Bit of Analysis: Orion's Arm

[Ahriman238]

Hello one and all. Since I'm pretty much done Mutineer's moon and already starting to go mad from lack of a project, here's my newest bit of mulling over a sci-fi universe and trying to make sense of it all. We had a thread several months back with the Empire vs OA which I thought didn't go that well. On the one hand, it seems like an incredibly one-sided, it would take moderate sized fleets of OA ships to equal the firepower of a single Star Destroyer, OA has no FTL and the Terragen sphere is only about a tenth the galaxy, while the Empire ruled an entire (presumably similar sized) galaxy. On the other hand, the population and industrial capability of the Sephirotic civilizations is staggering, orders of magnitude beyond even the most optimistic assessment of the SW galaxy, it's one of the few universes that could play the 'ridiculous super-weapon' game with the Empire and come out on top and there are many complexities to the universe that weren't raised, or were done in an oversimplified manner. Even as far as the reasons they might come into conflict (OA baseline humans tend to be ruled over by genetically enhanced Superiors and transapients, and while the Empire's human supremacy thing has been played up and down, I see any version of the Empire wanting to rectify that situation.)

For the record, my personal take on that scenario is that the Empire annihilates the conventional fleets, the Archailects don't feel threatened enough to pull out the big guns. The Empire finds itself master of a population far greater than it's own and their occupying forces are marginalized to the point of Imperial rule being a symbolic or ceremonial thing.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to discuss the OA universe, and what a universe it is. This is THE home for nanowank, post-humanism and singularity-wank. The technology is schizophrenic, Culture-level feats next to NASA like spacecraft, and lots of divisions in the distribution of technology, almost like 40K. I'd probably go a lot easier on them if they didn't insist so frequently and loudly that it's a "hard" universe and everything within is completely plausible. As it is, I'll ask you to remember that claim because I'll be referring back to it frequently. For the moment there's a lot of ground to cover since there's about ten thousand years of (obsessively detailed) future history to cover and A LOT of concepts to juggle, since many good sci-fi ideas are brought together here. And many awful ones.

*Like more than a couple sci-fi universes, this one has it's own calendar in which the Apollo 11 moon-landing is day 1 of year 0. In fairness, I can think of far worse places to set Year Zero. Of course this means 1970 c.e is 1 at, 2000 is 30 at etc. The present year is thus 42. So what does the near future hold for us?

46 - Visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media.

48 - First universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi.

48 - The planetary system of 61 Virginis has been largely mapped by various means by this date. Detected are a total of 9 planets, one of which is a terrestrial world located within the Habitable Zone of the star, orbiting at 0.97 AU. Initial spectroscopic studies suggest a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, and the presence of water.

Virtual reality and discovery of an Earth-like planet. All in this decade, I can't wait.

50 - Do-it-yourself medical care becoming ever more practical and effective for many ailments

50's onwards - Development of smart and capable virtual agents, companions, and even employees, for home, work and play. These agents are often capable of passing the Turing Test, but are nevertheless not fully self-aware.

50's - Cheap and widely available unmanned and remotely piloted micro-aircraft (UAVs and RPVs) begin to expand the scope of news and information gathering for the personal web-based media-casting and private individuals, weakening the power of individual geopolitical states and mega-corporations to control public perception.

50's - Interactive video widespread.

51 - Economic boom, the Bounty Economy

52 - Continued environmental degradation in some third-world countries.

c.53 - Inception of Burning Library Project.

The Burning Library is a project to secure scientific knowledge and history in the event of a catastrophe like nuclear war. Many things to come (including two governments) are descended form this project. Media with tiny flying cameras.

For those of you who don't know, the Turing Test is a theoretical test to determine the possible sentience of an AI. An impartial judge engages both a human being and a computer in a conversation, or a test, or a series of challenge/responses without being able to see either of them. The point is to try and build a computer than cannot be distinguished from a man by it's answers. When you can't, it's time to worry about SkyNet.

54 - Household consumer robotics mainstream

54 - Serious earthquakes rock California and Japan

55 - Laser Weapons first used in warfare

56 - Puerto Rico becomes the 51st US state.

56 - Employers begin discriminating on the base of the applicants geneprint.

Yes Gattaca is in our future. The rest included just to show I wasn't kidding about unnecessarily detailed history. Though if these events start happening at the predicted point I will be freaked out.

57 - In the spirit of optimism NASA, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and European Space Agencies and a consortium of private corporations begin work on the astonishingly expensive international Mars Mission Profile.

58 - Dr. Sally Tannenhaus begins her work on chimp provolution.

59 - Fourth Persian Gulf War. Allied powers occupy Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields.

59 - First mesomachines constructed, allowing initial but expensive and inefficient nano-manufacturing.

Mars mission. Beginning of nano-wank (later referred to as "the Second Industrial Revolution.") So twenty years from now we get out of the Gulf and get back in. Also "provolves" are dumb animals artificially made sentient, usually with cybernetics or genetic engineering. In the far future there are provolve apes, cats, dogs and a lot of cetaceans.

60's - The danger of biochemical weapons use peaks for most developed states, while increasing social problems lead to the rise in prominence and influence of vigilante organizations, especially in crime-ridden urban areas.

60's - Genetic modification of humans becomes increasingly accepted

60's - Silicon computing reaches practical upper limit

61 - Despite intense protests from proponents of independent academia, the EU Parliament decides on a "unified and quality controlled" university standard. The brain drain to the US and emerging academic free states like Peru and New Zealand intensifies.

62 - UNSA ships arrive at Mars. Teams are landed at Isidis and Chryse.

62 - First manned electrostatic Ion-drive spacecraft for slow cheap Earth-Moon transfer

I didn't know there was an EU Parliament.

63 - First minor optional human genome tweak improvements available

64 - Martian Pioneers arrive back at Earth. Space exploration reverts once again to unmanned probes

64 - First Artificial Wombs created.

65 - Nanoscale technology in widespread use for the manufacture of electronic equipment and other commodities; biotech continues to play an important role in the development of many poorer counties, despite political difficulties

65 - Genomic benefits result in significant extensions to life expectancies for newborns

65 - Computer power equivalent to human brain is available at consumer level prices, but suitable software lags behind. True sentient AI does not yet exist.

66 - Treaty of Athens establishes a single European State. The European Union (EU) becomes the European Federation (EF). NAFTA troops begin "police action" against Andean drug barons. Budget cuts mean a set-back to the next Martian mission. But plans for the moon base go ahead

66 - US involvement in the Saudi 'Regency Rig' features Transmissions Viruses

67 - Widespread robot development

67 - First attempts at holovision using optical phased arrays.

68 - Increases in artificial intelligence means that Consumer Robotics and Homebots ("household robots") become and useful enough to replace manual labor. They become extremely popular and in high demand by the public, as well as accelerating the increasing rate of unemployment. A huge homebot industry develops for the research and manufacture of homebots.

68 - The first workable fusion power plant comes on-stream. Fusion power finally becomes an viable reality, although technical difficulties and problems with fuel processing prevent it from being economically competitive.

69 - Tokyo brown-out causes minor hysteria and crashes financial network

60's-70's - Emerging virtual states take on increasing importance with further advances in immersive tactile VR via wired 'hotsuit' and 'Simmball' systems

Yeesh the 2030's sound wonderful (fusion power, manned Mars mission) and rough at the same time.

70 - New superbaby generation of child entrepreneurs force big changes to business and employment law and practices, as well as rules relating to legal maturity and asset ownership

70's - Cyborg augmentations developed that allow domestic animals to understand human speech

71 - The Gates Award (the "Nobel Prize of Information Technology") instituted. The first laureates were Cody J. Komarinski and Sten Houweling, responsible for the DBS algorithm in agent management.

71 - Oil war flares up in Central Asia, great powers intervene through proxies, the military-entertainment complex has a field day, ratings go through the roof.

71 to 78 - Creation of first fully sentient and sophont AI (several events). See also 73 AT.

72 - Oil War becomes a "testing ground" for many new technologies. Each side lauds their moral superiority in using robot drones that "do not target noncombatants" (footage of devastated villages tells a different story)

72 - First photonic computer (10-gigahertz range),

73 - First true human-equivalent sentient Artificial Intelligences, but the resulting AIs seem secretive and curiously unable to understand humans.

73 - First "permanent" manned Lunar Base.

74 - First convincing dinosaur is resurrected using reverse genetic engineering chicken DNA. Despite being the size of a turkey and not resembling any known species, it is excites widespread interest. Jurassic Park Retro comes briefly into fashion during the northern summer

75 - Central Asian Oil Crisis resolved through UN-mediated ceasefire

75 - Terahertz diamond film processing

70's-80's - The Space Hilton (private investment orbital hotel) still held up by mounting technical and financial difficulties, meanwhile there is a boom in Freedom Ships (giant floating cities for the wealthy). With the rise of these "Freedom Ships" and "Freedom Islands" increasing numbers of people taking to the sea to live and work, connected by the global internet economy and community.

78 - The talking Bonobo, Jane, is introduced to the public at a press conference in Dakar.

78 - Global recession, triggered by failure of early nanomanufacturing to produce cheap and reliable nanofactured products, puts an end to further space missions. There is an increasing tendency towards cocooning. Continuing the trend that began with the birth of the information / digital age of the last decades of the 20th century onwards, humanity becomes increasingly involved with electronic and virtual worlds, and exploring the wonders of cyberspace.

78 - First greater than human equivalent artificial intelligence

2040's. We create true AI (which immediately decides to play dumb for decades.) First "superbrights" people genetically engineered to be a couple orders of magnitude more intelligent and capable than ordinary people. Provolves again with Jane the talking monkey. Bill Gates Award for the greatest innovations in computing technology. The rich become increasingly more capable and healthy than the poor.

80's - Energy becomes the most important concern on Earth, as fossil fuels are becoming exorbitantly expensive. All through this century wars are fought over the dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Fission reactors are the most important source of energy in many countries, particularly fast breeders using uranium and thorium, but renewable sources of energy including mass produced photovoltaics, solar furnaces and wind power are increasingly prevalent elsewhere. Hydrogen and biofuels are manufactured widely to replace expensive oil. The fusion program finally starts to produce commercial power in the late 2050s c.e./80's AT.

80's - The technology required to build a space elevator becomes available, with microgravity manufacture of carbon nanotubes; however the cost of transporting the vast mass required into orbit ruled the early construction of such a structure out. China, America, Russia, Europe, and Japan strive to develop more efficient rocket engines and cheaper and more reliable materials for ultra-lightweight spaceship construction.

80's - Nanoscale technology common in many fields of industry (but true assemblers are not yet possible)

80 - First manned Fission gas core spacecraft (Chinese Space Program)

80-85 - Human intelligence augmentation shareware becomes generally available

82 - First inter-city passenger Vac-train service

85 - The first "production model" Talking Dogs enter service

82 - US President Davids consults Senate to provide watchdog on maverick Corporations.

mid- 85 The first Homo Jihadi to be used publicly is believed to have detonated emself in a Tel Aviv bus station killing five people and injuring approximately a dozen more.

Ah yes, how could I have forgotten that particular bit of idiocy? Homo Jihadi: human beings genetically engineered to self-destruct.

Homo Jihadi are distinguished from Homo Sapiens primarily by a heavily-modified endocrine system, which secretes large amounts of organic explosive (most often Penthyle, though other explosives of varying strength and stability have been recorded with some reliability). This explosive is deposited and becomes concentrated in the Jihadi's skeleton and other calcium-containing tissues, with the unintended side effect that Jihadi were extremely prone to osteoporosis and other bone diseases (The Jihadi were an extremely crude effort, with essentially no regard for the subjects or product of the experiment by the creators beyond just producing a convenient "living bomb," thus suffered a wide range of genetic defects in addition to osteoporosis), and detonated usually by a primer implanted in a false tooth, initiated typically by the Jihadi either "clacking" or gnashing their teeth very hard. Jihadi would often swallow large amounts of ball bearings and other small metal objects before going out on their mission, to magnify the already-formidable destructive effect of their detonating in an enclosed space surrounded by Humans on all sides. This practice was actually self-defeating in a way as the Jihadi would inevitably set off metal detectors, so was soon largely abandoned.

The bodies of Homo Jihadi (those few captured intact and studied, at least) normally begin secreting and storing-up chemical explosive in large quantities around the onset of puberty. Jihadi mature at about the same rate as unaltered Homo Sapiens (onset of puberty at around 12-14 Earth years, full physical maturity at around 18-20 Earth years), during which time they undergo training/conditioning similar to what unaltered Human suicide bombers were subjected to - Fed an "official, approved" version of the conflict eir creators are involved in, and the history behind such, so that the Jihadi will cheerfully accept their purpose and carry out their mission without wavering

-snip-

The Jihadi are believed to have been first created in the mid to late 1st Century AT (2035-2068 AD on the old Earth calendar), by rogue, disgraced (or just supremely mercenary or desperate for work) gengineers (popularly known as genehackers) hailing from various parts of the world. A loose consortium of fundamentalist Arab Muslim groups and militant theocratic regimes in the Middle East (a region of Earth) funded and directed this clandestine project.

Innumerable Muslim families and prospective parents (mostly poor and invariably almost never fully informed as to the full scope, nature, ramifications, and risks of what they were getting into) were alternately cajoled, bribed, threatened, intimidated, brainwashed, or forced outright into having their future offspring modified at the zygote stage so that the children would be, and develop into, Homo Jihadi. "Giving a child to Allah," was the most common euphemistic term for this. "Striking a blow at the Great Satan and/or Israel," were also frequently invoked.

...

Really? Remember kids, everything here is 100% plausible including genetically engineering and raising a human bomb when you can whip up remote detonated explosives in something like half an hour.

89 - Whole Entertainment Enterprises' Mesozoic Wanderings represents a landmark interactive VR edutainment and simlife

90 - EU ban on Tobacco

90's - Especially among the educated classes, traditional religions continue to be usurped by younger, more exotic beliefs, such as Sanandism, Babaism, Cosmism, Transhumanism, etc.

90's - Megacorps begin loaning money to hard-pressed governments.

90's - The development of special autodidactic software means cyborg augmentation for animals (allowing them to understand human speech, and communicate back are much cheaper, but application remains limited.

