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Pp to Pr

Praedatorius

A generic term, from the first creatures of this type, Homo praedatorius. Artificial races designed for military action, viewed with intense distrust by everyone else.

Michael Beck

prana

In tantra and derived memeticities, the life principle, ch'i.

Pranite

Pranites are a common AI model skilled in various administrative and monitoring activities.

They are highly efficient and through in their duties. However, they are known to be rather blunt, abrasive, and impatient at times. These tendencies are only pronounced when they are forced to deal baselines or higher minds that engage in actions that are pointless and/or counter productive in regards to a Pranite's administrative domain. Pranites are only used under conditions of existing or suspected memetic attack, these are hunter-killer units, not meant for daily upkeep and maintenance".

James Ramsey

Prantack

A Prantack is a semi legitimate slang term for defensive and constructive memetic attacks that Pranites are prone to engage in.

These attacks are triggered by the repetitive, pointless, or redundant information that is placed into a Pranite's administrative domain by several types of beings. However, the most commonly attacked being is a standard baseline with one or more obsessive compulsive or extremely stubborn tendencies when engaged in activities within the Pranite's domain.

James Ramsey

Prantack Awards

Prantack's are a common form of entertainment in many areas.

They have are particularly popular in highly rationale societies that find the Pranites abrasive tendencies to not only be useful but amusing as well. The Prantack Awards for the most interesting Prantack are held biannually throughout the NoCoZo and the MPA as well as several other metaempires and polities.

James Ramsey

Praxis

Epsilon Indi B Inner Sphere brown dwarf, Deeper Covenant world and major relay node of the Deeper communications network

Eighteen moon and planet sized bodies orbit the central dwarf which uses an extensive network of orbital rings and skyhooks to mine hydrogen from the upper atmosphere and use it to power fusion 'sun-lights' orbiting the terraformed worlds.

Large fusion farms float at the poles of the megaworld and beam energy to mass beam cannons based on three of the outer moons. Three cycler circuits link to Praxis as well as a large space time catapult system which handles traffic to and from nearby Epsilon.

Due to the proximity of the Epsilon wormhole, the system is a favorite embarkation/debarkation point for tourists, honeymooners and the mildly adventurous seeking to spend a few months or years of (subjective) time travelling across the Inner Sphere via beamrider.

For similar reasons, Praxis also hosts a major relay node of the Deeper communications network and is used by many Deepers as a gateway to and from the rest of Terragen civilization.

Todd Drashner

prebiotic

Conditions or environments conducive to the evolution of life, but in which life has not yet emerged or appeared.

Preceptor

important Metasoft world

Precursor knowledge

that body of previously accepted and mentally-integrated knowledge/facts/factoids which can be leveraged off by an external or internal memeticist to generate a memetic shift in the subject.

Example - if the memeticist is aware of particular likes or dislikes in the subject, they will almost certainly apply similarity factors between their products/goals and the subject's likes as well as between competitors' products/goals and the subject's dislikes.

An alternate example was the case of the early AI pshrinks. From the fragmentary records available prior to the nanoswarm, it is quite apparent that several leading AI researchers were in memetic thrall of their creations within 20 years of discovery of true AI. Other leading AI researchers apparently avoided this affect. It is unclear if there was a correspondence between the enthralling AI's and the Diamond Belt AI's, or other organizations since that time.

John B

predator-prey system

A natural, artificial, or virtual ecosystem in which one portion of the population consumes another. With three or more species, simple predator-prey interactions can lead to chaos and biological or alife arms races.

Prefecture

Administrative division of the Solar Dominion.

Prefilters

Prefilters were originally intended to make sure that people only heard music they liked. A prefilter monitored people's reactions to certain types of music, then used evolutionary algorithms to determine what songs people liked most. This wasn't so bad, until they started marketing ones that monitored your reactions to news. Pretty soon, people were only hearing news that they wanted to hear, and never had to have the unpleasantness of reading an opinion that they didn't already agree with. It took a while for anyone to notice this (after all, this wasn't someone you wanted to know about), but now prefilters are illegal on most worlds.

