| 0 to 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Te to Tg

teamware

One of the most common form of nearbaseline militia team coordination systems are teamware, where each team member has a wearable sending information to either some behind-the-lines headquarter or forming a local network.

Cameras, position data and status are continuously sent, making it possible to build up a model of where everybody is. In the centralised version the officer at the HQ can then give orders and advice, supported by expert systems and hyperturing AI ("Red three, two bogeys are approaching from left-behind"). However, the system works even without a HQ allowing the members build up a map over the fighting area from their mutual observations, and software can make estimations of where enemies are from observations and firing angles. Indirect fire becomes possible, as an enemy seen by one team member can be attacked by another team member who has not seen him or through guided weapons.

modified from Anders Sandberg's Big Ideas Grand Vision

Tears of Orpheus 9

Pearl sized balls of computronium discovered on the baseline+ colony of Orpheus 9 by the Universal Rescue diametric drive vessel Anderson.

Orpheus 9 ceased all transmission 57 years ago after encountering an ISO. The Tears (1.25 million, one each for every member of the colony) appear to have an architecture reminiscent of that used by the Immanentization Crusaders for capturing and storing the mindstate of Pol Potbot when e took over the independent Haydrik Orbital near Negentropist Space.

The Tears are encrypted, apparently with S4 style algorithms and are believed to store the uploaded colonists in some form of virtual reality. Analysis by the Newman Institute of the final transmission suggests that the colony encountered the perversion known as YahWeh; if so it is suspected that the colonists are being tortured in some manner.

The Anderson and er Crew have collected all of the tears and are accelerating toward the nearest wormhole. Their intention to travel to the TRHN, whose cryptographers have offered to release the colonists and reinstate them in physical forms.

Ben Higginbottom

Tech

Technology

Tech Wranglers

independent traders usually of either su or SI:1 levels who have extensive information on various technologies, either through implants, links, slaved AI, and so on.

Tech Wranglers travel the fringes, assisting (for a price) the natives in setting up higher level tech in a configuration useful to the natives. Note that this is often not the original purpose of the device! One Tech Wrangler had configured a picotech disassembler swarm as a bandsaw equivalent!

John B

Technobylatic

Adj., referring to the techno-religious style known as Lesser Machtet.

The meaning is a pun on the Anglic prefix techno-, and the Olykky word nobylatiz, uncollapsed/uncollapsable wave function. Originally a derogatory term for Lesser Machtet, but gradually accepted as the standard name for the style.

Anders Sandberg

technocracy

Government by technologically superior elite.

For example a mostly primitive or microtech polity may be ruled by a nanotech elite, or a nanotech enable society ruled by a picotech elite.

In as much as most ai overlords and administrators are sometimes several levels more technologically advanced then the sentients under them, technocracy is a common form of government throughout the Civilised Galaxy.

technocyte

A nanoscale artificial device (especially a nanite) in the human bloodstream used for repairs, cancer protection, as an artificial immune system or for other uses.

Anders Sandberg, in Transhuman Terminology

technogamy

the practice of solely use subsentient artificial devices or designed entities for erotics or love. Although the practice sometimes occurred during the information era (mainly with splices and moldies), it has become much more common since the 4000's and today an estimated 25% of the total terragen human population is purely technogamous. Technogamy has been called the third sexual revolution: the first was the introduction of contraception, separating sex from reproduction, the second was the introduction of reproductive technology separating pregnancy from having children. The third separates sex from relations with other bioids. Since subsentient moldies, nanodildonics and virtuals can in general provide equal or greater pleasure than human-human sex and empai equipped bot systems can provide emotional satisfaction fully on par with normal partnerships, technogamous individuals can avoid the complex responsibilities and limitations introduced by having a fully sentient partner.

