PJ’s Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Media corporations later…