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Fo to Fq

Focal Point

The only planet ever to be terraformed and colonised in the Archaipelago. Various races were created by the demiurge godling formerly known as the Looking Glass. Now a wasteland.

Darren Ryding

fog swarm projection

a rl projection of physical objects and entities through the behavior of trillions of foglets. Fog swarms can be seamlessly merged with virch environments to create a continuum from totally virtual to totally rl

Fog Wood

Famous series of interactive novels coded by Il Casi Tranden an SI:2 sentient from the Byron Habitat in the Sophic League.

Fog Wood deals with the existential angst caused by the discovery that after centuries of no contact, the original from which the uploaded hero's was based has become the complete moral and ethical opposite. Its deep handling of S>1 identity brought it to the attention of the entire core worlds, winning the Solarian 'Noticed' award for unenlightened works containing potential in 9192. Tranden became an instant petillionare, however eir predilection for drug abuse continued unabated, resulting in er obsolescence in 9197 after E took a spiked transcendence virus. The virus instead of enhancing eir intellect, instead regressed it to baseline levels. In the following months Tranden was scammed out of eir fortune by various S>1 sentients, including the rights to Fog Wood. Tranden suicided in 9198 at the release of the Virch interpretation, optimized for the baseline market in the NoCoZo, which turned this masterpiece into a pulp action comedy thriller.

Ben Higginbottom

Fogfo

Aerosol interactive food, developed at Regina in 360 by belter cooks at Hamblin Comemptives habitat.

Fogfo consists of a fine mist of aerosols that have been nanotreated to not interfere with breathing and to contribute strong taste sensations. While the original fogfo was a novelty intended to be inhaled from an inhalator the full body fogfo dinner became popular among the belters: participants floated naked within a chamber being flooded with fogfo streams. The erotic potential was obvious, and the practice spread to many other spacer cultures. Today fogfo orgies remains a classic part of zero-g hedonics, with regular design and enjoyment masterships at Dionysos, the Eden orbitals and Makrania Orwoods.

Anders Sandberg

Foglet

A mesobot that consists of a human-cell-sized device with twelve arms pointing in all directions. At the end of the arms are grippers that allow the foglets to grasp one another to form larger structures. These bots are intelligent and can merge their computational capacities with one another to create a distributed intelligence. Foglets are widely used by nanocyborgs, and there are a number of posthuman civilizations based on foglet technology. Because of the possibility of unpredictable ascension or subversion, many polities regard foglet clades with suspicion

fold mountains

On Gaian Type Worlds with active plate tectonics, the type of mountain range formed by two continental plates colliding. The colliding crust is compressed and pushed upwards (or provolved), forming mountains.

folk religion

The popular, SI:<1 to S<<1 expression or development of religion; much less sophisticated nature than the central theological expression of the faith, and usually incorporating indigenous local cultural and other heterodox memes.

Food

the common source of bioenergy for humanity and many of its descendants, the ritual and/or practical ingestion of biomatter for energy continues through much of Terragen space.

food chain

the energy exchange that constitutes the sum of interactions between predators and prey in which bionts, alifes, or other organisms obtain nutrition. The chain starts with plants or other autotrophs that are eaten by herbivores, which in turn are preyed upon by carnivores. These may in turn become food for other carnivores. When the organism dies, it becomes food for scavengers, detritivores, and decomposers

food production

There are many ways of making food: hunting/gathering from the environment, traditional farming and animal rearing, industrialized farming, meat factories, culturing plants hydroponically, vat grown meats, artificial meats based on yeast, algae or bacteria, as well as food built directly by matter compilers.

Which methods are used are both a question of technological ability, economics and culture. As long as a society is poor, the method used will always be the most efficient - be it the meat factories of the early information era or the food vats of the interplanetary era ("Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" as Brecht put it). As societies become richer, consumers will not just demand cheap food but also higher quality, lower environmental impact of the production, ethical treatment of animals and "spiritually correct" farming. This often implies less efficient food production than could be done, but the consumers are willing to pay the extra price of food they regard as good.

In advanced post-federation societies basal food production is often done using nanofacture, although a sizable amount is actually farmed using various traditional methods. Some cultural cuisines are based on special techniques, such as the Penglaiese vat foods, the many Sophic ahimsa cuisines where no living individual organisms are killed, and the hunted meat dishes of Atlantis and other worlds where hunting is regarded as important spiritual or ideological expression.