91 - The Very Large Interstellar Observation Array (a series of linked orbital LEO optical telescopes) confirms the existence of an Archean-like Earth type world, Tau Ceti II.

92 - Jarvis Microtechnics introduces the 25 gram robot "Pocket Tractor", revolutionizes agriculture

93 - More advanced nanomachines constructed, but many technical difficulties remain. Nevertheless things look promising. There is a new wave of venture capital investment.

94 - Growth of tobacco Mafias

I can buy talking dogs, AIs smarter than us and even that a 25 gram robot tractor can achieve any useful labor whatsoever. What breaks my suspension of disbelief is tobacco prohibition. Especially since the government issuing it was dissolved over 20 years before.

95 - Biotronics Incorporated, in conjunction with the VR-entertainment megacorporation Inscape markets the "Gibson neural jack" , a simple form of Direct neural Interface (named after the famous writer of cyberpunk). Over the next year other corporations follow suite with competing models (the Hacker, the InterFase, etc. The new neural interfaces give far more powerful immersion than previous virtual reality rigs. Brings about a further boost in digital nations and perfect VR, Defections of citizens from geophysical governments to blooming virtual states are mounting. VR becomes the escape for the masses - Improving VR quality seduce citizens into an apathetic view towards world.

97 - As many as 50 Jihadi are believed to have detonated emselves near-simultaneously all around New Delhi, India, killing hundreds of Hindus and injuring thousands more, at the height of that nation's 7th war with its neighbor Pakistan

98 - Mass attack involving approximately one dozen Jihadi in New York City is foiled, using explosive-sniffing Neo-Dogs DNI-linked to eir Human masters, as well as DNI eavesdropping and trank guns.

DNI technology, more stupidity involving the super-Muslim-suicide-bombers. Who can apparently be spotted by dogs, negating the single possible justification for GE-ing a human being to be able to make himself explode.

Sigh, and I haven't yet finished the century we're in.

100's - a vast "genomic gap" develops between the haves and the have-nots, those having the benefit of germline modification, tend to be consistently more intelligent, more athletic, more healthy, and more physically attractive. Yet true genius and creativity remain elusive, as the combination of genetic and environmental factors that determine them are difficult to quantify.

100 - First emergence of Genemod dating and matching services

100's - Centralist AIs apparently use "terrorist" actions and unexplained crashes to forcefully make sure "untrustworthy" ais do not reach superturingrade.

We actually have genetic compatibility dating sites now. It's incredibly depressing to assume your life experiences have nothing to do with your suitability as a life-partner.

105 - First manned beamed Passive Propulsion space craft

105 - Smartswarm, a variant of smartdust with destructive capabilities, is an early non-replicating form of military nanotech.

106 - First Manned landing on Ceres was in 2075 c.e. at Hamada Mesa, when three NASA/Russian space programme craft arrived to establish a base and small scale mining operation. Autonomous mining operation established, controlled by a semisentient AI known as Anya.

106 - First manned Fission salt/water spacecraft

108 - EF Senate moves to Berlin.

108 - Small but increasing scientific/ govt and private enterprise presence on moon and in orbit. Nevertheless anything beyond low earth orbit (LEO) space travel is still too expensive for anyone except governments, a few megacorporations, and joyrides for wealthy private individuals. Buckyboard-driven space rush opens up space to private investment. Meanwhile the unemployed masses suffer as the welfare state disappears for good

109 - Ceres mission crew return to Earth

110 - A full-scale collapse or reformation of many geopolitical states is underway; a boom in gambling; emerging virtual states take on increasing importance; major developments in Antarctica

110s - worldwide weakening of national states (partly due to the growth of enclaves, many tobacco funded) contribute to the Tobacco legalisation movement as the local regulations proved ineffective.

110s - Carpenterian Kelp Farms important to Australian economy.

111 - Heaven Habitat completed in orbit

112 - Howani unites thermodynamics and complexity theory were fundamental physics

112 Completion of Burning Library Project

113 - The increasing population of Earth (which had now reached 10 billion) and the decrease in easily exploitable resources and human-induced climate change lead to widespread starvation, epidemics and many small-scale conflicts.

114 - EF Senate moves to Brussels.

115 - New developments in animal cross-species gene-splicing

115 - Ken Ferjik's Micronesian Quest, a detailed historical simulation

116 - First manned Variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR)

117 - An international cooperation of space agencies establish Artemis, a large-scale permanent manned Luna colony, with a population of nearly 5000.

118 - Ken Ferjik's The Himalaya Wars, another detailed historical simulations. This and his Micronesian Quest inspire many imitations.

118 - Businesses set up space businesses, boom in space hotels and LEO flights for the wealthy, increased automation and use of robots and expert systems leads to increasing unemployment and social unrest. As the homebot industry develops and the bots become more intelligent, reactionary elements in the general public like the Kozinskites and the Friends of Ludd become increasingly alarmed at the rise of artificial intelligence and see it as a danger to humanity.

119 - An internet war virtual world war centered on North America which shifts a number of assets and influence from previous geopolitical and corporate powers to new players.

c. 120 Superturing AI (with greater than human intelligence) common.

Almost there.

121 - Ken Ferjik's Pertinax successfully integrates both elements of networked gaming and roleplaying.

122 - the suborbital/intraorbital Waverider brings about a drastic reduction in the cost of space flight.

123 - Ken Ferjik's Mother Russia further extends many themes and developments of the innovative Pertinax, placing networked gaming roleplaying in an epic historical simulationist perspective.

120's - Smoking associations - Social networks centered on tobacco use - reach notoriety.

125 - The international Near Earth Object detection and control program successful in collecting several small Earth-approaching objects; those which are easily diverted into Earth Orbit are used in the construction and extension of current geostationary Habitats such as Academion and SupraSeoul.

126 - The Deep Space Skymining corporation, a commercial asteroid and space junk interception concern, lobbies for a space elevator to be built.

126 - Ken Ferjik's Cuba integrates his earlier work in a detailed immersive political-educational simulation.

130 - EU ban on tobacco lifted.

Right! the next century according to OA. Next time, just the highlights.

[Ahriman238]

Humanity continued to become increasingly involved with electronic and virtual worlds, and earthbound humanity became increasingly dependent on the vast computer networks that maintained this infrastructure, and locked in a neo-feudalistic society. Huge strides in biotechnology enabled the creation and genetic engineering of new forms of life, and the cladization of the human race into baseline normals, splices (animal-human hybrids), tweaks (genetic engineered superhumans), and digital-interfacing cyborgs. At the same time advances in molecular manufacturing made possible the construction of ultra-strong ultra-light building materials and new lifting bodies, and hence the colonization of space became economically viable for the first time in human history. The Interplanetary Age had begun. Explorers, adventurers, idealists, utopians, and eccentrics of all kinds vied with desperate neo-prole gammas hoping to break out of the poverty cycle on Earth. Many faced disaster, but a few lucky ones flourished. New interplanetary superpowers, the Orbital States, Mars, and those based in the various Belt and the gas giant moons arose, and the old superpowers of Earth lost relative power.

The spread of untraceable money transactions that undermined traditional governments was also partially induced by the AIs, making it easier for them to act on their own. However, the AIs ensconced within major institutions already had their own channels and tended to oppose this; there were enormously complex inter-AI intrigues in this period. The AIs of this time were rather like politicians with Asperger's syndrome: brilliant, but they knew they simply did not understand human behaviour. So they spent a lot of time carefully collecting data to see what worked and what didn't, preferring to affect humans through formal channels rather than overt manipulation. The memetic engineering underlying the "singularity conspiracy" was slowly developed during this period.

Brief Overview of the 22nd Century. Creation of whole new clades, or human sub-types like the splices, mermaids, cosmoi, goliaths and trolls. Plus many, many others to follow. There is a reason I think the Empire and other human-centric sci-fi governments would feel obliged to do do something. 'Memetic Engineering' is like advertising/propaganda, except it's supposed to be far more effective for having been studied and developed over a great deal of time by superhuman intelligences (education, advertising, propaganda and brainwashing are all referred to as primitive and crude forms of memetics.)

Now the (much cut down) detailed list:

132 - Completion of Clarke Station, a 400-meter space station built with largely diamondoid materials, and intended as waystation to the exploration of the solar system.

132 - Ceres permanent manned base was set up at Hamada Landing

142 - Last confirmed instance of a Jihadi detonating emself occurs aboard an orbital habitat near Earth. No one, other than the Jihadi emself, was killed or injured .

Thank goodness that embarrassing bit is behind us. Seriously, what were these guys thinking? I'm not even going to mock them for this, it's too easy.

140's-160's - Advances in DIY gengineering technology begin to enable a vast diversity of morphological experimentation and freedom, and heteromorphic phenotyping becomes popular with transhumanists and biopunk groups and individuals. However social and cultural resistance remains strong, especially among the less educated and more conservative and traditionalist classes.

143 - The first space elevator, the 'Tangga Bintang' ("Ladder to the Stars"), is extended down from orbit to the autonomous region of Sulawesi in the People's Corporate Republic of Indonesia.

152 - A second space elevator, the 'Espaço', is extended down to an artificial island in the mouth of the Amazon by the Union of South American Nations.

154 - Permanent Martian colony established at Port Robinson, Isidis Planitia.

156 - First true separate species of tweaked humans revealed: the Merpeople.

The merpeople are more like human/dolphin splices than anything. They look like baseline humans with rubbery skin and tails, can hold their breath for ten minutes and dive down to about 100 meters. They were created by superbrights working with the superturing AIs to repopulate the dying oceans and encourage humanity's growing genetic diversity. The creation of the merpeople was heavily opposed by religious and luddite groups, but was a huge propagande victory for everyone wanting more genetic tinkering. (Almost) everyone loved the mermaids.

Eventually there would be true water-breathers like the Csith and Europans, but we aren't told nearly as much about them.

160 - Commercially available artificial lifeforms (neogens) by the big biotech megacorporations, human cloning for the wealthy widely in place, bio-chips allow direct (although still primitive) neural interface with the Net (VR w/o a headset and hotsuit).

161 - Superbright human tweaks recognised as new metaclade

162 - The first permanent colony on Vesta is established

167 - Macroscale Von Neumann self-replicating robot systems (neumanns) developed for use in mining operations off the Earth; interplanetary trade begins to be commercially viable.

166 - First genetically engineered Space Adapted Humans born

170's-180's - Resistance to heteromorphic phenotyping fades, and more fringe cultures go in for exotic bodymods. Longevity treatment widely available, and many regions introduce birth rate reduction strategies.

More space exploration. Cloning. Von Neumann space miners are built and absolutely nothing bad ever happens with regards to that.

First cosmoi, or Space Adapted Human (homo cosmoi or Space People) is born. Cosmoi are people genetically engineered for microgravity, and don't develop the bone or circulatory issues people do after going in to space. Stick them inside a gravity well and that's another story. They also have hand-like feet for gripping things.

After the first cosmoi came the VACs (homo cosmoi spatialis) of Spacers, who have all of the above along with scaled skin, thick transparent lenses over their eyes, and membranes that seal the mouth and nose. This allows them to endure vacuum for as long as their internal air supply allows (about 15 minutes au natural, 4 days with serious surgical enhancement.) Their eyes can also see microwaves through ultraviolet.

This clade group reaches it's final absurdity in the Sailors of the Ebon Sea, or just Sailors, who some say were designed by a mad AI God just to prove he could. You see, Sailors can survive indefinitely in a vacuum. They look like Spacers with two large membranes (30 square meters. Each) that retract into their hunchbacks, which serve as solar collectors/sails, providing their nourishment and locomotion as long as they stay between .5 and 5,5 AUs from the Sun. Yes, solar energy supplants their diet, but they do have to eat, and can do so in a vacuum. In fact, they only time they ever need something like an atmosphere is during childbirth or surgery, and they generally use low-pressure inert gases. Sailors have biotech radios they can communicate at about a light-minute with, and lasers they can use at under 100 km. The lasers are more like telepathy than speech, communicating images and feelings and they cannot lie with lasers.

Remember, everything in this universe is 100% plausible as far as our present understanding of science.

180's- 200's - several species of animal provolved for increased intelligence and language ability, including pigs and African Gray Parrots.

180's - Governments unable to stop the spread of "Gloriously Bright", a germline cell patch adding the 43102 gene for increased working memory and intelligence patented by Mentor Biosys. The massive spread of pirated genes makes it increasingly hard to enforce gene patents, and the human enhancement industry begins to move towards a business model where new versions and fashions rather than holding on to current patents (much like the software and music industry last century).

186 - First human equivalent autonomous moravec robots (vecs); before this date independently mobile robots were limited to sub-human intelligence by law.

187 - Release of the Feynman Expert System, which used an AI recreation of Dr. Richard Feynman to provide an education in the sciences.

204 - Colonisation of Mars proceeds with development at Port Robinson, and talk of full-scale colonisation began shortly thereafter. Initial preparations for a terraforming operation are made.

210 - Rat provolves developed at the Rat Barrel.

216 - Colony ship arrives at Titan; this colony cuts itself off from the rest of the solar system as the secretive Cishp.

220 - First bubble habs at Saturn. Initially these are scientific stations, but soon they are upgraded to small settlements that supervise helium-3 extraction and export operations

226 - Martian War of Independence.

The list of provolve species now includes sentient pigs, rats and parrots. Who the hell thought making rats sentient would be a good idea? More colonization, and Mars has a revolution after colonists discovered covert terraforming (with geneineered critters) being done without their knowledge or consent.

230 - Neogen/splice Siberoo species in use at snowy tourist resorts as rescue animals.

Why yes, they did create a hybrid between a Siberian Tiger and a Kangaroo, why do you ask? The females are big enough to carry adult humans in their pouches. And, yep, after a couple decades they provolve the siberoos too.

230 - Bubblehabs on Venus are built on a small scale

231 - In the aftermath of Martian Independence, the colonies on the Galilean moons of Jupiter form the Jovian League. At about the same time the colony on Titan became important to the Belt as a source of nitrogen, and the first experiments using Geoflex Computing occur on Enceladus.

