equipped with fusion engines, the shuttles have limited maneuverability, and are not atmosphere worthy. Transfer of cargo from the shuttles to the moons, planets, and asteroids is made with smaller shuttles that do the landings.

The second system is made of faster ships, mainly commercially operated ones, but some private ships as well, that run with more powerful fusion drives and can cover interplanetary distances in a shorter time than the long haul cargos. The fusion drives require a lot of heavy hydrogen, hence the booming hydrogen economy of the gas giants. Such ships can cover the 4.5 billion kilometers between the Earth and Neptune, for instance, in four weeks, and can reach the outermost worlds within six months. Trips are comprised of an acceleration phase, during which there is gravity due to that acceleration, a “cruise” phase, where there is no gravity (spinning ships to induce gravity was tried at some point, but turned out to be causing more space sickness than simple weightlessness), and a deceleration phase, where gravity is present again. Some of the fastest and most advanced ships skip the “cruise” phase altogether, and accelerate up to half of the trip, roll-over, and decelerate the second half of the trip. This allows constant gravity for the passengers, and maximum comfort. The prodigious amounts of energy needed to accomplish this mean that those ships tend to be cramped, because of the amount of fuel to bring along.

For most passengers, space travel is not fun, not to mention expensive. Cramped quarters, no gravity, limited food, all reason that most people try to limit their movement between worlds to the strict minimum. That’s one of the reason most colonization efforts tend to work very well: once you’ve gone to the trip there, you don’t want to go back…

The colony ship sent to Alpha Centauri was a monster: a huge ship, hosting hundreds of people. Its journey lasted close to 50 years. The 4.37 years of delay in signals to and from the Centauri Colony make contact with it very rare, and no one has traveled to Alpha Centauri since the original expedition.

Earth 2654: The League of Worlds, part II

Jupiter

The Jupiter system is one of the busiest places in the Solar system. It is a turning point of commerce from the asteroids and Earth towards the Outer Worlds. The moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede are heavily populated, and the abundance of water ice made them ideal colonization candidates. The Trojan and Greek asteroids, two groups of asteroids at the lagrange points of the Jupiter orbit, are exploited by the Jupiter corporation. One of the main export of the Jovian system is heavy hydrogen, extracted from the Jovian atmosphere by robotic Zeppelins, and which feeds the nuclear reactors throughout all worlds.

Saturn

Saturn, with its spectacular rings and its myriad of moons, brought many people to its orbits. Hydrogen collection is also an important economic activity. Its upper atmosphere hosts a number of Cloud cities, devoted mainly to hydrogen mining. Titan is one of the only successes of planetary transformation, mainly because of the abundance of hydrocarbons that could provide a cheap source of energy. Although the cold prevents populations to live on the surface, underground cities house 6 billion people, making Titan the single most populated world after the Earth. It houses the Saturnian Parliment and the seat of the Outer Worlds Union.

Uranus

Uranus is also a Hydrogen mining world, and was the first gas giant to be inhabited itself with the construction of cloud cities in the 24th centuries. The larger moons are inhabited, but by relatively few people.

Neptune

Neptune is the gateway to the Kuiper Belt and beyond, where thousands of rocky and icy worlds host the great variety of humanity: isolation and distance mean that each of those worlds is a closed system, and many of the tran-neptunian colonies were founded by one eccentric or cultural group or another, seeking to flee the levelling forces of the Media Corporations that control mainly earth, but whose influence reach all the way to Uranus. Neptune itself has Cloud cities, like Uranus, but the main population is on Triton, Where bustling spaceport handle the traffic and people to and from the Outer Solar system.

the Kuiper Belt and scattered disc

The Organization of the Kuiper Associated Worlds, seated on Triton, is a very much unorganized association, and most of the Kuiper Worlds keep to themselves. They tend to be “Thematic” worlds, devoted mainly to one specific activity. Monasteries, breweries, instrument makers, games, sex, universities, libraries, ancient Egypt, celts, religious fudamentalists, cults, music academies, zen budist temples, martial arts schools, the whole diversity of mankind. Populated worlds reach far beyond the Outer Worlds, and the largest of those worlds, Yggdrasil, long left undiscovered, is also one of the furthest, lying in the space between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.