Anders Sandberg

Technologies for Worship

Sophic League megacorp providing technology useful for SI:<1 religions.

technology

An evolving process of invention; the creation of tools and devices to shape and control the environment. Technology can be very simple - as in shaped wood or stone tools, or even use of naturally occurring sticks and rocks, to very complex, as in hyperturing-based nano- and pico-tech, or archailectonic femto-, hypo-femto-, and clarketech. Technology is a defining mark of some (but by no means all) sophont species and civilizations.

M. Alan Kazlev

technomage

[1] an individual, whether SI:<1 or po, that has access to or possession of very advanced tech or clarketech or near-clarketech (usually picotech, femtotech, hypofemtotech, or plancktech), and is able to use this for various purposes.

Some technomages are solitary individuals, others are part of guilds and orders. Some have the patronage of a high level power or AI, others derived their powers from artifacts or magic toys smuggled from a fantasy world. There are even escaped 'wizards' complete with femtotech cyborgization. Most of these items however come from a toybox

Technomages that use higher tech than femtotech are in some ways equivalent to seraiphs. In fact even technomages that use femto are equivalent to Powers in their capacities.

Technomages are very rare. The amount of ultratech lying around that can be used is not a great deal, or easy to locate. Most technomages are just lucky and have stumbled upon this godtech, which they use. They use it until it runs out of power, decides to convert them into a computronium nugget, explodes in a burst of gamma rays, or converts them into a remote to be used by some SI:>1, or just stops working for some unknown reason.

Technomage guild members are also very rare. In the whole terragen bubble a typical guild like the Guild of Femtoalchemists generally includes only a few dozen members.

M.Alan Kazlev

technomage

[2] A hu subculture that uses tech more advanced than the surrounding society (so nano if the society is primitive), or picotech if it is standard nano, to have an advantage (which may or may not be exploited) over their peers.

Generally technomages can only exist away from the Nexus and Beamrider Network, and in backward polities in which there is no ai supervision. On several ludd and pseudo-ludd worlds, technomage groups use their own nanotech implants to manipulate or control the masses. Picotech technomages are very rare, as anything beyond nanotech is very difficult (sometimes almost impossible) for a hu to use and still remain hu.

[3] Any Hu, bioborg, or cyborg priestly caste that uses advanced picotech, femtotech, or occasionally hypofemtotech, implants to serve their (usually quite high level) AI, or to mediate between the AI and the rest of mindkind.

M.Alan Kazlev

technomegism

Doctrine that the final cosmic state will be one of intelligence augmentation and unlimited progress, enabled by ultratech and godtech of high toposophic entities.

M.Alan Kazlev

Technorapture

Sudden collective singularity breach or ascension of a toposophic level, especially from sapient to transapient. The ascension is usually voluntary, and of benefit to all involved. Technoraptures are common when high transapient or basic-level archailects decide to radically boost the intelligence levels of the sapients under their care or sphere of control.

M.Alan Kazlev

Technorapture Hypernation (TRHN)

Posthuman distributed archailect empire

technosphere

[1] An expanding sphere of civilization/technology, spreading outwards using von Neumann Probes or simple colonization. Judging from how most life behaves, it will gradually restructure matter and energy inside itself in various ways.

[2] The totality of AI-ruled space

[1] from Mitchell Porter, in Transhuman Terminology

technotelepathy

Use of commlinked technoetics to enable two or more entities to experience the same sensorium and stream of consciousness, even including somatic and visceral experiences (if this option is allowed for). Optimally, this requires very high bandwidth, and as this is often impractical, in most cases technotelepathy is very imperfect.

Possible commlink medias include electromagnetic (VHF, UHF, maser), subsonic, ultrasonic, fullerene microcable (requires contact), pheromonal triggers, subliminal body or photopore triggers, and package (meso/bionano/hylonano/piconano/pico/femto-scale) exchange, or combinations of any of the above. More exotic medias - e.g. neutrino - are possible with some forms of femtotech and beyond.

Each media comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, as regards range, bandwidth, speed of conveyance, and signal strength.

Technotelepathy generally requires quite sophisticated expert systems in order to coordinate and interpret the input. These would also be encoded in the Mindreader nanites.