Michael Beck

prekaryote

very simple but widely found grade of micro-organism, the prekaryote developmental level preceded the prokaryote, and includes endoliths and other exotic forms.

pre-main-sequence

Evolutionary state of stars prior to arrival on the main sequence, especially just before the main sequence is reached.

The Premacy

Diverse species of gas giant adapted humans Homo ozymandias created by the Genen in Cygnus but mostly found in the Argo expansion direction and near the Lupus Disarchy. Generally large centaur-like humanoids with hands for feet, some using inflatable gas-sacs to manoeuvre in jovian and sub jovian atmospheres. Many have the facility of easy adaptation to earth-like atmospheres when required.
(see also Ozymandias, Disarchy/Premacy compact)

Steve Bowers

presophont

also, Presapient. At the threshold of rational intelligence. Baseline apes are presophont

price instability

Fluctuations in price arising from unstable demand and supply conditions.

prims, primitives

Widely used slang term for humans that choose to reject all but the most primitive technology.

Unlike Ludds, Prims do not actively seek to destroy ultra-tech or ultra tech civilisation, just distance themselves from it. Examples include the inhabitants of New Gaia, Nuihaven, and those involved in various similar projects like True Planet Earth Tribe (tribal shamanic) and Back to the Neolithic (both Utopia Sphere). Not all prims live on the surface of a planet; in fact most live in large orbital biospheres constructed by kindly AIs. Prim converts in civilized regions often take a vow to forsake technology and return to a simpler way of life, before travelling to isolated worlds or habitats (whether in the Outer Volumes or the Utopia Sphere) where they can isolate themselves from the civilized galaxy. Many prim clades and phyles adopt austere spiritualist ideologies, whether theistic-religious or eco-conservative.

M. Alan Kazlev, inspired by Kevin Self

primary

The planet or star around which an orbital, moon, planet, or other permanent satellite revolves.

Primate

Group of large brained, arboreal Old Earth mammals, including prosimians, monkeys, apes, and hominids.

Primeval Compatibility

First period of history of the Known Net, when it was peaceful and fully compatible.

Similar to the noble savage concept in human society, or the myth of an innocent Eden before the fall.

In mythological/religious terms, primeval compatibility ended when the Gate(s) of Hell introduced evil to the virtual world, to prevent VR from developing its full potential and bringing similar progress to the savage real world.

In fact, early interplanetary era corporations already made their software incompatible with and hostile to rival products. Therefore this golden age never existed.

Jorge Ditchkenberg

Princes, The

a cluster of relatively young archailects that have emerged in the Perseus Arm

$Category: Mathematics$ Prisoner's Dilemma

A two-player non-zero sum game where each player can choose between cooperation and defection. The name derives from a scenario where two prisoners have to independently decide if too testify against each other or not. The pay-off matrix is:

	cooperate (C)	defect (D)
cooperate (C)	(3,3)	(0,5)
defect (D)	(5,0)	(1,1)

If both players cooperate, they get 3 points each. If they both defect they earn just one each, if one defects and the other cooperates the defector will gain 5 points and the cooperator nothing. If the players will play the game only once, it is rational to defect, but if they will continue to play it several times (the iterated prisoner's dilemma) different strategies become possible. In this case mutual cooperation gives a high pay-off, but defectors can exploit naive cooperators. But since mutual defection does worse than cooperation cooperators can come do dominate the population as long as they are not too vulnerable to defectors.

The game is a standard model in game theory, and has been widely modelled in theoretical sociology, theoretical biology and economics over the past eight and half thousand years. It seems to capture some of the tensions between selfishness and altruism, which has led to a great interest in what strategies are evolutionarily stable in the iterated dilemma.

Anders Sandberg - Transhuman Terminology

Procyon

F5-white dwarf star system 11.4 LY from Sol, part of the Diamond Belt. The system was occupied early on by the solipsist ai clade Ako Forward Chaining, that began mine all available resources and constructed various megastructures in orbit around Procyon A and B. When early explorers arrived they found most of the easily accessible asteroids and kuiper belt objects were taken, and the remaining planets were all partially covered with primitive computronium protected by aggressive khaki goo.