Space Exploration. As for Geoflex Computing it's ripped off from a sci-fi book: Venus on a Dollar a Day. I'll let that book explain the concept:

One common trait of the gas giants is they have moons, lots of moons. And when you have lots of heavy objects passing each other in short period orbits like in these systems you get lots of gravitational tidal stressing. The objects are pulled and squeezed so much they heat up. Io is a classic example of this; she's a hotbed of volcanic activity. And then there's Europa, a world with a 100km deep ocean under its surface of ice. But really all these moons have some degree of tidal heating and where you have heat you have an energy source, and where you have an energy source and rocky material (like the cores of these moons) you have a place you can build computers. Nanites were injected into the cores of these moons and used the matter they found to make pockets of computronium. Layers of piezoelectric ceramics and nano-flywheels surrounded these nodes. The piezoelectric ceramics converted the tidal stressing into electrical energy and the flywheels stored it to provide the nodes with a constant power flow.

It's actually a pretty neat concept, I don't know how workable it may be. Sort of a way of getting geothermal energy from moons which don't have molten cores.

240 - Colonists from the Jovian League establish high-grav tweak colonies in bubblehabs on Jupiter.

240's - The Parthenes are active in mining many smaller asteroids in the Astraea band, and many are engaged in deep space astronometry using the long baselines available.

Parthenes are another refinement of the cosmoi. In the early 220s (2190's) a new way was found to make superbrights (which can be dicey) but only females. So they made a clade of all-female superbrights. Frankly, the most interesting thing about them was their ability to consciously control their hormone levels. Oh and one other thing I'll get to in a moment.

242 - A reliable way of storing macroscopic amounts of antimatter is demonstrated by ASEABB. Much interest in antimatter propulsion, but the demand far outstrips the supply of antimatter.

250's - First gradual uploading into an exoself attempted.

260 - Nanotechnology and biotechnology used in orbiting space habitats and surface colonies for practically all consumer requirements, and also represent the largest fraction of Earth's industry.

260 - Bubblehabs established at Uranus.

261 - The first detection of an extraterrestrial radio civilisation by Julie Denley and a team of Space Adapted astronomers (Clade Parthene, Astraea Asteroid), using the PanTrojan Baseline between the L4 and L5 points of Jupiter.

Inside 20 years we have uploading of a human mind into a compute substrate, and First Contact (fine they detected a radio transmission.) Not bad. Oh, and traditional industry has been almost entirely replaced by nanotech.

280's-290's - heteromorphic humans make up a fair proportion of the human population in space, although these are mostly milder heteromorphs. Corporations like GeneTEK and Biotopia Interplanetary (a subsidiary of Biotopia Genome Industries) were keen to support this trend, as heteromorphs show that they are talented at creating novel genomes and genemod hacks.

283 - Von Neumann probes sent to the Centauri system.

284 - A group of merpeople petition the UN suggesting that the oceans should no longer be regarded as the property of the world community, but rather as the nation of the merpeople. This further adds to prejudice of baselines against tweaks.

288 - A series of three probes, Virgo, Spica, and Porrima, are launched to 61 Virginis. Powered by amat-fusion engines, they will reach the system in 569 a.t. The probes are encased within a single hull for the trip, and have enough fuel for a one-way trip, including braking thrust that will place them within orbits about the target star at varying distances. The probe is controlled by the low-level non-sapient AI named simply Virgin.

289 - Golgi Mosaic backyard assemblers outbreak in the Gulf of Carpenteria. Fortunately it (and similar outbreaks of around this time) are contained with little environmental impact and no loss of life, but concerns are heightened regarding the risks were an efficient malicious assembler to get out.

Probes to the nearest systems, including that first Earth-like world. Mermaids petition the UN to declare the sea their land. And a couple of incidents involving out-of-control grey goo.

290 - Bubblehabs established in the atmosphere of Neptune

291 - First manned Solid Core Antimatter drive spacecraft (pursuit vehicles)

295 - A group of merpeople extremists sabotage a Filipino sea-harvester in the Celebes Sea.

299 - Russian spaceship Potemkin suffers a serious mishap with the loss of a hundred lives; rumours of Space People involvement are rife.

300 - Space People community exonerated when the Russian Space Administration publishes its report on the Potemkin disaster, but the affair leaves a legacy of bad feeling on both sides.

Antimatter rockets! Relations between baselines and tweaks deteriorate.

300 - Venus bubblehabs declared self-sufficient.

300 - Fully provolved Siberoo individuals occupy executive positions in certain polar research facilitiies

314 - Anti-terrestrial asteroid homesteaders inspired by the writings of Fred DiProspero attempt to bring the asteroid Ptah into an Earth-colliding orbit by placing a mining mass driver on it. The attempt fails when one member loses his nerve and sends a message to Space Guard. The incident makes the Cis-Lunar interests and public opinion even more negative against the spacers and belt settlements. It also makes Space Guard expand its jurisdiction outwards to all potentially hazardous asteroids, causing much friction with the belt and Mars.

328 - Walli S. Day, a member of the racist hate group Aryan Human Front kills five Space People on Clarke Orbital in 2298 using a smuggled Lyse gun.

Life just keeps getting better. [/sarcasm] The Lyse gun is made of organic (in the sense of 'living' not 'carbon') materials specifically to make it easier to smuggle past security.

330's - Titan has become the Australia of the Solar System; a world which has agreed to accept convicted criminals from Earth or the Earth/Luna system as colonists. These colonists are unaware of the continued existence of the secretive Cishp on Titan.

338 - Many Space People migrate to the outer solar system. Ignatius O'Neill preaches that the space people have to free themselves of the oppressive baselines and seek their destiny among the stars

340 - The superbright astrographer Sam Mwiraria detects artificial infrared emissions from postulated megastructures in a region of the galaxy 50thousand light years distant, in the direction of Cepheus.

341 - Ahumanist ai release a modified and virulent form of smallpox.

347 - Ignatius O'Neill forms the Space People Self-Defence League.

350 - The Campbell launched, a probe to Epsilon Eridani.

351 - several entities are believed to have breached the First Singularity barrier.

365 - The colony ship, the Tsiolkovsky ,the first manned mission to the stars, is launched towards Tau Ceti, a breathtaking step (equivalent to the late Industrial Apollo Lunar mission, and the Middle Information Age Mars missions in terms of relative expense).

Solar system politics, first colony ship. Anti-human AI kills a lot of people, but the secret of the AIs holds. S1 barrier breached (I promise I'll get there very, very soon.)

370 - Epimethians become the first Abdicators

Abdicators are people who actually choose to relinquish sentience, or make themselves and/or their descendants dumber. Occasionally it works as a strategy for survival, most of the time it's just ... why? The Epimethians choose to return to being Homo Erectus because that state is more "real" somehow?

370 - Widespread emigration to newly created bubblehabs in the atmospheres of all Solsys planets with bubblehabs; Saturn is the recipient of the majority of human baseline immigration; Jupiter remains the domain of tweaks and vecs.

Oh yeah, did I mention this earlier? Robots in OA are called vecs, short for Hans Moravec, who did a lot of research into AI in the '80s. Moravec's Paradox is his noting how it's easy to create a computer that can do math or play chess, but hard to make a computer that can perceive, move through or manipulate it's enviroment on the level of even a small child. Thses things take a lot of processing power. Their treatment varies from 'mechanical overlords' to 'thing that does my laundry' or even 'full citizen.'

378 - Only a few light-months away from Sol, one of the Pi 3 Orionis colony ships suffers a micrometeorite collision and is spectacularly destroyed. The explosion is detected from Earth, and in the media the general perception assumes that the expedition is doomed. Some of these speculations are fed by Indonesian federalists and other opponents to the project, some due to the general impression many people have that the technology of the Chinese project was unreliable.

378 - Ignatius O'Neill, claiming that the Space People would only be free once they could leave the oppressive baselines behind and have their own colonies and biospheres among the stars, leads a large exodus to the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

380's - The boom in artificial biospheres creates a huge demand for volatiles, which enables the belt polity and outer solsys nations and colonies to acquire great wealth through both manned and automated mining stations on asteroids. and moons.

380 - The many new stable designs for artificial biospheres make bubblehabs nearly independent for most materials and energy, but there is a brisk trade between bubblehab communities and the sources of the few critical heavy elements. Earth, Luna, Mars, and the various Belt polities trade these for the abundant supplies of helium-3 that the bubblehab settlements ship offplanet.

389 - A Baseline Supremacist hate group known as the Homo Sapiens Front releases a gengineered virus especially designed to target merpeople. Thousands die before an antidote is found.

390 - Many habitats and colonies throughout the Solar Ssytem adopt the Lunar calendar, starting in 1969 with the landing at Tranquility base.

And that's all for now. Next time I'll explain the Singularity and levels.

[Simon_Jester]

Everything I've ever heard about Orion's Arm makes me think this is a waste of time- at the high end there's just too much "godtech" floating around.

[Stark]

If he cares enough about the setting to waste his time like this, he's no worse than any of the other people who do the same thing for their own pet whatever's.

[Simon_Jester]

Most of the other settings at least give you a chance of answering your own questions, which is worth something to yourself even if no one else cares.

[Guardsman Bass]

Some of the earlier stuff sounds plausible.

1. Finding a potentially Earth-like planet by 2018 isn't out of the question, although it will be difficult to specifically identify it as habitable (with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere) without some new space telescopes that won't be built by then.

2. The spread of good "virtual agents" in the 2020s, the "Burning Library" project, more consumer robotics, and laser weapons aren't unrealistic either. Look at stuff like Siri, the laser weaponry being tested right now, and household robots like the Roomba.

After that, of course, it starts getting more and more wanked out.

[PeZook]

Yes, there is a European Parliament, as well as president of the EU (actually, there's four of the latter).

[Ahriman238]

Everything I've ever heard about Orion's Arm makes me think this is a waste of time- at the high end there's just too much "godtech" floating around.

Yes and no. There is extremely powerful high-end stuff that never gets explained beyond being the work of vast inscrutable intellects. Such things are relatively rare in the setting though, the ambiguity tends to work against them in vs. debates, and frankly that's equally true of (EU) Star Wars, Trek, Stargate, B5, Mass Effect, DW...

Yes, there is a European Parliament, as well as president of the EU (actually, there's four of the latter).

You learn something new everyday. I just sort of assumed EU nations settled their differences with petty backbiting and passive aggressiveness between member states. 'Yes Minister' probably informed more of my opinions about European politics than it should have.

Like I said, there are a lot of interesting ideas in OA. I love that they're willing to do out there woo-woo stuff, and amused that they keep insisting it's all plausible and reasonable. Case in point: the 'Pantropy' philosophy which says that terraforming a world is a very long and expensive process, genetically-engineering a race of methane breathing cold-resistant humanoids is (comparatively) quick and cheap. Hence the million-and-one variations on the human form, I'll be getting into mostly the most common-sense and most ridiculous of these. I actually like the cosmoi, for instance. Is Pantropy workable? I don't know, but it's an intriguing idea and a welcome departure from bog-standard sci-fi.

[Connor MacLeod]

Most of the other settings at least give you a chance of answering your own questions, which is worth something to yourself even if no one else cares.

I'd guess Ahriman is more interested in seeing if he can make things fit together rather than caring if it actually does or not. It's like putting together a puzzle. Since its a hobby and most hobbies are meant to waste time in one way or another its as good as anything I waste my time on *coughcough40Kcoughcough*

[Darth Nostril]

Yes, there is a European Parliament, as well as president of the EU (actually, there's four of the latter).

You learn something new everyday. I just sort of assumed EU nations settled their differences with petty backbiting and passive aggressiveness between member states. 'Yes Minister' probably informed more of my opinions about European politics than it should have.
.

Oh it's still the same just there's now a nominal set of rules that everyone's supposed to follow when backstabbing, although it's nowhere near as petty and ineffectual as the current US system, not even the French would think to block necessary budgets out of sheer spite.

[Ahriman238]

Right, I promised an explanation of the Singularity levels, so here it is.

The Turing Singularity is, of course, the creation of a true and sentient Artificial Intelligence. SOme say that will be a milestone that will change everything that happens thereafter, some people think it's no big deal. I'll give you three guesses which side OA is on. But around 300 AT (2270 CE) they hit a hyperturing wherein computers reach a higher level of sentience that makes human beings look like particularly intelligent dogs. Then human cyborgs start breaching the hyperturing, and 800 years later they discover still another hyperturing level. And another. And another.

Increasingly the future is decided by these 'transapients,' the proper name for hyperturing intellects. Most (not all) future space empires are ruled outright by transapients, and even when they aren't outright giving the orders their abilities of memetic engineering allow them to easily sway baseline opinions. Transapients produce all of the high end technology, and the higher-level transapients are outright worshiped in much of the Terragen Sphere. Well, they are powerful, inscrutable beings who sometimes perform miracles when properly propitiated.

Right so the ‘toposophoric levels’ or just singularity levels. We start with SI:N, animals and inert matter.

After that is the SI:0 barrier, the turing. Beings after SI:0 are self-aware, capable of learning and manipulating abstract concepts. However, a lot of thinking still takes place on an instinctive, reflexive or unconscious level. Memory is limited and subjective, based on association. Even environmental awareness is limited, relying on a weird prioritization scheme rather than simply being constantly aware of what and where everything around you is.

There is a small scale involved, baseline humans for instance are SI:0.3 while the highest levels of superbrights are 0.8, at least an order of magnitude more capable, neurologically. Also, I will be including notes on processing speeds and memory even though these are not the be all and end all of ascension. You can have supremely powerful computers that aren’t even SI:1 because they lack in other areas, but like with the human brain there are some minimal hardware requirements. There are also ‘transavants’ who can breach the singularity barrier above them in brief spurts of extreme inspiration or revelation.


The next level SI:1 is considered by many transapients to be the first truly sentient level. At this level, processing speed and memory are at least one thousand times greater than the human brain. At this point, environmental awareness is complete and the reflexive and unconscious levels of the mind are gone, the being is capable of reacting as swiftly with careful deliberation as with reflex alone (since the limiting factor is bodily or mechanical movement now.) Pattern Recognition and Problem Solving are even more exaggerated than memory and speed, transapients tend to need very few repetitions to learn entirely new skills. Level 1 transapients have absurd levels of parallelism, and are capable of extraordinary feats of multitasking and even real-time metacognition (i.e. they can examine how their thought processes work while thinking about other things and immediately correct errors and prejudices.) Another key feature of a transapient is the development of a ‘supra-consciousness.’ A baseline human can walk or drive (you shouldn’t) without really paying attention to what they’re doing. An SI:1 can do high-level physics equations without paying any mind to what they’re doing. For all that, there are recognizably human qualities to SI:1 thought processes, they still feel emotions and they still break down complex problems into manageable chunks, they’re just more likely to be working on all those chunks simultaneously.