Earth, 2654 : The League of Worlds, part I

The other worlds of the solar system, where most of the Human population live, are highly diverse in their culture, but the basic needs of life support mean that their infrastructures are somewhat similar.

Mercury

Mercury, being so close to the sun and bathed in high intensity solar winds, is a rather inhospitable world. It’s main resource is it’s proximity to the sun, and a number of very important Solar Observatories are implanted on the planet, connected by a network of tunnels. High radiation levels and extremes in temperature keep this world as mostly a research installation, with a global population of less than one million.

Venus

As the Earth’s Sister planet, some people had Venus in sight for long as a target for terraforming efforts. However, its dense and thick atmosphere mean that setting down on the surface of Venus is the equivalent of plunging 1000 meters into the ocean. Some scientific stations have been set up on the planet, most are automated, and very few people live permanently on the surface. In orbit around Venus is a large space station that is a popular vacation destination for Terrans, called Aphrodite. It is a leisure center with spas and pools, but is mainly the largest bordello in the Solar System. It’s construction in 2435 was largely viewed as a publicity stunt by the adult industry, but this stunt payed off, and two centuries later, it is highly successful.

the Moon

The Moon is permanently occupied by humans since the mid-21st century. It took a long time to host a significant population, but in the 22nd and 23rd century, when the emigration to the outer worlds began, a large population settled on the Moon: “All the excitement of moving to Space, without the hassles of interplanetary travel” was the main sales pitch. The main cities are Aldrin and Collins, near the North and South poles, where ice has been found in some quantities. The main economic activities are logistics-related, since the moon is the gateway between the Solar System and Earth, since the lower gravity means a lot less energy spent to get to space. Transportation from the moon to the surface of Earth or to the space elevator is easy and fast, and shipping lanes to all planets of the system go through the Moon’s spaceports.

Mars

Mars has held a special place in Mankind’s collective imagination, and many people who moved there in the first immigration waves were going to Mars because of that imaginary Mars. Many were disapointed when they were faced with the mundane problems of living, be it on another planet. The closeness to Earth means that the Terrans have long tried to meddle in Mars Internal affairs, considering it a colony under it’s control. This even led to a war which in turn, in 2434, led to the creation of the League of Worlds. Mars has been from the start a mining colony, but has developed a diverse economy and a culture very different to Earth’s. Terraforming efforts undertaken in the 23rd century, shortly after the arrival of the first settlers, have either been mostly unsuccessful or have be abandoned during the war, and never restated. The result is that the atmosphere is thicker than it was before human intervention, but is still insufficient for humans to life on the surface unprotected.

the Asteroids

The largest asteroids, Ceres, Vesta and Pallas, have permanent colonies, mainly spaceports used for the mining operations of the asteroid belt. Those mining operations are conducted mainly through automated robotic diggers, but ships patrol regularly the whole belt for maintenance of the equipment.

More on the Outer Worlds on another day…

Earth, 2654 : Media Corporations and language

20 million channels and nothing on…

The Media corporations of the 27th century have their origin in the Television and Radio companies of the 20th century, merged with the internet media of the 21st and the Integrated Mobile platform of the 22nd. The Corporation provide information, news, entertainment, culture, knowledge, education and power to each of the 20 billion humans on the planet.

What are the 27th century media? Let’s first look at how the content is broadcast to the people.

After experiments with direct neural interfaces, the disastrous results of plugging people’s brains directly into a computer/media network was realized and outlawed in the 25th century. Today, some people still undergo implantation of a DNI, but the system is used mainly for illicit and illegal activities. Instead, a more “gentle” implantation procedure was developped by interfacing not directly with the brain but with the sensory organs of signal paths. Instead of one central neural implant, people are now implanted with individual sensory broadcast devices. Auditory implants usually sit inside the Cochlea, visual implants are grafted unto the optical nerve, smell and taste implants are implanted in the nose. Tactile signals are the most difficult, and are implanted at the back of the neck, near the cerebellum. Controls for this system are implanted under the skin of the inside of the forearm, and the antenna for the system is usually implanted between the forearm bones.

This system allows the person to receive all sorts of sensory information, from music and talk radio to fully immersive sound and visual experiences. It can be used to communicate with others through the network, and to chose the level of involvement of the conversation, just sound, sound and image (A small camera is mounted with the forearm display), or the full sensory system. Many people have taken to send touch messages or smell messages, which can give a lot of information.