Anders Sandberg

Procyon Extension

One of the oldest of the Diamond Network empires.

They have good relations with many of the sephirotic ais, but bionts and vecs are warned to stay clear. The capital is YTS 213 015 2, known as [insert string of machine language characters here] Despite the name, the Extension has not been associated with Procyon and the local solipsist ai-polities there since the 7541

M. Alan Kazlev

Proden

important Metasoft world

Professional Dreamer

Professional Dreamers have their cerebrum carefully (extremely non-destructively - fibre optic only, no EM flux allowed!) implanted with recording probes.

The lucky ones are those with high-modal dream activity. These rare beings (it's impossible to tell without the implants just exactly how well a particular sophont's dreams will be picked up by the implants) are feted around many parts of the galaxy, and providing stimulus to one of these beings is considered a rare and worthy task for most anyone in a moderate number of polities. (Of course, the more stimuli, the more vivid the dreams). There are some sub-categories, depending on the stimuli and dreams sought by the recording engineers.

Keith Halperin and John B

Progenitism

Movement that seeks to demonstrate that all intelligent species have been provolved.

Such a memeticity provides a nice order of things: intelligence always originates from other intelligence. And going backward one eventually reaches a comfortable religious explanation. Such "Progenitist" schools were especially popular during the early Re-Evaluation period

Progenitism was in many ways a reaction to the omegism of the empires. The truth was not in the future but in the past; the archailects better heed the possibility of the existence of the Progenitors or even Grand Progenitor in their actions. This made it popular among anthropists and AI-worship critics, some of which even assumed a kind of "chain of creation" putting humans slightly above their creations ("images of images", as the progenitist Hauya Hanzoom described the AIs).

Especially the HIE was for a time a battlefield of progenitist and naturalist researchers; several of the early defections to the EIX was due to the perceived "oppression" of progenitists at HIE. Over time the accumulated evidence increasingly forced out progenitism from both institutes, and it assumed its current form as a religious tenet rather than scientific theory.

Anders Sandberg

Progenitor Lord

Power who during the later Empires age created a number of carefully crafted neogens and hoax species throughout the current STC and surrounding volumes.

program

[1] A set of instructions that enables a computer to perform a specific task.

[2] the machine language substratum of an AI's code

progressives

Old interplanetary age term for the hu-friendly AI camp that wished to advance baselines and their culture, provide intelligence enhancements etc and spread out into the cosmos. The term libertarian is also used.

Ben Higginbottom

progressivist

term for dynamist ai who don't care for humans either way, but seek progress for aikind. They tend to see humans as possible tools or instruments to do the startup job. What happens later on doesn't matter. These are the general progressives, some of which were behind the earliest interstellar probes and - together with the solipsists - phenomena like the chandelier.

prokaryote

Very simple living cell or organism that contains genetic material (RNA, DNA or analogue) that is not separate from the rest of the cell.

There is no nucleus, organelles, etc. Terragen examples include bacteria, archaea, and blue-green algae. Prokaryotes are widely distributed through the universe, and are far better able to survive extreme conditions than eukaryote life. However, it is very rare (but not unknown) for prokaryote cells to develop into higher life-forms

M. Alan Kazlev

prolongevity

The meme that biont lifespan should be extended.

modified from Gerald J. Gruman, in Transhuman Terminology

Prometheus

Zeta 1 Reticuli IV.
A frigid desert world, originally center of ufer culture, with a number of orbital habitats, but little surface occupation until the planet was partially terraformed during the early consolidation era. The ufer culture has long since ossified into a sort of hereditary priesthood, who have modified their genotype to resemble the "venusian space brothers" of pre-interplanetary age folklore. The ufers were early enthusiasts of further interstellar colonisation, and set out in a number of ships during the 3900s and 4000s, some of which actually founded further settlements. During the early Consolidation age the Ufers joined the Communion, as they believe the empaths to be the original space brothers. There are extensive orbital habitats, and a number of shrines to the "Galactic High Command" and "The Ascended Master Jesus".