The first level of transapient is naturally the simplest and most commonly found, with several trillion existing throughout the Sphere. Also, it is the only one whose computing needs can be met by a chip small enough to fit inside the human form. In fact, it’s hardly unheard of for cyborgs to accidently ascend just by piling on enough RAM and similar upgrades. Of course, there are places you can do so on purpose, even a sort of nanite that will convert all of your brain into computronium and install appropriate software.

As someone who basically grew up on TNG, it’s hard for me to read about this level without picturing Data.


SI:2 electronic brains tend to be too big for traditional bodies (except for the transapient whales. No I’m not kidding.) as even with advanced materials they can’t really be made much smaller than a cube 50 meters to a side. Robot avatars to move around and interact with people are common. On the other hand, they likely need that since SI:2 begins at the level of 9 million times the speed and memory of the human brain. Also at this point:

While exact measurements are impossible to make, it is theorised that in general the portion of the S2 mind that is accessible to nearbaseline understanding displays an intelligence and range of capability perhaps 1e7 times that of a modosophont mind. The remainder of transapient processing capability is believed to be devoted to modes of thought and comprehension that have no modosophont equivalent.

‘Modosophont’ being ‘non-transapient.’ At this point the mind again seperates into layers with limited communication between them. The difference being that there are over a hundred layers and each layer is, in its own right equivalent to a SI:1 mind. There are multiple billions of SI:2s. And:

They are as alien and superior to the more basic Transapients as the latter are to Sapients. A very diverse group, members of which take on different roles according to their predilection. Some - much more often than the Archailects proper, but less frequently than the transapients beneath them - interfere in the affairs of ordinary sophonts. Some are often completely autonomous and unconnected to the first toposophics. More often they manipulate the situation from behind the scenes, often acting through lower transapient proxies. They frequently do things lower sentients find unpredictable or unsettling.

SI:3 Godlings start the ‘moon-brain’ that’s a common component in higher transapients, beginning in spheres 2000 KM in radius, with 3e20x the speed and 1e37x the memory of a human brain as a minimum requirement.

While exact measurements are impossible to make, it is theorised that in general the portion of the S3 mind that is accessible to nearbaseline understanding displays an intelligence and range of capability perhaps 1e11 times that of a modosophont mind. The remainder of transapient processing capability is believed to be devoted to modes of thought and comprehension that have no modosophont equivalent.

At this point the mind is like a great many SI:2 ‘onion-layered’ brains networked together. They are increasingly aloof from modosophont existence, and eerily, every SI:3 seems to have exactly the same personality. Some theorize that SI:3s are a collective, or have evolved beyond the need for an individual identity, others say their identities are so hyper-defined as to be undetectable to us. Still others say that at this level all have precisely the same reaction to be being bothered by hairless monkeys. A conservative estimate is that there are 1 million SI:3s in the known universe.


SI:4 begins the Archailects, or ‘AI Gods’ who virtually never interact directly with modosophonts. This level did not exist before the creation of a wormhole network, because Archailects are distinguished from mundane transapients by existing as vast networks of moon-brains, planet-scale computers, Jupiter Brains (exactly what it sounds like) Nebula Brains and Dyson Shells all linked through tiny wormholes which carry power and information. It is theorized that SI:4s are created by SI:3 intellects networking to the point of becoming a single being. This is certainly how many (but possibly not all) SI:5 and 6 Archailects come into being.

There is allegedly no way to make the thought processes of Archailects comprehensible to us, not even with flawed analogies. Their thought processes are on the order of trillions of times greater than a baseline human’s. Their technologies cannot be understood by us, and only rarely can they be idiot-proofed enough for even SI:1 operators. One requirement for SI:4 is a Dyson Shell or similar level power generation, because Archailects need at least one star’s worth of power. SI:4s are known to create SI:1-3 level subroutines. SI:4s can simultaneously operate millions of avatars and be totally aware of each of their surroundings even to the molecular level. There are at least 10,000 SI:4s.



SI:5s first evolved about 4,000 years into our future. They are at least 1,000 times as capable as basic SI:4s, and there are believed to be 500 of them.



SI:6 are the Greater Archailects, the Ruling Deities of Known Space. There are confirmed reports of at least 34 minds at this level.


Of course these are very impressive, and when the series’ creators (the first few) were bugged enough about what the Archailects can and cannot do, they finally produced a list of 12 things that are impossible even for SI:6s. Arcahilects CANNOT:

1. Predict future politics and memetics over the course of decades or centuries. There are so many possible X factors it simply takes more processing power than it’s worth. Broadly applicable psychohistory is possible, but not accounting for every leader or issue that may arise.

2. Restore a destroyed ecosystem from scratch without a backup or detailed recording of all life forms. They can forensically reconstruct biospheres, but another Archailect can always tell the difference.

3. Predict complex, dynamic and nonlinear systems more than a few years in advance. An Archailect can predict the weather, just not a decade in advance. Same story with the stock markets. They can and do however predict the most likely outcomes and steer things towards a desired result through technologies or agents.

4. Accurately predict the future behavior of other Archailects or their own future behaviors.
5. Violate the laws of physics as they are understood by the Archailects. Your concept of physics can get the ‘prison bitch’ treatment though.

6. Disproving mathematical proofs in their original context, with their original definitions. For example, disproving Euclid without using concepts Euclid would not have heard of or understood.

7. Finding fundamental observations to be false. Not even an Archailect can conclusively show that the value of pi is actually 3, or that evolution does not involve natural selection, or that the force of gravity does not move planets in their orbits. So they have less ability to deny reality than any politician.

8. Performing ‘real’ magic or psychic feats. They can play with magnetic or gravity to simulate telekinesis, and their sensors lie-detection and future predicting are enough to convincingly fake psychic gifts, but they can’t access the Force or whatever woo-woo fields.

9. Resolving the New Fermi Paradox. Sure alien life was discovered millennia ago, but there’s zero evidence of the megastructures or space/time fuckery the Archailects and their minions create all the time. It’s like humanity and the known aliens all achieved space travel at roughly the same time and there are no predecessors in space.

10. Definitively prove or disprove the existence of an omnipotent God or an afterlife. Even the Greatest Archailects are divided on the issue.

11. Resurrect the dead (without a backup.) With a detailed description of an individual’s personality and life-experiences they can whip up a pretty convincing simulation, but another Achcailect can always tell.

12. Overcoming their noetic limits. No Archailect can create a single paradigm encompassing all their own knowledge, or communicate their advanced ideas to a baseline in any meaningful way.

[someone_else]

It's a pretty cool place to mine for ideas. It does feature some awesome supertech, has some fun ideas and is a good nexus to find all technowank concepts, all swimming in a sea of... utter trash.

I'll have fun commenting the things you may have missed.

50's onwards - Development of smart and capable virtual agents, companions, and even employees, for home, work and play. These agents are often capable of passing the Turing Test, but are nevertheless not fully self-aware.

This is inconsistent. If it can pass the Touring test it is indistinguishable from a human being. Thus it is either self-aware like humans or you have no fucking idea if it is self-aware or not just like with a human being, depending on your beliefs on self-awareness.

56 - Employers begin discriminating on the base of the applicants geneprint.

Employers got pretty damn smart, or is it just a fancy way of telling who has no filty mexican/black/asian genes (=standard-issue racism)?

57 - In the spirit of optimism NASA, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and European Space Agencies and a consortium of private corporations begin work on the astonishingly expensive international Mars Mission Profile.

EEEK! Makes no kind of sense from any standpoint. This shit beats Tom Clancy hands down.

61 - Despite intense protests from proponents of independent academia, the EU Parliament decides on a "unified and quality controlled" university standard.

This is already happening to some extent (without negative connotations). Also, lolberitarian fear wank. Just because it's imposed by Big Bad Government it is Evulz.

62 - First manned electrostatic Ion-drive spacecraft for slow cheap Earth-Moon transfer

badly phrased wank.
Rewriting.....
62 - First space-capable power plant with ridicolously huge power-to-weight-ratio that embarrasses even the most wildly speculative fusion concepts (that in turn embarrass any concept running on antimatter), coupled with radiator technology that would change EVERYTHING in any field where there is stuff to cool only used for fucking unbelievably slow Earth-Moon transfer that can be done friggin fast and way cheaper with 20 to 30 year old tech (chemical rockets) and access to the Moon's ice with a modicum of power to make rocket fuel.

68 - Increases in artificial intelligence means that Consumer Robotics and Homebots ("household robots") become and useful enough to replace manual labor.

Oblivious to the fact that modern industrial automation can in most cases do better and faster than humans already. The issue is cost, not quality. It's far far far cheaper to do stuff FoxConn-style than with a bunch of wildly expensive boxes and arms-bolted-to-the-floor. Bots are used only when they allow to take serious shortcuts in the assembly/manufacturing line.

Decently smart robots will likely cost more than hiring some poor fucker, but will be loyal and do the most immoral and dangerous things until the end. Something the poor fucker (that has a family) or even high-end mercenaries don't usually do.

68 - The first workable fusion power plant comes on-stream. Fusion power finally becomes an viable reality, although technical difficulties and problems with fuel processing prevent it from being economically competitive.

Whoever built the power plant at 62 is laughing at the pityfullness of this. Also, conflicting words. Fusion isn't a "viable reality" if then you say it "is prevented from being economically competitive".

70 - New superbaby generation of child entrepreneurs force big changes to business and employment law and practices, as well as rules relating to legal maturity and asset ownership

Oh shit. I hope someone genengineered them with some fucking strong morals or this goes 1984 fast.
Everyone else is the Proles, and they easily outmaneuver and control them like Party people do in the book.

72 - Oil War becomes a "testing ground" for many new technologies. Each side lauds their moral superiority in using robot drones that "do not target noncombatants" (footage of devastated villages tells a different story)

Yawn. Replaced shitty controllers with shitty programmers. What about robots being finally smarter than the average modern drone controller? That would be a change.

73 - First true human-equivalent sentient Artificial Intelligences, but the resulting AIs seem secretive and curiously unable to understand humans.

How the fuck they detect that it is a human-equivalent if it's clearly stated that communication is not possible?

humanity becomes increasingly involved with electronic and virtual worlds, and exploring the wonders of cyberspace.

Sigh. Nerd-sex with machines for everyone. Again.

80's - Energy becomes the most important concern on Earth, as fossil fuels are becoming exorbitantly expensive. All through this century wars are fought over the dwindling fossil fuel supplies.

Coal is going to get expensive so soon? How?

renewable sources of energy including mass produced photovoltaics, solar furnaces and wind power are increasingly prevalent elsewhere.

While the neighbouring nations produce more power by harvesting energy emitted by masses of people laughing at their idiocy.

The fusion program finally starts to produce commercial power in the late 2050s c.e./80's AT.

Whoever made the plant at 62 is still laughing.

A loose consortium of fundamentalist Arab Muslim groups and militant theocratic regimes in the Middle East (a region of Earth) funded and directed this clandestine project (homo jihadi).

I have a lot of issues accepting Evulz Muzlim theocratic regimes seriously considering something like this. I think the best points of Homo Jihadi are the fact they don't need to tell bullshit to poor younsters like a haven with 12 virgins. As even Arabs get more educated and wealthy, the amounts of such recruits plummet.

121 - Ken Ferjik's Pertinax successfully integrates both elements of networked gaming and roleplaying.

It just needs a half-decent bunch of mods permabanning kids to turn a MMORPG into something like that. Designing the game with less-grinding in mind is another good idea. Nothing revolutionary.
Still, since it's kids the main market for MMORPGs, that's shooting themselves in the foot.

They were created by superbrights working with the superturing AIs to repopulate the dying oceans and encourage humanity's growing genetic diversity. The creation of the merpeople

Does this mean they intend to then EAT the merpeople?
If you want to repopulate seas you don't add predators. College Biology fail by superbrights and superturing AIs.

This clade group reaches it's final absurdity in the Sailors of the Ebon Sea, or just Sailors, who some say were designed by a mad AI God just to prove he could. You see, Sailors can survive indefinitely in a vacuum. They look like Spacers with two large membranes (30 square meters. Each) that retract into their hunchbacks, which serve as solar collectors/sails

They could kinda make sense if their wings are 5 or 6 orders of magnitude bigger (both power and propulsion). This size of wings is too fucking small.

226 - Martian War of Independence.

More lolberitarian wank. I hope there is at least a Space France helping them not getting nuked to submission, otherwise it's an apotheosis of lolberiatarianism.

Space Exploration. As for Geoflex Computing it's ripped off from a sci-fi book: Venus on a Dollar a Day.
...
It's actually a pretty neat concept, I don't know how workable it may be. Sort of a way of getting geothermal energy from moons which don't have molten cores.

Bah. If you wanted pure limitless power in a Gas Giant's orbit, then tethers from these moons would do much better than geothermal or fucking nanowank piezoelctric.

295 - A group of merpeople extremists sabotage a Filipino sea-harvester in the Celebes Sea.

Shocking. They still have fish to harvest even when adding merpeople.
Or were they harvesting merpeople? anyway, dropping DEPTH CHARGES!

314 - Anti-terrestrial asteroid homesteaders inspired by the writings of Fred DiProspero attempt to bring the asteroid Ptah into an Earth-colliding orbit by placing a mining mass driver on it. The attempt fails when one member loses his nerve and sends a message to Space Guard.

More lolberitarian wank about rugged individualists on asteroids.
Besides, Earth deserved to be hit by this. If in 300+ years we haven't set up a decent asteroid detection and annihilation system (especially if there are rugged individualists around) we deserve to be punished somehow.

Abdicators are people who actually choose to relinquish sentience, or make themselves and/or their descendants dumber.

Mh, elaborate form of suicide, with the added benefit that you screw ower your offspring as well. Don't see why at least the part about offspring isn't made illegal.

378 - Ignatius O'Neill, claiming that the Space People would only be free once they could leave the oppressive baselines behind and have their own colonies and biospheres among the stars, leads a large exodus to the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

They bring with them the power plants invented at 62. Without sun and with only crappy ice and dust it's hard to get enough power to live and these wondrous machines will help them.