The Corporations provide professionally produced content, and constantly monitor the media use and habits of people, in order to tailor each person’s experience and advertisement exposure to his needs. Paying services provide advertisement-free airtime, and a lot of user-generated content is also advertisement free. The main role however, of the Corporations, is to provide Bandwidth to all. Colossal infrastructures have been put together to allow 20 billion people full access to the network.

By controlling bandwidth, the Corporations effectively control the world, since all business and policy is conducted through the Network, and that most human contacts are too, strictly networked.

Network addiction is universal, and very few people can sanely go off the network for more than a few hours. I read somewhere that information is to humans what the bright spot of light from a laser pointer is to a cat. The cat is hardwired to chase bright moving things. That’s how they catch birds and mice, and survive. But there is nothing in nature remotely close to a laser pointer, so the cat responds to it by chasing it, uncontrollably, and cannot do otherwise. Humans are hardwired as information gatherers, and so the network is a giant laser pointer for humanity: the irresistible unnatural thing that we just cannot move away from…

Language

There are still many regional languages, but the language known as Standard Earth English is understood and spoken by a vast majority of the population, but on earth and around the solar system. The relative isolation of the outer Worlds mean that their language has evolved in different directions, and the Jovian English is quite different from the Earth English. The Media corporation mostly provide content in Standard Earth English, and only a small portion of the information present on the Network is translated into the local languages. However, machine translations into any language, although far from perfect, allows access to all information in all languages.

Earth, 2654 : Society

The 27th century is as far from us than the 14th, where Europe and the middle East were struggling for control of the Holy Lands, printing wasn’t invented yet and the New World was known only to a bunch of Basque fishermen… In most parts of the world governments were monarchies, and universal education was an utopic dream. It is important to keep that sense of perspective in considering the workings of 27th century society.

First, lets look at the various levels of Government:
-Solar System: The League of Worlds, a quasi-governmental organization, overseeing relations, commerce, and war issues between the various human colonies around the solar system. It has it’s seat at New Jaipur on Sumatra, near the Earth’s equator, at the base of the old Clarke space elevator, and the whole island is devoted to the League’s bureaucracy. Officials are named and sent for 10-year terms.
-Organization of the Terran Treaty: A loose organization made of the Moon, the orbiting cities and the Nations of Earth. Mainly devoted to security issues.
-Earth Government: The highest “real” level of government, a “mediocratic” government, with elected officials that are selected through the constant popularity polls that are run on the relevant Media Channels. This gives rise to very variable term length for officials, based on the popularity of their policy decisions.
-Regional governments: based loosely on the nation-states of the 2nd Millennium, regional governments take many shapes. Most are historical democracies, and only a few Old Line hereditary rulers remain in European and Eastern countries. The most powerful nation States are the Black Kahganate that was born from the Ashes of the China War of the 23rd Century, Europa, a direct descendant of the European Union, and the United States of America and Mexico.
-City-States: In the 24th Century, a number of cities in the old nation-states became independant. These were mainly Metropolises of more than 30 million inhabitants. Most are owned by corporations who provide all services to the population. The actual political system of each depends on the Company culture of each corporation, and range from open-source anarchism to totalitarian military and security-oriented regimes.

Religion:
Religions on Earth and in the solar system are very diverse, and freedom of religion is still a fundamental right enforced by the League of Worlds. One of the dominant religions on Earth is the New Temple of Jerusalem. In 2231, Pope John XXVIII convened the leaders of all christian, jewish and muslim faiths in order to end once and for all religious wars. The Council of Jerusalem laid the foundation for the Great Unification, and despite extremist and fundamentalist groups still existing in many parts of the world, the New Temple of Jerusalem, with the actual Temple being re-built in 2368, is now the faith of close to 70% of the Earth’s population.
On other worlds, religion takes more or less importance, and the Temple is far less present, even on the Moon, where Zen-paganism is very prominent.

The Aliens, 2654

The Aliens are a writer’s nightmare, just as they are a nightmare for the Media of 27th century Earth. They are a race that inhabits red dwarf systems, where the energy given off my the star is a lot fainter then the Sun’s, but those worlds are three times as old as the Sun. They live at different scales than our own. Their race was an advanced, space-faring civilization before the sun existed. In fact, their homeworld was a rogue red dwarf that was caught into the orbit of the Milky Way some 8 billion years ago. It took them hundreds of millions of years to slowly colonize the whole Galaxy. They inhabit the underground tunnels and caves of highly geologically active worlds.