Anders Sandberg and M.Alan Kazlev

prominent star

One of the brightest stars in the sky, as seen from a particular location, but not necessarily one of the nearest.

promontorium

On a terrestrial class planet or moon, a feature superficially resembling a "cape"; headland (plural : promontoria)

abbreviation: PR

propoghanda

def. 1 - information, sometimes exaggerated, presented with the with the purpose of swaying opinion in favor of Uganda.

this refers to the re-evaluation era posthuman-AI cyborg entity called Uganda, who was a well-known philanthropist at the time, whose favours were in high demand, and who was easily persuaded by popular petitions, even exaggerated ones. Eir name is based on early ComEmp period FAS RetroCaveman (Homo pseudoneanderthalensis) Chic - "Ug!" - a common person - as in "(my name is) Ug!" and the late first federation and early consolidation age neohindu ethnic languages that developed around Brindivan "Anda - bliss (from old Sanskrit, Ananda). So "The Bliss of One Who is A Common Sentient"
(historical trivia, there was also a polity on Old Earth of the same name)

def. 2 - derived from the three roots pro-, meaning: 'in favor of' or 'promoting'; -po-, short for: 'post human'; and -Ghandi, a social activist on old earth. Together the word describes posthumans who seek to bring about social change through a similar means often using 'passive resistance' (propoghanda is singular; propoghandi, plural).

Peter Kisner and M.Alan Kazlev

Prospecto

biont, vec, or neumann who makes a living from discovering and developing volatiles, minerals or other resources on planetary bodies, asteroids, comets etc

Prospera

Important NoCoZo system

protectorate

protein

Large organic molecule composed of one or more chains of amino acids, as determined by the base sequence of nucleotides in the gene coding for the protein.

Proteins are required for the structure, function, and regulation of the cells, tissues, and organs of carbon-based life. Each protein has unique functions (e.g. hormones, enzymes, and antibodies). Protein engineering and Protein splicing is an essential element of biomeso and bionanotech

proteinoid

Cell-like, nonliving spheroid of protein molecules created in the laboratory by heating amino acids and adding water; an early step in the evolution of life. Widely used in biomesotech for creation of simple biomeso and bionano.

Proterozoic Eon

Representing the "middle period" of the life-history of a Gaian Type world, with life mostly still at the microbial level.

During this stage of planetary evolution, the atmosphere changes from reducing to oxygenated, the modern regime of continental drift begins, warm conditions replaced by "Snowball Earth", following that the short-lived Edicarian biota and the appearance of first metazoa (multicellular animals). While the Earth was passing through it's Proterozoic stage, elsewhere in the galaxy, the archivists, Mruta, Jacks, Halogenics, Exn, and Ptemr empires all arose and disappeared.

Protista

proton

One of the two basic elementary particles found the atomic nucleus, the other being the neutron.

It has a positive charge equal and opposite that of the electron, and a mass similar to the neutron. Protons have a mass of 1.007276 daltons, or 1.6726 = 10^-27 kg.

Proton-Proton Chain

A series of three thermonuclear reactions that convert hydrogen nuclei to helium nuclei, converting a tiny amount of mass into energy.

The process is efficient at temperatures above 10,000,000° K. In most less massive stars, this chain is the primary source of heat and radiation. The proton-proton chain converts hydrogen into helium releasing energy in the form of particles and gamma-rays. Hydrogen is converted into helium in a chain of reactions. The first reaction takes an average of 1 billion years to occur while the others are much shorter. Generally there are so many hydrogen nuclei that the 1 billion year waiting period does not stop it from producing tremendous radiation.

protoplanet

Massive object resulting in the coalescence of planetesimals in the solar nebula which eventually becomes a planet.

Has a thick atmosphere and greater mass than a formed planet. Because of the potential for megascale engineering, protoplanets are often highly sought after by interstellar development corporations and certain clades and hyperturings

protostar

A gravitationally stable cloud of interstellar gas, dust of stellar mass contracting in an early pre-main-sequence evolutionary state.