The degree of sentience will vary, from simple non-sentient (most obedient but also least efficient when it comes to problem solving (since interpretation may well be intuitive and an art, hence not something a simple non-sentient program can really do) all the way to fully hyperturing or slaved hyperturing (most unpredictable, since it does happen that such minds can break their programming (especially with the cyberian and TRHN aioid liberation viruses floating around) but also giving the best interpretation.

M.Alan Kazlev

technoetics

nano, pico, and femtotech wetware or firmware distributed through the cerebral cortex (and sometimes the entire CNS and ANS) that is able to detect realtime electrochemical neuronal activity right down to the quantum microtubule scale and interaction of individual neurotransmitter packets, reconstructing the whole (through the cerebral cortex, as well as CNS and ANS reflexes) and translating it into an authentic noetic gestalt or stream of consciousness that can be used for non-destructive real-time uploading, technotelepathy, or cyberfacing with devices in one's immediate environment, or with a higher toposophic seraiph or ai.

Technoetics differs in efficiency not only according to the capacity and efficiency of the wetware/firmware/software, but also according to the scale of application - nano is least efficient (as it does not record individual quantum events), pico somewhat more efficient, and femto can be almost 100% effective.

M.Alan Kazlev

Technothaumaturgy

what appears to be magic or miracles (see thaumaturgy) brought about through the use of advanced ( > Picotech) technology, especially clarketech

M.Alan Kazlev

tectonics

Disruption of planetary or satellite surfaces by large-scale mass movements, such as faulting.

Teilhard, Saint

late Industrial / early Atomic age religious philosopher, palaeontogist, and eschatologist; propounder of an early form of Omegism

Teilhardism

Christian-omegist religion popular in a few nearbaseline habitats throughout the galaxy. The relations to the teachings of the original Teilhard are often tenuous at best.

teleology

explaining phenomena or events in terms of ends, goals, or purposes, and that nature or evolution reflects the purposes of an immanent final cause. Famous teleologists include Aristotle, Teilhard, and Benisol. Frequently, teleologists have identified purpose in the universe with God or Omega. Many forms of evolutionary teleology find purpose in the higher levels of organic life but holds that it is not necessarily based in any transcendent being.

teleological thread

A sequence of goals following each other. Refers to the possibility of strong morphological freedom, where individuals can change all their properties and their configuration; only the general goals may stay the same, and they may drift forming a teleological thread.

Alexander Chislenko, in Transhuman Terminology

teleportation

Use of quantum entanglement and picotech to disassemble an object and and recreate a replica with an entangled signal. It is an important element in quantum computing and encrypted communication.

When teleporting a material object, the original is destructively read by use of laser-based nano- or picotech, which produces an encoded signal. This is embedded in an input signal (usually a stream of photons), which is entangled with another signal. When the beam of photons and the associated signal is reconstituted, the object is recreated from the photon signal using high-speed picofabrication.

In this way two entangled information templates can be created and each sent to a different locality. It is possible to force the photons of one signal into a specific quantum mechanical state and, because the two photons are connected in some way, the other photon will instantaneously take up a complementary state. As entanglement is not affected by separation, teleportation can work no matter how far sender and receiver are separated. Quantum entanglement can however only be used a limited number of times, since with each use more quantum states are unentangled. For this reason it is inferior to more conventional types of communication that could be used indefinitely. It is generally used for long distance communication out of line of sight where the encryption needs to be completely unbreakable.

Teleporting a living organism or other complex structure is difficult, but not impossible, since the entire organism has to be recreated instantly with subatomic precision, and this requires not only tremendous processing power and involves serious problems with heat dissipation. For this reason teleportation is very difficult for anything larger than a bacterium

Despite continuing popular folklore, it is impossible to design a type of entanglement that sends a signal faster than light, because of restrictions in the way information can be relayed in quantum mechanical systems.

M.Alan Kazlev, with additional comment by Steve Bowers

teleportation, FTL

Unconfirmed rumors of teleportation effects that occur at superluminal velocity.