Their biochemical make-up is based on carbon and silicon polymers, and their chemistry includes a lot more metals in various enzymatic processes. Their genetic information is stored in silicon-metal complexes, and their cells have sulfonate-carbon walls. Their high metal content interacts with the strong magnetic fields of the worlds that they inhabit and allows them to produce large ammounts of bioelectricity, their basic energy source. They have a specialized organ for centralized electricity production, and have a nervous system made of conductive metal “wires”. They have no central nervous system, but their body is lined with single-cell electricity generator that act as an “all -body” brain. This gives them prodigious “calculation” power, a little in the same spirit as massively parallel supercomputer. They feel electromagnetic fields, and are also highly touch sensitive. They have no sense of taste or smell (so no chemical receptors accompanying air intake), and eat mostly other plant-like organisms that they grow specifically for food.

To humans they appear as tall, hulking and lumbering giants. Their bodies have two symmetry axes: a two-sided top-down symmetry, as well as a three-sided around symmetry: Their bodies are spheroid in shape, and they have three lower and three upper appendages that are identical. Those appendages are arm-like, with three main joints: one at the body, one at mid-length, and one near the end, where they have prehensile organs, like a claw or a hand, with retractable high-precision tentacle-like protrusions.

When in movement, they use only one set of “legs” for moving in open spaces, keeping the other set folded against their bodies if not carrying anything. When in tunnels or in their ships, or if climbing, they can use all six legs expertly, and carry heavy loads with only one of those appendages. They have no eyes or sense of vision in a earth sense, but have directional EMF detectors that are sensitive, among other things, to what we consider visible light, although with nowhere near our level of specialization. They have “mouths” both on top and below their bodies, and they ingest food, keep it in a stomach pocket until fully digested, and release the waste through the same opening. The time required for the digestion means that they use both of their mouths in alternance. They have no pre-set “up” or “down”, and are stricly top-bottom symmetrical.

More on the Aliens another day…

Earth, 2654 : technology

One of the important concept in Science-Fiction is the “Technological singularity”, a point beyond which everything changes: computers gaining sentience, the discovery of faster-than-light travel, a “next stage of human evolution” when amazing powers are possible, a medical discovery that extends life to centuries, an infinite source of energy…

In my world, none of that has happened. Sure, computers are much more advanced than their 21st century counterparts, but they are just machines. Sure medicine has progressed, but human life is not much longer than now: most people do not live beyond 100, and no one has lived to see his 200th birthday. Humans are not fundamentally different than they were at the dawn of civilization a few millennia ago.

And perhaps more significant for the setting of the story: faster-then-light travel is not possible. In fact, the prodigious amounts of energy needed to go at any significant speed means that traveling beyond the solar system is far from routine. There is indeed a human colony at Alpha Centauri, but it took a large amount of money, and a great deal of time to get a ship there, and it was generally hailed as a pointless exercise by the Earth people. Even traveling within the solar system is not very common, most traffic is unmanned robotic cargo asteroids, that are placed in highly elliptical orbits that cross the orbits of the various planets.

There is no artificial gravity, so any semblance of gravity in space travel has to be provided either by the acceleration/deceleration of the ship, of through the rotation of the ship. Rotation is not the ideal method for long-haul trips, since the Coriolis forces make for a stomach-turning experience for most travelers.

Large-scale life-support infrastructures are common and very advanced, since they are absolutely necessary on all human-occupied worlds. Humans are present on almost all rocky and icy worlds of the system, even on some Kuiper Belt objects. The Oort cloud is still largely unoccupied, although there are some robotic probes that are exploring the area and some automated mining robots are digging through comets for rare elements.

Communications are an essential part of the human civilization. The Media Age, started at the end of the 20th Century, is still in force. 24/7 information on all topics at the tip of the fingers of the 120 billion people of the solar system. The Media are one of the major economic, political and ideological driving forces of the Solar System.