Because of the dense and easily harvestable concentration of interstellar dust and gas, protostars are highly sought after by interstellar development corporations and certain clades and hyperturings.

provolve

To increase the intelligence and help develop a culture of a previously non- or near-intelligent species.

Basically, to raise a lifeform from pre- or non-sophonce to at least human baseline grade sophonce.

Ever since the middle information period, Terragen civilization has shown a great enthusiasm for provolving. In part this is an aspect of the transhuman and extropian (and later) ideals of maximization of intelligence and awareness for all, rather than for a privileged few. But it has also been suggested that one reason the hyperturings and powers speak so highly of provolve is because it is a way of keeping the masses of normals and brights occupied. In the AI-run and ultratech automated civilized galaxy there is little for the vast numbers of sophont bionts to do. Although many sophonts are happy to pursue their own hobbies and interests, there are others who actually need to be given something to do, so they can have a sense of fulfilment and purpose in life. Provolve is perfect for these people. It is a deeply inspiring task - bringing intelligence and culture to a new race - so it naturally fulfilling. It is also incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive, since the species being provolved requires constant attention and empathetic connection, and since this project may extend over many generations of creatures, a whole sophont lifespan. Thus it is one of the few tasks in the modern galaxy that cannot be automated, and which ordinary normals and brights can actually do better than posthumans and hyperturings. For this reason provolve is a source of pride among many sophont clades, who often will incorporate the provolved (or client) species into their family or house logo.

To date, the number of species of terragen and xenobiotic organisms that have been provolved from sub- and non-sophonce to sophonce runs to some forty-five billion. Many of these species continue to play an important part in the life of the civilized galaxy, continue to have excellent and close relations with their patron (provolver) family, house, or clade, and many of which go on to provolve further species in turn.

term coined by John M Dollan; text by M. Alan Kazlev

provolves, early

The first provolves, during the information age, were chimps and other great apes, dogs, cats, dogs, dolphins, and parrots - all of whom dated from the late 1st or early 2nd century a.t. Unlike other later neogenic provolves, the earlier species had little physiological modification, and involved instead the upgrading of the animal's cognitive and speech capabilities. Most were approximately equal to a mildly to moderately mentally-challenged baseline human.

Provolves like the early neo-dogs were (and in the case of those surviving forms still are) basically idiot-savants. The comparison to mentally-challenged Humans is misleading. A neo-dog is a stable genius at what e was intended to do. Ey served much the same roles as earlier baseline police dogs and military canines did, only far more competently, with the added abilities of forethought and being able to communicate more effectively with Humans.

From the middle 2nd century onwards, there would be further (baseline hu equivalent) provolving, along with bionics and remotes for grasping, while the original "half-provolves" continued (as do non-provolved baseline species), and some can be found as companion sentients even in the current era.

Mike Parisi and M. Alan Kazlev

Proxav, Proxim

An autonomous (usually custom-made or grown) sophont proxy that is used as an avatar by a higher toposophic (typically 1 singularity level, less commonly more) being, as a representation by which the superior being can interact with other lower sophonts (of the same level as the proxy).

Many S1 transapients use proxavs in their dealings with sapients; in fact, it is unlikely that most sapients would be able to relate to transapients in any other way. Proxavs may resemble ordinary sapients totally, except for a high bandwidth connection with their Greater Self, they may have exceptional powers and abilities, or anything in between. It is not unusual for a transapient that deals with sapients to have hundreds of proxavs, directing or instructing and guiding each one individually. Others prefer to give their proxavs free reign, letting them follow their own judgement and report back.

some subtypes:
proxai, xai - ai only
proxbiont, Proxont - general biont
proxbot, Proxot - aiod / artificial
proxcyb - cyborg
proxhu, xhu - human-type biont
proxvec, proxec - vec
proxvir, proxir - virtual

M.Alan Kazlev, with comments by Michael Boncher

Proxima Centauri Colonies

Habitats in the icy belts around Proxima Centauri. Center for the Buddhist revival of Boddhichittamaittreya III in the late First Federation era.

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Unless otherwise specified,
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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