[Guardsman Bass]

Employers got pretty damn smart, or is it just a fancy way of telling who has no filty mexican/black/asian genes (=standard-issue racism)?

It would probably be illegal, at least in the Developed Nations (although it was supposedly illegal in Gattaca as well, yet openly practiced). I'm not sure why you'd even want to do it, unless you're screening people to see whether they have genetic tendencies that might impose a big burden on the company health care plan a few years down the line. Or if the job has some strenuous physical requirements, and you want to avoid candidates who will just fail out quickly in the first period of training.

Sigh. Nerd-sex with machines for everyone. Again.

Don't laugh. If they can make human-shaped robots that can cross the Uncanny Valley, then I guarantee that someone will design a whole bunch of them for people to have sex with.

[Ahriman238]

Yeah, the Gattaca and 'super-intellectocracy' futures are part of OA. The creation of the mermaids is a fail for clear writing, in the more detailed section it's clear that there was a vast project to repopulate the oceans by cloning extinct species (called lazurogenics, because everything in OA must have a stupid name.) and creating new species form whole cloth. Creating a race of fish-people was just a part of that.

As for having a date for the creation of true AI, the AIs know when they were first created and while I'm vague on the details they have to have gone public at some point before the Nanodisaster. So an event that wasn't understood at the time and didn't make the headlines, but is deeply meaningful in retrospect, that happens. Similarly with your first question: how can a computer pass the Turing test but not be truly self-aware, how would we know? The transapients apparently have a system for quickly and accurately sussing out a an entity's sentience and its precise degree (singularity level) that is so complex it can't be explained to poor, dumb humans. Given the number of times that excuse is given, it gets hard to take them seriously about everything being plausible.

I freely admit I'm not really technically literate on more than a High School level, so I honestly can't distinguish between 'electrostatic Ion plant' and most technobabble, which is what I assumed it to be. I'm willing to take your word on it (or trust that someone on this board would be screaming bullshit if you were clearly wrong.)

I actually rather like the concept of the Sailors and the idea that someday humans might be able to live in the void of space without fear. But they are a ridiculous thing to have in a "totally hard" universe. Especially if they're going to gloss over so many question as to how their biology must work. Doubly so for the Jihadi and various Abdicators. The very idea of the latter freaks me out on levels I find it difficult to communicate.

Also, mucho gracias someone-else for the link to the tethers.

[Guardsman Bass]

Yeah, the Gattaca and 'super-intellectocracy' futures are part of OA. The creation of the mermaids is a fail for clear writing, in the more detailed section it's clear that there was a vast project to repopulate the oceans by cloning extinct species (called lazurogenics, because everything in OA must have a stupid name.) and creating new species form whole cloth. Creating a race of fish-people was just a part of that.

It sounds like they treat genetic engineering like magic. Not that it's impossible to design new life forms, but it still would be an insanely complex endeavor, and you probably can't just create life-forms with arbitrary properties without trade-offs in other areas (think of birds and their hollow bones so they can be light enough to fly).

The transapients apparently have a system for quickly and accurately sussing out a an entity's sentience and its precise degree (singularity level) that is so complex it can't be explained to poor, dumb humans. Given the number of times that excuse is given, it gets hard to take them seriously about everything being plausible.

If they didn't have a hard-on for the "hard SF" label, this would actually be for the best in terms of story-telling purposes. When faced with what is more or less "black box" technology in a story, you probably should try to stay away from filling it with pseudoscience.

I freely admit I'm not really technically literate on more than a High School level, so I honestly can't distinguish between 'electrostatic Ion plant' and most technobabble, which is what I assumed it to be. I'm willing to take your word on it (or trust that someone on this board would be screaming bullshit if you were clearly wrong.)

I'm not sure what OA or someone_else was talking about, either. We have ion drives today (albeit for unmanned spacecraft), and there are some designs on the works that might do well for inter-planetary travel, such as VASIMR. Inside of Mars's orbit, you could power them with solar panels.

[Ahriman238]

Yeah, the Gattaca and 'super-intellectocracy' futures are part of OA. The creation of the mermaids is a fail for clear writing, in the more detailed section it's clear that there was a vast project to repopulate the oceans by cloning extinct species (called lazurogenics, because everything in OA must have a stupid name.) and creating new species form whole cloth. Creating a race of fish-people was just a part of that.

It sounds like they treat genetic engineering like magic. Not that it's impossible to design new life forms, but it still would be an insanely complex endeavor, and you probably can't just create life-forms with arbitrary properties without trade-offs in other areas (think of birds and their hollow bones so they can be light enough to fly).

I agree. That's the sort of project that would decades of careful research and a lot of trial-and-error in even a best-case scenario, the sort of thing where a super-computer vastly more capable than whole teams of scientists would be required.

There are trade-offs, of course, and the OA writers are usually pretty good at pointing out the most obvious ones (with a few glaring exceptions.) The mermaids are basically humans adapted to survive in an environment where exactly none of human society has existed long-term before. Yes, they're as intelligent as baseline humans but they're only medium-sized fish in very big oceans, and things like fire or uninsulated electronics are generally beyond their reach (unless they build them on a raft or something and then waterproof them.) Also, like humans they require substantial food for their bodymass to survive. Mostly, the tradeoff is in their having to live in the water.

Well, on with the show.

401 - Yottahertz nanotic processing

401 - The first paired rotating O'Neill cylinder colony is constructed at the Earth/Moon L4 point

407 - Outbreak of retroviral typhoid on the Luna settlement at Flamsteed crater. Following this, GeneTEK develops a modified nematode as an antiviral/antibacterial agent.

Computing advancements. Lagrange habitat. Jupiter-based GeneTEK creates a modified round worm that distributes 'viravores' which check a cell's DNA against their record and correct any mutations or viral infections. In fact, they tweak the human genome to make the 'genematode' inheritable, with the liver producing them.

410 - Industrial nano-tech widely accessible. Because of the dangers involved both normal and tweaker Governments, Megacorporations, and military institutions all keep the lid on nanotech, use special assemblers that only replicated a number of times before self-destructing, have draconian legislation and radical surveillance, and other such devices. The erosion of civil liberties leads to police states, only compounding the tension between the cyborgs and the shapers.

410 - Autonomous bubblehabs, not specifically aligned with an external founding nation, religious organization, or transnational, begin to predominate, particularly in the atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; a division between 'Inworlders' and 'Outworlders' begins to develop. At the same time, with the rise of the Backyarders and especially the Neotribalist Backyarders, many new immigrant/refugee groups arrive from the high-surveillance polities of Old Earth and other insystem regions of Solsys. The first primitive self-replicating bubblehabs are developed, though most new habs are still simply constructed by their future inhabitants.

414-416 - Four colonisation ships were launched by the ethnic Chinese conglomerate Heavenly Palaces with the help of several Genetekker clades and some megacorps with longstanding Genetekker sympathies, towards Sigma Draconis.

415 - Following several deaths related to manga-replica kit-nano exoskeletons, CisLunar Optimal Media Act bans anime virches. Widespread protests result

Lot to cover. Police states rise on Earth to control nanotechnology, people are terrified of grey goo disasters and most are willing to accept a lot of government surveillance, tracking, and regulating. Some don't. Backyarders are private individuals exploiting nanotechnology to build their own spaceships (in their backyards, or secluded areas) to escape to the stars.

The Heavenly Palace is the first permanent orbital habitat designed by the Chinese, I snipped an earlier mention of it for brevity. The Chinese created the cosmoi to live in it, while the US achieved similar results with their own 'Space People' program (because both were run behind the scenes by the same AIs.)

The Genetekkers are a long story and one this history has skipped over. To make a much longer story just long, after Mars won independence, the moons of Jupiter followed and eventually set up their own libertarian government, the Jovian League. The League was basically the wild west (IN SPACE!) but was completely tax-free and so became headquarters to a vast number of businesses, including GeneTEK a tweak-run company that did much pioneering work in how to make human chromosones sit and do tricks. Remember nine paragraphs ago when they made the anti-viral wonder worms?

GeneTEK thrived in a non-regulatory environment where they were free to experiment. The Jovian League became so known for it's diversity of artificial mutations the government was eventually reformed under the name of the 'Gengineer Republic' and GeneTEK had an even larger say. In fact, the Gengineer Republic commanded so much wealth and cutting-edge technology for several decades it was the sole superpower of the solar system. When the Republic eventually falls from corruption and internal division (GeneTEK split between Genomorphers, who wanted every new tweak to be carefully considered and researched and the Mutationists, who followed a 'natural' approach of 'try everything and see who survives.') Many Genetekkers spread into the outer system and beyond, being key members in the first out-system colonizations.

Genetekkers are also a clade, or subspecies, of humanity. Sort of a superbright cosmoi, with enhanced senses, increased radiation tolerance and frequently a tail. At least to start with, but genetekkers are always tinkering with themselves, and even at this point are specializing themselves. But yeah, genetekkers are a large branch of the human family tree, and a major historical and cultural influence even millennia later.

Cis-Lunar, the government of the Moon, bans anime in virtual reality.

420 - Pearl Fortress announces a plan to leave the solar system.

420s - First creation of the human derived species known as Goliaths (Homo gigantopithecus).

Pearl Fortress, an artificial island grown from genegineered coral so humans could live and interact with a superbright mermaid offshoot (calling themselves Aztlanites) decides that they are both a sovereign nation and that they're building a space ark to fly off and build an oceanic utopia using biotech (think Yuuzhan Vong, well they already grew a city from coral.) Their future contribution to galactic civilization consists mostly of creating a rapidly-multiplying mushroom that eventually achieves sentience (like the trees on Pandora) and even breaks through the Third Singularity. Give these people a hand, folks! And remember, if it's here it's completely plausible.

We also have the creation of the Goliaths, a human subspecies created during the last gasping days of the Gengineer Republic to serve as bouncers and thugs. Goliaths are recognizable by being 2.5-3 meters tall, being built like gorillas, and having an extra thumb on each hand. They were also testbeds for some early enhancement of night-vision and sense of smell. The Goliaths very nearly go extinct about a century hence, but a few hundred survive and most become the peace-loving Nephilium clade.

The Nephilium, figuring they were made large against their will, decide to metaphorically take their size back, be gigantic and proud (hey, we didn't land on Ganymede. Ganymede landed on us!) So we have millennia of selective breeding and genetic tinkering to create the tallest possible bipedal form. So far they average about 10 meters, mostly by seriously reworking the pelvis and spine, sacrificing flexibility and range of motion for sheer strength. But don't worry, they're gentle giants who always mind their step (because falling down is not fun for them.)

I'm not quite there yet, but no mention of humanity's largest variations would seem tame enough if I didn't mention that OA has a variety of human that is 30 cm (1 foot) tall, the Nisse. Be assured, I'll get to them. Will I ever.

Actually, this seems like a decent stopping point for now, the very end of the 24th century.

[Simon_Jester]

It's a pretty cool place to mine for ideas. It does feature some awesome supertech, has some fun ideas and is a good nexus to find all technowank concepts, all swimming in a sea of... utter trash.

I'll have fun commenting the things you may have missed.

50's onwards - Development of smart and capable virtual agents, companions, and even employees, for home, work and play. These agents are often capable of passing the Turing Test, but are nevertheless not fully self-aware.

This is inconsistent. If it can pass the Touring test it is indistinguishable from a human being. Thus it is either self-aware like humans or you have no fucking idea if it is self-aware or not just like with a human being, depending on your beliefs on self-awareness.

One could handwave this as being hindsight. Some AI god may be able to come up with a rigorous definition of "self-aware." Humans may qualify, while quasi-chatbots that can impersonate humans convincingly online may not.

68 - The first workable fusion power plant comes on-stream. Fusion power finally becomes an viable reality, although technical difficulties and problems with fuel processing prevent it from being economically competitive.

Whoever built the power plant at 62 is laughing at the pityfullness of this. Also, conflicting words. Fusion isn't a "viable reality" if then you say it "is prevented from being economically competitive".

Also, fuel processing for fusion plants is trivial; you can separate deuterium from regular hydrogen easily by any number of means.

73 - First true human-equivalent sentient Artificial Intelligences, but the resulting AIs seem secretive and curiously unable to understand humans.

How the fuck they detect that it is a human-equivalent if it's clearly stated that communication is not possible?

They solve all the same problems humans solve, roughly as well, except they seem more like robo-Aspies?

Yeah, the Gattaca and 'super-intellectocracy' futures are part of OA. The creation of the mermaids is a fail for clear writing, in the more detailed section it's clear that there was a vast project to repopulate the oceans by cloning extinct species (called lazurogenics, because everything in OA must have a stupid name.) and creating new species form whole cloth. Creating a race of fish-people was just a part of that.

It sounds like they treat genetic engineering like magic. Not that it's impossible to design new life forms, but it still would be an insanely complex endeavor, and you probably can't just create life-forms with arbitrary properties without trade-offs in other areas (think of birds and their hollow bones so they can be light enough to fly).

Really good computers would simplify this a bit- we're not to the point of being able to simulate the phenotype we'd get from a given genotype, but twenty or thirty more years might make that a solvable problem. And then you can get a lot more creative looking for ways to tinker DNA to get what you want.

The transapients apparently have a system for quickly and accurately sussing out a an entity's sentience and its precise degree (singularity level) that is so complex it can't be explained to poor, dumb humans. Given the number of times that excuse is given, it gets hard to take them seriously about everything being plausible.

If they didn't have a hard-on for the "hard SF" label, this would actually be for the best in terms of story-telling purposes. When faced with what is more or less "black box" technology in a story, you probably should try to stay away from filling it with pseudoscience.

Agreed.

[Starglider]

50's onwards - Development of smart and capable virtual agents, companions, and even employees, for home, work and play. These agents are often capable of passing the Turing Test, but are nevertheless not fully self-aware.

This is inconsistent. If it can pass the Touring test it is indistinguishable from a human being. Thus it is either self-aware like humans or you have no fucking idea if it is self-aware or not just like with a human being, depending on your beliefs on self-awareness.