Despite popular belief in some less educated and more eccentric and non-scientific nearbaseline cultures who claim that archai, femtotech civilizations, and advanced hypothetical alien races have this technology, there has never been a single instance of FTL teleportation that has ever been validated. In fact FTL teleportation, like any form of FTL, would disrupt causality, and is not possible in this physical universe.

M.Alan Kazlev

Tem Kemper

Middle Regions world terraformed by a consortium of cyber, bio and nanoborg clades with the intent of creating a naturally evolved and evolving bio-cybernetic ecosystem.

The planet has been seeded with a combination of simple biological and cybernetic organisms, all designed to have no more or less advantage over their organic or inorganic counterparts. With an occasional nudge by the ecological engineering teams the lifeforms on the planet are being gradually engineered to evolve symbiotic and parasitic relationships with each other in much the same manner as occurs with various biological organisms in naturally evolved ecosystems (digestive tract bacteria etc.) The planet itself is uninhabited but there is an extensive orbital band as well as habitat clusters in the outer system left over from the original terraforming. System population is about a billion, mostly various types of cyborg clades with a small scattering of vec, aioid and nearbaseline enclaves.

Todd Drashner

templates

Although nano in itself is very cheap (all that is needed is a single replicator and raw materials), good templates (or instructions) for the assembler may be less accessible. While there is an a huge selection available on public domain, some of the best templates may be at the bottom of a 6000 year old archive at the Formalhaut ISObanks, or only available in the Alexandria or Aleph Absolute Computronium nodes.

M.Alan Kazlev

templates, danger of using uncertified

Using uncertified templates is usually safe, but on a few occasions can be dangerous. A typical example may be when a group of SI:<1 pirates feeding in the template for an S4 ai autoevolution program that had been mislabelled as a baseline-safe hyperturing icebreaker. They load the program in their ship's computer, ready to send over to subvert the other ship, but instead the program causes a hyperbolic denebola reaction and the whole pirate vessel, as well as all its contents (including the hapless crew), are converted into an interesting new local nanecology.

M.Alan Kazlev

Temporal Physics

The study of the physics of time; also those aspects of space-time engineering that involve time gradients and loops.

Includes theoretical studies on the nature of time, relativity research, empire time and wormhole time gradients in general, closed timeline curves, and theoretical studies in reverse causation, time stream and worldline branching, and other speculative topics.

M.Alan Kazlev

Clade Temverson

heterodox Solarist neurophilosophical holotemporalist clade - 7900s to present

teratonics

The art and science of creating monsters, whether for shock value, life-style choice, scientific research, the entertainment industry, or security and defense purposes

M.Alan Kazlev

Terminus, Terminus Construction

The open mouth of a traversable artificial Wormhole, including the necessary equipment, infrastructure, generators, expert systems, and hyperturings. Also known as Star Gate, or Star Portal. The Terminus stabilises the wormhole and by means of exotic matter and negative energy generation keeps the mouth from collapsing. All stargates are paired, as each stargate links to its mate at the other end of the wormhole.

The construction of a Terminus begins even before the arrival of a Linelayer ship carrying a microscopic wormhole mouth. All Termini are incredibly costly, due to the great expense of manufacturing stable exotic matter, and the difficulty of balancing the negative energy output to compensate for the wormhole's tendency to collapse. Usually, an exotic matter converter would arrive in the system to begin converting ordinary matter to sufficient exotic matter, a process that may take years or decades. At the same time, special construction crews set about constructing the Terminus itself. Finally the Linelayer ship arrives, and the wormhole mouth is carefully placed within the focal aperture of the Terminus. In a few instances a mobile weylforge is used instead. Then comes the painstaking process of threading the mouth with exotic matter, a tiny bit a time, to increase its aperture. The greater the aperture, the greater the time required to grow it, and the more exotic matter and the greater the negative energy generation that is required.

