PJ’s Blog

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

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

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

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

I’ll see what I do with it…

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

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

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

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

Jupiter

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

Saturn

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

Uranus

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

Neptune

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

the Kuiper Belt and scattered disc

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

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

Mercury

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

Venus

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

the Moon

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

Mars

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

the Asteroids

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

More on the Outer Worlds on another day…

20 million channels and nothing on…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Aliens another day…

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…

The Alien world is, to humans, truly alien.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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