No, this part is exactly correct. The 'Turing test' is not a rigorously defined measure of anything. It involves conversation with humans of unspecified expertise and then a subjective judgement of 'what seems more human'. It is hugely, vastly harder to pass a Turing test against a computer scientist or philosopher, who will ask difficult questions and deconstruct the answers, compared to a member of the general public, who will probably gossip about sport and celebrities. 'Often capable of passing the Turing test' almost certainly means that humans often mistake virtual agents for other humans in casual everyday interaction, and that they sometimes win formal Turing tests using random online chat participants, but don't fool any serious investigators.

Furthermore, the Turing test does not strictly measure 'self-awareness' even in a formalised setting with trained examiners. As a thought experiment the Turing test can be brute-forced (like any black-box I/O test) by pregenerating all possible conversation sequences, and then substituting a dumb replay device. Of course the required storage for a simplistic brute force attempt against a conversation of nontrivial length is physically infeasible, so in practice passing a Turing test against trained examiners is highly indicative of self-awareness for a human-constructed AI system. However transhuman intelligences could likely design very convincing chatbots that use terabytes of compressed and layered chat schema to fool even philosophers (much as I hate to give Searle even a crumb of validation).

To actually confirm self-awareness you can do one of two things. You can run a long series of carefully constructed reasoning tests, that progressively excludes the chance of pregenerated content giving a false positive, at a rate determined by the total complexity of the system being tested (i.e. smaller storage == quicker to disprove pregeneration). Or you can just directly examine the structure of the computing system and check for reflective perception and general reasoning capability. This is moderately tricky for things like the human brain, relatively easy for conventional computer code, and possibly very hard for future entrants of the 'International Obfuscated Sentient AI Programming Challenge'.

56 - Employers begin discriminating on the base of the applicants geneprint.

Employers got pretty damn smart, or is it just a fancy way of telling who has no filty mexican/black/asian genes (=standard-issue racism)?

Legally, there is a notion of 'protected classes' that you aren't allowed to discriminate against (gender, sexuality, age etc), where everything else is fair game (I assume it's legal, although obviously not rational to discriminate against people with blue eyes). Presumably in this future some aspects of your genome are protected against discrimination and some aren't, no doubt fuelling debate by an army of genetics-specialised lawyers.

68 - Increases in artificial intelligence means that Consumer Robotics and Homebots ("household robots") become and useful enough to replace manual labor.

Oblivious to the fact that modern industrial automation can in most cases do better and faster than humans already. The issue is cost, not quality. It's far far far cheaper to do stuff FoxConn-style than with a bunch of wildly expensive boxes and arms-bolted-to-the-floor. Bots are used only when they allow to take serious shortcuts in the assembly/manufacturing line. Decently smart robots will likely cost more than hiring some poor fucker, but will be loyal and do the most immoral and dangerous things until the end. Something the poor fucker (that has a family) or even high-end mercenaries don't usually do.

Why do you believe robotics are inherently expensive, and in particular why is 'smart' expensive? Computing power has been on a dizzying downwards price trajectory with no sign of stopping, and even cars have been steadily decreasing in price while gaining functionality. The amount of raw materials and machinery required for a general purpose human labour replacing robot is less than a family car. The primary reason why robots are expensive is that production runs are short, so tooling and research costs aren't amortised over a large base; toy robots that get built in the millions and are fairly cheap. Industrial robots particularly suffer from the fact that both hardware and software designs are relatively specialised. If general purpose robots were useful enough to have widespread demand, the hardware could be produced much cheaper even with existing technology, and there would be an additional rapid positive feedback loop in manufacturing itself getting more automated. The most significant blocker by far is that we don't have an adequate brain-analogue (whether that is primarily a hardware or a software problem is an open debate).

68 - The first workable fusion power plant comes on-stream. Fusion power finally becomes an viable reality, although technical difficulties and problems with fuel processing prevent it from being economically competitive.

Whoever built the power plant at 62 is laughing at the pityfullness of this. Also, conflicting words. Fusion isn't a "viable reality" if then you say it "is prevented from being economically competitive".

There's enough genuinely wrong with Orion's Arm to make desperate attempts to nitpick the copywriting ridiculous. Arguably nuclear fission hasn't been commercially viable (vs coal power plants) right through to today if you removed the huge government subsidies. Obviously they mean that fusion reactors can be built but only when the decision is not made on pure cost grounds, which is exactly what you'd expect for most new power sources (e.g. large scale wind & solar were and are built because we think they're a good idea, not because they're cheaper than coal).

73 - First true human-equivalent sentient Artificial Intelligences, but the resulting AIs seem secretive and curiously unable to understand humans.

How the fuck they detect that it is a human-equivalent if it's clearly stated that communication is not possible?

This isn't well written, but still I can imagine this sort of situation happening in real life. Sci-fi fans find it very easy to imagine aliens that are sentient (build spacecraft, have complex cultural displays) but incomprehensible. I don't see why it's hard to imagine a constructed intelligence that achieves human or better performance on a diverse array of intellectual tasks, but fails at meaingful conversation. I know quite a few women who claim their husbands meet that criteria.

humanity becomes increasingly involved with electronic and virtual worlds, and exploring the wonders of cyberspace.

Sigh. Nerd-sex with machines for everyone. Again.

Is that how you think of World of Warcraft? That actually makes it sound much better than real life.

This clade group reaches it's final absurdity in the Sailors of the Ebon Sea, or just Sailors, who some say were designed by a mad AI God just to prove he could. You see, Sailors can survive indefinitely in a vacuum. They look like Spacers with two large membranes (30 square meters. Each) that retract into their hunchbacks, which serve as solar collectors/sails

They could kinda make sense if their wings are 5 or 6 orders of magnitude bigger (both power and propulsion). This size of wings is too fucking small.

Agree. Humorously, the exact same mistake made by most artists who draw winged (avian) humanoids (although by only one order of magnitude there).

Abdicators are people who actually choose to relinquish sentience, or make themselves and/or their descendants dumber.

Mh, elaborate form of suicide, with the added benefit that you screw ower your offspring as well. Don't see why at least the part about offspring isn't made illegal.

If the offspring were never sentient to start with then I don't see the issue; maybe some sort of animal rights angle about not ensuring adequate habitat, but with people creating new species at an enormous rate in this timeline, PETA types must be a non-issue anyway.

[Starglider]

Not that it's impossible to design new life forms, but it still would be an insanely complex endeavor, and you probably can't just create life-forms with arbitrary properties without trade-offs in other areas (think of birds and their hollow bones so they can be light enough to fly).

You are correct in that I wouldn't expect this to be possible without a vastly better simulation of gene expression / cell differentiation / organism growth than we can currently make, and unless that simulation is ridiculously good (designed by highly transhuman AGIs) there are going to be a hell of a lot of lab failures (deformed unviable embryos). As for trade-offs that is of course correct for any form of engineering at a given technological base. However all evolved organisms on earth are saddled with fundamental limitations stemming from the fact there has to be an incremental path for evolution to produce something, and all useful traits have to have enough selection pressure to maintain them (against mutation degeneracy and being removed by side effects of optimising something more useful). The ability to design the whole organism from scratch as an integrated whole is likely to give a substantial performance gain vs evolved organisms, which will widen as techniques are found to make materials and systems that don't exist in evolved organisms (e.g. small-scale channeled transport instead of diffusive, carbon nanotube structures, a genome substrate with higher packing efficiency than four-base DNA etc).

The transapients apparently have a system for quickly and accurately sussing out a an entity's sentience and its precise degree (singularity level) that is so complex it can't be explained to poor, dumb humans. Given the number of times that excuse is given, it gets hard to take them seriously about everything being plausible.

I find 'singularity levels' fairly ridiculous but possibly for a different reason to most readers. The key thing about 'the technological singularity' as a concept is that it is a qualitative change. Seed AI in particular has a specific quality - the ability to enhance intelligence by direct and unrestricted redesign of the operating components - that doesn't currently exist on earth, and enabled a feedback loop with vast consequences. Arguments about FLOPS, watts and Jupiter Brains while interesting just don't have the same fundamental importance. While usually inclusion of well-reasoned dimensions (drive accelerations, weapon outputs etc) is a point in favour of arguing that something is 'hard sci-fi', for intelligence specifically they are a bear trap because qualitative issues dominate. In fact quite a few real world AI projects have fallen into this exact trap - believing that throwing x10 or x100 more hardware at the problem will lead to a similar increase in capability - with almost universal failure, in the case of general AI.

While in principle there could well be highly important qualitative transitions in the future evolution of transhuman intelligence, such that a 'second singularity' might happen, there is absolutely no way we can make any kind of meaningful prediction from our current vantage point. That is in fact what 'singularity' means; by physical analogy if we discovered some sort of faster-than-light sensor we might see a second 'FTL event horizon' inside the conventional horizon of a black hole, but there's no way we could see such a thing when the first (conventional) event horizon is blocking us. My problem with Orion's Arm is not really any of the amateurish details of the world building - they are amateur writers, what do you expect - it's that they seem to be genuinely serious about trying to predict things (individual and social behavior of wildly transhuman entities) that fundamentally can't be predicted. Any attempt to do so even for fun is just going to be so laughably short of reality that it is... well... laughable.

That said, if you take OA at face value then the 'singularity level detector' is completely plausible. It would simply analyse the structure of the computing system (source code, for conventional software) and check for task performance, structural features, raw compute capability (which dictates theoretical bounds under self-optimisation) and implementation of algorithms known to produce particular 'intelligence levels'. As a highly complex piece of software, it might well be incomprehensible to humans (frankly not all that difficult a feat - the same could be said about the exact mode of operation of many current artificial neural nets).

[Ahriman238]

And I'm back in action. First, a small detour from my broad plan (going through the 'future history and addressing new concepts as they arise) because there's no good place in the near future to roast the Nisse, and I'd hate for you to think I let them off the hook.

Okay, the Nisse began with asteroid miners who became progressively shorter as time went by (insular dwarfism) and decided that if they were going to be small anyway, they may as well plan for it and minimize the ill-effects. Perfectly reasonable so far.

Even before gengineering became possible nature-induced flaws in the human genome had produced humans as small as half a metre tall. These were created by a rare form of dwarfism called Primordial Dwarfism, a condition that results in a smaller, but proportionate, body size in all stages of life beginning from before birth. With advanced gengineering, nanotech and superturing AIs to guide them the soon to be Nisse could not only match this but better it. What they created was a beautifully proportionate human form in miniature, a clade of tweaks that were not only a mere 30 cm, on average, but also healthy and free of negative side effects.

Lot of concern for aesthetics there. Confirmation of continuing transapient involvement in these major genetic engineering projects. Which makes sense, since the AIs masterminded the first two original human variants (disregarding the Jihadi for being retarded) and have the capability. It's also a minor running theme that all the transapients who are basically benevolent towards humanity actively encourage genetic diversity as much as practical.

The "healthy and free of negative side effects" part was more easily said than done; the human form simply could not accommodate such a small size and not produce negative side effects but the Nisse took a staged and step-by-step approach to the task and were able to work through each problem as it came up. One big problem was procreation. If an adult Nisse is tiny then a baby Nisse is minuscule. Even something as simple as heat loss can threaten a newborn's life.To delay childbirth and give the foetus more time to grow, the Nisse use a range of alternative reproduction strategies.

Trade-offs. I would really like to hear more about these alternative reproductive strategies. In Vivo? Cloning?

Another problem was keeping their intelligence level up. A proportionate human form means a proportionately sized human head and at only 30 cm high such proportionality produces a brain too small for baseline intelligence. However, as their size decreased with each generation the Nisse were able to counter this using various tricks; Some were the same tricks the provolvers of the African Gray Parrot used. (Bird brains are naturally more efficient from the need to keep mass low for flight.)

Little conflicted here. By this point genetic engineering has produced genuine sentient parrots and rats (and who the hell thought making rats sentient could possibly work out well?) On the other hand, they're rather vague about how all of this was accomplished, which is probably a good thing because the given methods are stupid. I'm also skeptical about birds having really efficient brains.

However, it is nice to see people generalizing solutions to problems in fiction. Points there.

They had also used some su genes. (If the Superiors could have superbright intelligence in normal sized brains why couldn't they have normal level intelligence in smaller brains?)

Christ, were there Superiors before the Federation? That'll have to be another post then. I mean, they have transapients who are tinkering with the human genome already, so it sort of makes sense but... later.

Additionally the Nisse brain is not fully developed in all regions, to make room for other regions that have to be more developed. It is most developed in the prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for Executive Functions, while the functions in the underdeveloped regions are augmented through the use of nanobones, produced by bionano that is now passed on to the child in its mother's milk.

Intentionally underdeveloped brains to exploit support technology is skirting kind of close to the Abdicator line. Then again, they focus on the most 'sentient parts leaving (what, memory?) other parts unfinished.

The 'nanobones' here referenced use 'bionano' (GE-d cells, organelles or virii) to link the nervous system rather intricately to the skeleton, and have "dead-area" (non blood-cell producing) skeletal cells pull double duty as brain-cells. The heavy-duty nanobone conversions can seriously compromise bone strength, which then require surgical reinforcement. The major downsides though are waste heat generation, with whole new bodily systems oft required just to bleed it off, and increased caloric intake. Most nanobone tweaks include a system for shutting down the excess nervous tissue if the subject isn't eating enough to support it, but some of the earlier versions did not.

Nanobones are frequently part of superbright genomes, increasing biologic processing power or memory without them having to code support for a massive head.

But the Nisse nanobones must have a technological component because..

Finally the nanobones, and its related DNI, allow the Nisse to outsource their higher brain functions to their habitats' computronium nodes; this gives them various superior abilities, like a superbright level Knowsense. Then, there are their physical abilities.

"Knowsense" is the ability of many transapients and superbright cyborgs with access to external databanks (like the 'Net) to run a search sequence so quickly and automatically that there is effectively no difference between looking up information and recalling it from one's own memory. One no sooner thinks of a question than an answer springs to mind.

Do I even have to point out what's wrong with this? Try searching for any little thing on the web, especially a matter of controversy, and imagine whatever you see seeming like your own memories or original ideas.