Of course, many clades have moved beyond the need of traditional food. However, corresponding functions are often mapped to eating. Vecs have more often than not made recharging into a symbolic meal when dealing with bioids, and in Metasoft the recharging stations act as places of social interaction not unlike human coffee houses and restaurants. Nanocyborgs often imbibe raw materials together. Uploads enjoy virtual meals. Even some AIs are known to enjoy food, although more like an art form than sustenance.

Anders Sandberg

Forensic eschatology

Discipline related to forensic cybernetics and AI pathology.

Forensic eschatologists study the remnants after AIs crash, AI viruses, perversions, blights, ascensions and other threats. While mainly a theoretical field, forensic eschatologists are called whenever serious high-singularity aberrancy is detected. They not only have to figure out what went wrong, but also point out possible consequences. A blight or ascension might leave behind many dangerous artefacts or have cultural-spiritual implications that must be handled.

Anders Sandberg

forest

any biome type involving a dense concentration of trees or analogous neogens or xenophyta, distributed over a large area of land. In some biomes, such as rainforest, there are a number of distinct levels, such as canopy and forest floor, each with their distinct micro-ecologies

forest floor

the lowest layer of a rainforest, extending from the ground to about a meter in height. This layer is teeming with animal life, including insects, mammals, and ground birds.

fork

use of nondestructive uploading to create an infomorph version of oneself while still keeping the old biological version.

Adam Foust, in Transhumanist Terminology

$Category: Mathematics$ formal system

A mathematical formalism in which statements can be constructed and manipulated with logical rules. Some formal systems are built around a few basic axioms and can be expanded with theorems that can be deduced through proofs.

Fornius Tup'arrah

Planet in the Queenus Nine system notable for its population of a clade of baseline hu quasi-hybrid vampires known as the Tan'gg DruU.

Distinguishing the Tan'gg DruU from other vampire worshipping cultures is the adoption by Tan'gg DruU society of a moral high code known as the Gor'dan Thi'tsu. This code, which is rigorously adhered to by the population at large, precludes the involuntary "victimization" of newcomers to Fornius Tup'arrah. Issuing planetary edicts is the governing Bloodthane, with each edict binding upon the entire population.

Charles Mosteller

Forestry

Sustainable management of forests, specially on terraformed worlds, large orbitals and biohabitats

Includes subfields like botany, ecology, lithology, biospherics, conservation, bionano, phenotypic and genotypic modification and optimization for local environmental conditions, knowledge of tree pests and diseases (both natural and artificial, indigenous and introduced), watershed protection, taxonomy, growth habits and environmental preferences of different types of trees, properties of various types of wood, and (in those polities that permit it) techniques for harvesting individual or stands of trees for wood for furniture and (among certain ludds and prims) paper and plywood manufacturing. Most foresters tend to vecs, who are able to patrol and look after large areas of forest without tiring, although in certain polities even nearbaselines can find work in this occupation.

adapted by M.Alan Kazlev from the original write-up by Robert J. Hall

Forwardium

A heavy toroidal neutronium nucleus that is accelerated to a very high spin and used to generate gravitomagnetic fields

(after pre-singularity thinker Robert Forward)

Anders Sandberg

Fosfo Cluster

a number of indexdep settlements recently founded by Epistemic radicals

fossil

mineralized impressions or cast of ancient terragen or alien life-forms. In the case of many extinct organisms, fossils provide the only trues to their form and existence. On some unpoliced frontier worlds and unregulated free zones trade in fossils reach endemic proportions, although in developed systems the authorities almost always step in to conserve them

fossil fuel

naturally-occurring, energy-rich carbon-based substance, such as shale, petroleum, coal, or natural gas, in a Gaian Type world's crust that was formed from ancient organic material. During the industrial, atomic, and early information ages on Old Earth fossil fuels were burned in a criminally negligent manner, resulting in drastic climate change and ecological crisis that was only repaired during the late Interplanetary age.

fossa

long, narrow, shallow depressions on the surface of a planet.

abbrev. FO

Foucault pendulum

a simple pendulum that tracks the rotation of a planet (or moon or orbital). As the pendulum swings, the planet rotates under the pendulum, so the pendulum seems to rotate. It was first demonstrated by Jean Bernard L�on Foucault, in 1851 at the Paris World's Fair, Europe, Old Earth.

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