More on the Media corporations later…

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…)

Earth, 2654

Earth is the seat of the Solar government, despite it’s inconvenient position at the center of the system, very far from the Jovian and Saturnian system, where most of the Solar population lives, but the position comes in handy when Jupiter and Saturn are on opposite sides of the Sun.

Earth population is around 20 billion, living mostly in cities, and most people are considered as “middle class”. All regions have roughly the same level of development, with some people very poor, and some very rich. Culture is still somewhat regionalized, but the Media corporations present the same content in all parts of the world.

The information age, started in the 20th century, still continues after many centuries. Sounds and images from all around the planet are broadcast, 24/7, to a population that thrives on information, on always learning more, knowing more, even if it’s pointless and trivial information.

A number of cities exist in orbital stations, but these are not very popular as permanent residences but as exotic vacation spots. The moon on the other hand is a thriving colony, with a population of close to one billion, mostly in the polar metropolises of Aldrin and Collins, on the North and South poles, respectively.

Relations with the other Solar colonies are very limited, Except through the United Worlds and through limited commerce. The inconvenience of space travel and of communication delays make any attempt at more extensive contact futile.

Mars is also a thriving colony, with a population close to 4 billion. It is the most ancient Human colony outside of the Terran system, and the Martians take great pride in their history.

The bulk of the Solar population resides on the moons of the outer planets, where more than 100 billion people reside. Gas mining is the main economic activity, providing, once refined, radioactive hydrogen to power the nuclear fusion reactor of the whole Solar system. Energy is cheaper than the old fossil fuels, but still not unlimited, considering the population of around 130 billion people of the Solar System.

Worlds needed…

I’m planning the flow of my story as a contrast between 27th century Earth, when the first aliens land on earth, and the 30th century expedition that is leaving the Alien World and heading back to Earth. The story ends with the arrival of the expedition on 30th century Earth. So, what I need is:

-27th century Earth, a media-dominated world, where information overload is the norm.
-27th century Alien world, where even the concept of communication is foreign. The group of earth Colonists, calling themselves the Stowaways, establish an outpost on the alien world, and try to open some relation with the Alien species.
-30th century Alien world, the “present” of the story, told through the journals of one of the members of the Earth expedition. Humans have thrived in the three centuries of presence on the Alien World, and their communication attempts have succeeded to some extent.
-30th century Earth, hardly changed in three century. Still overloaded, corrupt, and chaotic. Fashions and technologies have evolved, but the world has not budged…

The premice…

Terrans are contacted by an alien civilization, nothing like anyone had ever imagined, not a war-like race, not wise overlords, just alien, and so alien that communication is not only difficult, it is just impossible. In fact even the concept of communication seems to be impossible for the alien race to comprehend…

After the excitement and the media frenzy, the aliens just fade from attention, and only a small group of people stay interested. At one point the aliens leave and humans mount an expedition to follow them. They get into the aliens’ ship, and tag along in the voyage, and finally, after a long time, end up on a planet of those aliens, and the humans settle there. They slowly learn and teach a way to communicate with the aliens, learning many things about themselves in the process…

Generations pass before actual communication is possible, and before the Stowaways change enough to be able to comprehend the aliens and how they think. The descendants from the Stowaways mount an expedition back to Earth, and they arrive, after years of traveling back, to a Earth that is now almost as alien to them than the original Aliens were to them centuries ago…

General setting…

I’m gonna be building around a rather simple premise: in the relatively distant future, somewhere close to the year 3000, a group of scholars from a distant planet plan an expedition to the Old Earth, that their people left several generations ago to follow an alien spaceship than landed on the moon in the 27th century.

The story is told from the standpoint of one of the scholars, a historian or linguist, most likely, and he recounts the history of the 3rd millenium, how the much anticipated Technological Singularity never happenned, and that the speed of light is still something that humanity has to deal with in interplanetary and interstellar travel. The Solar system is colonized by humanity, but impracticalities in travel and communication means that humanity is not a coherent, unified world, but a chaotic mess, much like earth was a chaotic mess before anyone left the planet…

The world that those scholars inhabit is a nameless planet in a not-so-distant system, 10 or 15 light years from the Sol system, but the centuries of isolation and contacts with the aliens have changed humans in the way they see themselves and the universe. They are confronted, after the years of travel back to earth, with the chasm of difference between them and the Solars, as they name the humanity that stayed behind…