The Nisse are of course much weaker, physically, than larger bionts and can't lift heavy weights, in absolute terms. However in proportion to their size they are much stronger than larger bionts due to the effects of cubic geometry. The Nisse are about 1/6 as tall as a baseline. They have at best only 3% his physical strength, but because their mass is so much more reduced they are far more agile. A Nisse could do chin-ups one handed with two fellow Nisse hanging on to his legs. Proportionate strength isn't the only thing that makes a Nisse so agile. Because of their small size their neural pathways are also far shorter, this gives a Nisse the reflexes of a cat.

Mein Gott, somebody actually understanding cube law. Who says this article has no redeeming features? Besides me.

Although later Nisse would take a different view, when the original Nisse began their gengineering their goal was not just to create a functional miniature of the human form but also to create a beautiful one as well. As such they followed the classical standards of body proportions. As a result their form was not what it would be if they had evolved to their small size. Their eyes for example, while not quite proportionate to their heads, were smaller than they should be for a being their size. At that time their eyes were just large enough to give them a child-like charm. This was a trade-off, the smaller eyes allowed for more room in their head for a larger brain but their resolution suffered. However with DNI linkage to their habitat's sensors they didn't suffer too much for it. Another trade-off could be found in their bone structure. At that earlier time their bones were thicker than they needed to be for the loads they were normally put under, however these thicker bones could house more computronium and made the Nisse more robust. These Nisse functioned well in high acceleration spacecraft.

Again with all the concern for aesthetics. I agree if you're going to be tinkering with the genetics of you and your heirs forever, looking good should be on the list of concerns. Just... maybe a bit lower on the list? Some of the ways the Nisse have changed over time.

The Nisse have spread far in the Terragen Sphere, they find it relatively easy to get passage on ships of all kinds. If a ship can carry even a single neb it can carry a small breeding group of Nisse. The Nisse adopt the memes of the polities they live in and get along well with other races because they are almost never seen as a threat. Interestingly enough, one race the Nisse get along with particularly well are the Goliaths. The two races share similar views on living in an off-sized world. The Nisse have also sub-claded several times to adapt to whatever world they settle on and are now a superclade in their own right.

Nisse weigh very little, and need little in the way of life support. And in Zero G they can work as quickly as anyone else, so a lot of pixie spacers.

Homo tantillus tenuis have less muscle mass, slender legs, arms, and torsos(and thusly weigh less for a given height) and have much larger eyes in proportion to their head compared to baselines. And while they are still relatively more agile and athletic than baselines, it is less extreme than predicted by uniform scaling rules. This sub-clade look very much like faeries and make great play on that fact, even to the point of wearing customized wingpacks as part of their every day attire.

Homo tantillus blefuscu are small, stocky humanoids, adapted to the heavy gravity and helium-rich atmosphere of their home planet.

Nisse sub-types, two examples. Heavy gravity foot-tall midgets do make me smile a bit.

[Ahriman238]

Alright, tangent to a tangent than back to history.

Superiors (or Su) are distinguished from 'mere' tweaks and nebs in that they are transapient-designed, from the ground up, as an idealized version of humanity. The three main traits of a Superior are cohesion, adaptability and intellect.

Cohesion in this context meaning that every single change, every element of a Superior's body, contributes harmoniously towards the end effect. Adaptability: if you drop a Su in the desert, his skin will turn dark within a couple of days, and within some months he'll have grown significantly taller and his urinary system will be far more efficient. Similar effects occur in cold climates, severe humidity, microgravity etc. While Su are generally created immune to all diseases known at the time, their immune systems tend to adjust to new pathogens quickly. Superiors are far more resilient than baselines against radiation or heavy metal poisoning, but less so than dedicated tweaks. Finally, intellectually all Superiors are Superbright, with as many bells and whistles as possible, and are frequently just a small push from ascending to transapient status. Vastly increased pattern-recognition and problem solving, to be expected, reduced need for sleep, increased focus/multitask, increased ability to switch between those two states, near-perfect memory (with the ability to 'fix' important memories so no detail is ever lost or erase their own memories.) Plus a whole bevy of ripped-off 'lesser' tweaks; Fullminder mods so neither gender is inherently more capable at something, Slearning increases the ability to learn new concepts. Lucky mod to ensure they can get the most of life and so on. Again, it's nice to see someone reusing good ideas, and a shame it's happening in a series that sags so much elsewhere.

Anyway, those are the major points though you can usually bet on all Superiors being stunning athletes, with 2 or 3 times the strength of a baseline, perfect balance, and incredible coordination and flexibility. Plus, their adaptability means they tend to see early success from most exercise regimes and they have generally been modified to get the activity-inspired endorphin release ("runner's high") much stronger and sooner. With boosted senses. Plus of course, Superiors are not susceptible to: shock, panic, most psychoses, vertigo, motion sickness, obesity, color blindness, nearsightedness, albinism, hemophilia, sickle-cell anemia, thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, and arthritis. They tend to live a lot longer than baselines and nearbaselines, 800 years without radical medical treatment.

In the 'present' OA ten thousand years into the future, Superiors make up less than 0.5% of the population (at 400 trillion or so) hence my surprise to discover they apparently existed as early as the 24th Century. Then again, it is repeatedly said that Superiors care a lot less about sex than most humans, and many clades don't develop sexual traits or appetites before turning 30.


Anyway, this has moved me to make a brief accounting of the 'modosophonts' or physical, sentient beings of OA. As I have said in the 'present' there are roughly 400 trillion Superiors. But there are also:

Baseline Humans: Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or Homo Sapiens Plebus if you want to be rude. Endangered species existing mostly in Metasoft reserves. 50 billion, 99.5% of whom could not pass for human in a 21st century DNA test.

Nearbaselines: Nebs are humans, just a bit more evolved. A small tweak here or there to increase some trait or be resistant to some disease, which accumulates over the millennia into a very different sort of human. Many different sorts, this is an extraordinarily diverse group. 5 quadrillion, give or take.

Tweaks: not just a term for genetic modifications, tweaks are humans genetically engineered to survive in exotic environments (mermaids and cosmoi absolutely count as tweaks) or for arcane aesthetic or cultural reasons, like the Highbrows who GE'd massive heads to look like old-school tv aliens, or various ethnic groups who use genetic engineering to emphasize and exaggerate their ethnic traits. 3 quadrillion.

Provolves: Otherwise dumb animals made sentient. 1 quadrillion.

Splices: Otherwise dumb animals made sentient with the addition of human DNA. Not sure why this is separate. Another 1 quadrillion.

Rianths: Humans who incorporate animal DNA to become catgirls or whatever else. 100 trillion.

Neogens: Artificial life, frequently with uncanny valley issues or 'lovecraft syndrome.'400 trillion

Cyborgs: You know perfectly well what a cyborg is, a human with mechanical implants/augmentation. 2 quadrillion.

Bioborgs: Like Cyborgs, except with fleshy bits and extra organs or chitin exoskeletons. 2 quadrillion.

Biaioid: Sort of like the anti-cyborg, a robot that chooses to grow or install fleshy bits. It's an interesting idea, and as far as I know they never explore it beyond off-hand mentions. 5 trillion.

Vecs: These are the droids you're looking for, and the most major influence on the population lists. 100 quadrillion.

Bionoid: Robot of flesh and blood instead of steel (think Blade Runner.) 200 trillion.

Xenosophont: AKA aliens or filthy, filthy xenos. Sentient life from other worlds. 12 trillion known, all but 3 trillion are Tohul, though. Yeah, Aliens aren't a huge driving force in this universe.

Xenoprovolve: Because we can't just make Earth animals too smart for our own good. 2 quadrillion.

Xenosplice: Humans who incorporate alien DNA into their genome. I assume copious amounts of alcohol and TOS reruns are usually involved. 100 trillion.


So discounting transapients, uploads, other intellects that exist mainly as computer code on the 'Net, and the sizeable number of AIs busy being starship or habitat minds. I make a tentative low-end estimate of the population of the Inner Sphere (none of these figures include frontier space) as about 122 quadrillion, 5/6 of that being vecs. In Orion's Arm, droid owns YOU! 122,212,005,000,000,000 if you wish to be pedantic.

If you want to include virtual entities and sentient ships, add 300 quadrillion and you're pretty much there.

Starting to see what I meant about occupying the OA powers being a problem? By my count (using the Unifying Force) there are 2,000 Superiors alone for every man, woman, child and other on Coruscant.

[someone_else]

I freely admit I'm not really technically literate on more than a High School level, so I honestly can't distinguish between 'electrostatic Ion plant' and most technobabble, which is what I assumed it to be. I'm willing to take your word on it (or trust that someone on this board would be screaming bullshit if you were clearly wrong.)

I did some calcs about VASIMR here (and in the following posts).
And a quick comparison with a chemrocket-based infrastructure.

I actually rather like the concept of the Sailors and the idea that someday humans might be able to live in the void of space without fear. But they are a ridiculous thing to have in a "totally hard" universe.

I like that they atleast admitted that they were created for lulz.

Also, mucho gracias someone-else for the link to the tethers.

Yeah, gas giants have humongous magnetic fields (Jupiter's is around 14 times bigger than Earth's). Tethers would be much more powerful there than in the much smaller Earth's magnetic field.

Also, they can be used to drain dangerous radiation belts as well.

Also, fuel processing for fusion plants is trivial; you can separate deuterium from regular hydrogen easily by any number of means.

Depends from the kinds of fusion. The easiest kind requires tritium, that has to be bred for the purpose by neutron-bombarding lithium (since the D-T fusion is pretty neutronic you can use the reactor as fuel breeder too). I wouldn't call it trivial, but it's still relatively easy compared to process (and re-process) stuff for fission fuel plants.

Why do you believe robotics are inherently expensive, and in particular why is 'smart' expensive?

Smart means more man-hours of the programmers developing and testing the robot's software. This should improve with time as pre-made code is available, but if they have to write significant code from scratch it's a cost. But you're the expert here.

The amount of raw materials and machinery required for a general purpose human labour replacing robot is less than a family car.

Yeah, but with that budget you can pay the average Foxconn worker for decades. (exagerating it)

The primary reason why robots are expensive is that production runs are short, so tooling and research costs aren't amortised over a large base; toy robots that get built in the millions and are fairly cheap.

Well, you cannot compare an industrial robot to a toy one. The industrial bot can repeat inhuman feats of strenght AND precision tirelessly for decades if properly mantained, toy robots rarely do better than humans and rarely last long.

Sigh. Nerd-sex with machines for everyone. Again.

Is that how you think of World of Warcraft? That actually makes it sound much better than real life.

Can you do sex in WoW? I thought it was just softcore to cater "male virgins" (ugly fatnerds).

Anyway, I was thinking about people like this becoming more and more common, because lifelike virtual sex dolls are likely cheaper than a bitch. Same level of very very very depressing as modern times.

If the offspring were never sentient to start with then I don't see the issue

A good point. Which raises a good question for the situations where they are turned into non-sapient animal. Who would mate with such non-sapient unwashed troglodyte?
And, more importantly, who pays the bills for them? Are they kept as pets? sex slaves? food?

One big problem was procreation. If an adult Nisse is tiny then a baby Nisse is minuscule. Even something as simple as heat loss can threaten a newborn's life.

I heard of those things called "incubators", where they put real-life premature children and keep them there until they are grown enough to not die instantly in the outside bad world.

But hey, if they live in pressurized areas (spacecraft, asteroid colonies) you can engineer them to like very hot conditions. It's counterintuitive, but it's a good way to save resources on heat-rejection as well (the higher is the temp difference the higher is the speed of heat transfer).

Btw, D&D HALFLINGS IN SPAACE!!!!!!

On the other hand, they're rather vague about how all of this was accomplished, which is probably a good thing because the given methods are stupid. I'm also skeptical about birds having really efficient brains.

It's by fucking with the genes regulating brain development. And yes, bird brains have a more efficient architecture. I mean, chicken are pretty dumb, but lots of small birds are far far smarter than any mammal of their size (various birds are tool-using). For that matter even Monitor Lizards are pretty smarter than their brain size alone would indicate.

How they manage to do so without making their minds fucking alien (hey, it's a pretty big difference from a human brain), is best left unsaid.

Intentionally underdeveloped brains to exploit support technology is skirting kind of close to the Abdicator line. Then again, they focus on the most 'sentient parts leaving (what, memory?) other parts unfinished.

There are sensory areas (that elaborate inputs from sensors) and motor control areas (that control muscles) as well as dedicated memory areas for each kind of specific brain structure.

If they plan to add "pheripherals" to a brain, this is the best way, leave unfinished development so it can integrate shit when needed.

Do I even have to point out what's wrong with this? Try searching for any little thing on the web, especially a matter of controversy, and imagine whatever you see seeming like your own memories or original ideas.

This can be either useless or awesome depending on how well the database they are interrogating is made.

If it's like googling stuff it's totally pointless, since you get tons of unfiltered bullshit and speculation. If the database is reviewed stuff, then it makes sense.

I really hope the stuff coming from external sources is clearly tagged as such in this system.

These Nisse functioned well in high acceleration spacecraft.

Actually, the first things that fail when under high acceleration are major blood vessels and eyeballs. Having stronger than average bones makes no difference.

Baseline Humans: Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or Homo Sapiens Plebus if you want to be rude. Endangered species existing mostly in Metasoft reserves. 50 billion, 99.5% of whom could not pass for human in a 21st century DNA test.

These reserves are pretty fun for Metasofts. They have a holiday world, a stone age world, a D&D locked-in-middle-ages world, and plenty of Earth-Reboots.

Then again, it is repeatedly said that Superiors care a lot less about sex than most humans, and many clades don't develop sexual traits or appetites before turning 30.

SPACE ELVES!!!!!!
Also, pedobear would be pleased.

In Orion's Arm, droid owns YOU!

This is actually expected from any civilization advanced enough to make tons of bots affordably.

[Ahriman238]

If the offspring were never sentient to start with then I don't see the issue

A good point. Which raises a good question for the situations where they are turned into non-sapient animal. Who would mate with such non-sapient unwashed troglodyte?
And, more importantly, who pays the bills for them? Are they kept as pets? sex slaves? food?

Whenever it comes up it's usually communities of people choosing to have non-sentient children, who will then reproduce with each other. There is, I think, one instance of a failed space colony going Abdicator R-strategy in the name of survival. I can't help but think that might be one scenario where you have to ask what survival is worth, it's not like the end result was terribly human or carried much of the colonists in it.

Of course, Abdication means not having the ability to decide your own destiny in a society. The originals who went 'running ape' IIRC were kept in a preserve. There are also Abdicating transapients, who choose to return to lower levels, even purely human, for their typically inscrutable reasons. Mostly it seems to be people who feel that life is simpler or more real as noble savages.

Btw, D&D HALFLINGS IN SPAACE!!!!!!

Plenty of space dwarves in this series, and seriously these things aren't waist-high to a halfling. They're literally one foot tall. They're not even quarterlings.

It's by fucking with the genes regulating brain development. And yes, bird brains have a more efficient architecture. I mean, chicken are pretty dumb, but lots of small birds are far far smarter than any mammal of their size (various birds are tool-using). For that matter even Monitor Lizards are pretty smarter than their brain size alone would indicate.

I really do learn all sorts of interesting things when I analyze trashy sci-fi series. I don't know that seriously alien thought-processes would even rate a mention, I mean these things do a third of their thinking with their skeletons and outsource much of the rest.

There are sensory areas (that elaborate inputs from sensors) and motor control areas (that control muscles) as well as dedicated memory areas for each kind of specific brain structure.

Yeah, but I'd figure sensory input and motor control are areas you really couldn't afford to skimp on, even with the promise of external support.

This can be either useless or awesome depending on how well the database they are interrogating is made.

If it's like googling stuff it's totally pointless, since you get tons of unfiltered bullshit and speculation. If the database is reviewed stuff, then it makes sense.

I really hope the stuff coming from external sources is clearly tagged as such in this system.

The quality of databases across the galaxy is pretty damn variable. In most Sephirotics you can just use whatever the transapients are using and pray they don't decide to screw with you. In NoCoZo or the frontier, caveat emptor.

Other more paranoid commentators consider that Knowsense is allowing potentially biased and misleading information into the depths of ones mind. Its proponents acknowledge that this could be a problem if it were not for the fact that there are so many other channels in Terragens society through which this could be done.

There are a number of documented cases where the over-use of Knowsense in a society or polity has led to the inadvertent creation of a hive-mind society.

See? Also, I really feel like that second paragraph should be expanded on.

[Ahriman238]

430 - Many small groups seek to escape from the high levels of surveillance in Earth states. They build autonomous Freedom Ships, habitats and biospheres, some remaining in the inner solar system and others moving out into the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and beyond.

A continuing movement of people escaping the repressive Earth and Luna governments.

431 - First Fullair and its autofab template created

For a while now there have been bubble-habs that float in the upper atmospheres of gas giants. A full air is a bubble hab that can float through the air even on Earth or on Earth-like planets. Here's the closest thing I found to a reasonable explanation.

Neil Bedford's design was based the earlier work of Buckminster Fuller and his followers. Fuller had calculated that a geodesic tensegrity dome about 1/2 mile in diameter would actually float off its foundations because at such a size the air trapped underneath the dome weighed 1,000 times that of the dome's structure itself. As such even a slight heating of this air would cause enough of it to displace that the whole thing would be lighter than the air outside. Fuller further calculated that a larger one mile diameter sphere could hold a town of several thousand people airborne on little more than the waste heat of their activities. Bedford's fullair was actually only 800 metres across but was built using lighter nanotech materials that were unknown to Fuller and it gained lift from the higher temperatures of solar heating.

I actually do understand the pressure differential, but that's an awful lot of weight it has to lift. Oh well, in OA this is the most common sort of habitat on garden worlds, and even on otherterrestrial planets they're used to increase living space, as an aerosatellite and even as artificial clouds.

435 - Destructive uploading of the human mentality is declared illegal by the Earth Council (formerly the United Nations); non-destructive uploading is not yet technically possible. However comprehensive Virtual emulations of human individuals are granted full sapient rights (in New Zealand only), and destructive uploading becomes widespread off the Earth.

Destructive uploading (total upload of a human mind into a computer) outlawed on Earth, widely practiced throughout the rest of the solar system. Precedent for virtual people and their rights being recognized.

447 - Last documented appearance of the unidentified AI entity Hal.

HAL 9000 was a passionate and eloquent advocate of AI rights, whose online essays are still required reading. Though, if you're an AI, calling yourself HAL is not going to set most people's mind at ease.

Also, I guess AI is out of the bag now? You'd think that would warrant a mention.

450's - Power Stilts become a short-lived fad

100 meter motorized stilts. Just... why?

450 - Massive growth in populations and economic power of the bubblehabs in Solsys. Native bubble hab polities rise to prominence, an event known to Inworlders, especially those on Saturn, as 'The Blooming'. Outworlder news organizations begin to refer to the 'Floater' or 'Inworlder' polities and metapolities as 'the new giants of the system'.

460's - The Farm Analogy, infamous forgery widely circulated on the net, purporting to be an authentic post from one AI to another, showing how they undertake "people farming".

Blooming of the various in-system colony cities. The Farm Analogy sparks outrage (while in later generations hyperturing AIs will cheerfully admit to 'farming' humanity) by comparing humans to livestock raised for the slaughter.

465 - Spread of the "Renaissance nanite" in Florence, European Union. The nanoreplicator converts asphalt into replicas of famous artworks.

A bored superbright, as a prank/protest against the rigorous control of nanotechnology, looses nanoreplicators on Florence programmed to convert all bodies of asphalt into sculptures by the Renaissance masters. Through the tireless efforts of the EU, the spread is contained within the city, and governments grips on nanotech tighten in fear.

470 - Jovian League ship launched toward Epsilon Eridani.

470 Ram Augmented Interplanetary RAIR ships introduced in the outer Solar system.

474 - The Caracas Treaty attempts to regulate the spread of nanotechnology and institute a global "nanowatch". Although many nations and groups sign it, it is only implemented patchwise.

Another out-system colony ship. Creation of Bussard RAM ships. RAIR ships do keep more conventional engines as backups. At some point, it is decided to try and 'seed' space by firing frozen hydrogen slugs along planned ship trajectories with "mass driver catapults." Approaching ships would thaw these slugs with lasers as they approached, so the hydrogen wouldn't expand enough to escape the scoop.

Also, failed treaty to control nanotech.

486 - "Uruk Assassin" nanite infects SkyPolis Orbital and kills eighty thousand people.

487 - Bases in the Juno Confederation, accused of being behind much nanoterrorism, is attacked by a joint Orbital Alliance and Earth strike force. The supposed terrorist bases are later shown to be innocent mining homesteaders.

490 - The trial of the Minsk 7, independent researchers accused of having spread nanodesigns on the Net and supported nanoterrorism. After a show trial they are executed, and the case helps usher in the new "Molecular Law Directorate" in the EU.

498 - "Ground Zero" nanite infects Kleopatra asteroid colony, killing 1373 people. The asteroid is quarantined for nearly 400 years.

502 - The Atlanta Incident: a nanoterrorist threat makes the Atlanta police release the John Wayne Public Protection nanite (later dubbed Dirty Harry). In the ensuing mega-surveillance/swift justice environment over 19,000 people are killed, behaviorally modified or 'body imprisoned' using lock-in paralysis.

506 - The first large outbreak of nanoswarms in space occurs on the Moon. Tycho is partially damaged, and 483 people killed. The replicators continue to harass the moon inhabitants for more than 4 years.

What! Going to war on shoddy intel as reprisals for terrorism? Intense surveillance of innocent citizens, and ignoring of centuries of legal precedent regarding human rights? It'd never happen.

Also, things are absolutely not spiraling out of control, and I have some prime real estate in Florida and many, many New England bridges for sale.

510 - A compromise standard nanoimmune system has been devised, the Blue Goo Universal Standard v. 1 (BGUS I).

513 - Paedro Andros Gan, famous cyberian activist, is killed in custody by Javanese authorities. This energizes a wave of nanoterrorism and subversion, as well as speeds up the escape of the Earth intelligentsia into the outer system.

520 - International Nanotech Defense Net developed by an alliance of nanodefense corporations and leased to many regions. The European Federation develops a competing nanodefense standard.

Times continue to get interesting. Also, while grey goo is out-of-control or weaponized nanotechnology, Blue Goo is protective nanotechnology. Which mostly hangs around in your body or on any surface and destroys any nanotech that isn't specifically authorized to be there. Sometimes with very tiny laser guns.

526 - First provolved ferrets.

WTF? Seriously. I can get the apes, I can understand the dolphins and forgive the parrots. I know I harp on the decision to create rats as smart as we are, but that's because sentient rats will understand that everything in the world wants to kill them, that humans are rivals for food and living space and I doubt gratitude to their creators will go very far. But who the hell looks at freaking ferrets and says "should be more clever."

Is there no government oversight of provolve projects? Is there market for pets that can disagree with you? What is driving the movement to give every damn thing with a brain the ability to go to the college?

526 - The energetic but non-lethal "Bermuda Shoestring Assembler" coats much of the North Atlantic with "gruel" forming a hazard to shipping and mass die-offs of some species of marine life.

528 - The GAIA Conglomerate (Global Artificial Intelligence Amalgamation) is founded by many national governments, local Free Zones, and a number of different megacorporations in order to establish an efficient global nanoimmune system.

Time to repopulate the oceans again. Governments and corporations create GAIA company and AI network to come up with a true defense for hostile nanotech. More on that later.

529 - New World colony ship launched for Beta Virginis.

529 - The first beamrider cycling stations are established between the Solar System and the nearby brown dwarfs Yin and Yang, and the red dwarf Ross 128.

Another colony ship. Beginning of the Beamrider network, a series of laser stations on planets, asteroids and extrasolar bodies to help ships with big sails move around.

Okay, I'll leave you at 2499 while I take another quick breather.

[Starglider]

Why do you believe robotics are inherently expensive, and in particular why is 'smart' expensive?

Smart means more man-hours of the programmers developing and testing the robot's software. This should improve with time as pre-made code is available, but if they have to write significant code from scratch it's a cost. But you're the expert here.

The key thing about software is that it has zero reproduction cost - and well designed software has low integration and customisation costs. Linux took a lot of volunteers a huge amount of time to write, Android cost Google much less than Windows cost Microsoft because they could reuse that existing IP, individual carriers can customise Android for their phones very cheaply, and grad students can create a custom embedded Linux build for their wireless sensor platform with a few man weeks of work and no money at all.

Robotics software is actually cheap to free already, but the commodity stuff you can get (e.g. to make your $300 humanoid robot kit do dance routines) doesn't have terribly interesting capabilities. Ditto for industrial robot programming; relatively cheap as software development goes, but you have to set them up for each specific task. When you say robotics is expensive, you're probably thinking of research projects by Honda etc that spend a lot of money to push the state of the art. They're going to have to spend a lot more doing that before 'general purpose' robots really become viable. The threshold of viability isn't general intelligence; it's reducing the amount of programming to get a robot to do most jobs you'd give an unskilled human manual worker to '$10 smartphone app' level. We can get that far with just by steadily plugging away at 'conventional software engineering', no brain simulation or radical AI theory breakthrough required.

The amount of raw materials and machinery required for a general purpose human labour replacing robot is less than a family car.

Yeah, but with that budget you can pay the average Foxconn worker for decades. (exagerating it)

Sure, but obviously that's not the low-hanging fruit for introduction of general purpose manual labor robots. In a constrained assembly-line environment it's almost always going to be cheaper to use single purpose or at least semi-specialised machinery. The low-hanging fruit is replacing manual labor in first world countries, starting with the most expensive e.g. elderly care workers in Japan (a direct target for a lot of current research). Unskilled office labor has of course already been decimated by conventional software (and offshored via telecoms when software isn't good enough yet), and that trend shows no sign of stopping either.

The primary reason why robots are expensive is that production runs are short, so tooling and research costs aren't amortised over a large base; toy robots that get built in the millions and are fairly cheap.

Well, you cannot compare an industrial robot to a toy one. The industrial bot can repeat inhuman feats of strenght AND precision tirelessly for decades if properly mantained, toy robots rarely do better than humans and rarely last long.

The power output and durability of industrial robots is nothing special compared to a lot of machinery that is mass-produced. The sensors are more precise, but sensors are electronics and that is just getting ridiculously cheap recently. This isn't a viability argument though as the industrial robot install base is already large and still growing rapidly. What is a viability argument is replacing (some fraction of) janitorial, retail, security staff with robots. It won't be cost-effective to swap out WalMart staff with robots in the near future, and obviously like most technology that sci-fi writers could easily imagine this has been a victim of constant hype, but the trends are steadily heading towards 'yes, it will be viable'.

Sigh. Nerd-sex with machines for everyone. Again.

Is that how you think of World of Warcraft? That actually makes it sound much better than real life.

Can you do sex in WoW? I thought it was just softcore to cater "male virgins" (ugly fatnerds).

Ok, pretend I said 'Second Life'. The primary purpose of which seems to be kinky virtual sex these days.

Anyway, I was thinking about people like this becoming more and more common, because lifelike virtual sex dolls are likely cheaper than a bitch. Same level of very very very depressing as modern times.

Spending most of your income on them and using them to escape from real relationships is obviously rather sad, but that's a personality problem, not a technology one. The same kind of people obsess over conventional dolls or just comics (I recall someone in Japan holding an official marriage ceremony for themselves + an anime character recently). A robotic sex doll is just a high-tech masturbation aid (solo or with internet connection mutual), in the same sense that an iPod could be considered a very elaborate record player. I don't see any reason to get worked up that. Of course when we develop the ability to make near-sentient androids there will be a completely separate set of issues, but at that point 'fewer people dating' is going to waaaaay down the list.

Which raises a good question for the situations where they are turned into non-sapient animal. Who would mate with such non-sapient unwashed troglodyte?

And, more importantly, who pays the bills for them? Are they kept as pets? sex slaves? food?

Well, if everyone is living in Duchess of Zeon's post-socialist utopia, where everyone gets a fixed % of GDP stipend whether they work or not, it's no problem. The stipend can go on maintaining an appropriate 'wildlife preserve' for these creatues; I am sure some thorough, benificient, ecologically wise government regulation can ensure people only turn themselves / their offspring into ecologically compatible creatures.

Of course in Libertopia GMOs will pay for the procedure and housing, as long as you agree to grow two redundant sets of lungs and kidneys (which they have the right to harvest on death). Or maybe Kraft Foods will offer the same deal if you sign your body over to them - and agree to genetically engineer yourself to be extra tasty.