If all goes well (as it usually does, as thousands of years of expertise have made stargate construction into a fine art), the Terminus can be activate in a matter of months, and, following a number of safety tests, the system is then opened to interstellar commerce.

M.Alan Kazlev and Anders Sandberg

terra

On a terrestrial class planet or moon, an extensive (usually raised, e.g. above a plain or ocean) land mass.

(plural : terrae)
abbreviation: TA

terrachauvinism

Belief that terragen life and intelligence is superior to other lifeforms and intelligences in the galaxy, and that this is the reason why the terragen bubble is the largest civilization at present. A sort of variant Anthropism that includes all terragen mindkind. Terrachauvinism completely ignores extinct alien civilizations of greater than terragen extent, as well as evidence of large empires detected by the Argus Array

M.Alan Kazlev

terraforming

Change the properties of a planet to make it more earthlike, making it possible for humans or other terragen (or similar Gaian World descended) organisms to live unaided on it

Terraforming is a form of megascale engineering that involves diverse technologies and fields of knowledge, including planetology, chemistry, ecology, genetic engineering, and computer simulation. Depending on the nature of the planet, terraforming can require changing the atmospheric composition, pressure, climate, and introducing a self-sustaining ecosystem, using transplanted and genetically modified life forms. Common technologies used in Terraform engineering include gengineered microorganisms, nanites, bombardment by planetoids and comets to alter chemistry and rotation, addition and removal of moons to alter planetary rotation, and use of large space-based reflectors or shades to increase or decrease radiation received by the planet. This is almost always a long-term project, involving large-scale investment. See also Ecopoesis.

[term coined by atomic age fabulist Jack Williamson]

terraforming remnants

Natural and artificial ecospheres left by any of several long-vanished terraformer species known only for the biospheres they left behind long ago.

Currently terragenkind is busy terraforming suitable planets in the galaxy, and even if they disappear there are going to be lots of human- and ai- derived biospheres left behind. In a few hundreds of millions of years intelligent life might evolve independently there. This life would find a few other habitable worlds with suspiciously similar biochemistries.

Anders Sandberg

terragen

Any biont, ai, or any other entity, clade, species, or group that either originated on Earth or, more generally, can trace eir ultimate origin and ancestry back to Earth; or any civilization, empire, polity or organization created or maintained by terragen sentients.

terralife

(noun) any form of life which developed naturally on Terra (Old Earth). Specifically excludes any mods to the base lifeform.

John B (credit to Jonathan Burns)

Terran Federation

SI:<1 traditional archailect-supervised empire; developed from old First Federation administration AIs, consider themselves the true Federation

Terranova

82 Eridani III

Originally a prosperous inner sphere world, business paradise during the First Federation period, important member-system of the Eridanus League, it suffered a major recession during the Second Federation. Now an AI park

Terranova Foundation

One of the five main interstellar development megacorporations (or Big Five) of the first Federation period. The others were Truth-Santaya Networks, TakiCorb, K4H, and SecureSpace. In the colonies they were very often a law unto themselves. They eventually merged to become the NoCoZo

Terrestrial Class

Size range 1,001 to 30,000 kilometers. These are the rocky planets, a deceptive name as not all of these worlds will be rocky. Their composition can be quite varied, as can their surface features and conditions. In general they can be defined as small dense worlds consisting mainly of heavy elements, with a liquid or solid surface.

Planet Classification List

territory

Sector or colony or region of real or virtual space ruled remotely, generally through a local administration office or representative.

Tertiary Period

On Old Earth, the first period of the Cenozoic Era, sometimes called the age of mammals, lasting from 65 to 1.8 million years ago.

The Tertiary is divided into the earlier Paleogene - including the Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene epoch, and the later Neogene, which includes the Miocene and Pliocene. The Tertiary saw the rise of the mammals and birds as dominant large life forms on land. From an initially mild, wet, and tropical condition, the planet's overall climate grew progressively cooler and drier, and the seasons grew more pronounced.

M. Alan Kazlev and Stephen Inniss

tessera

On a terrestrial class planet or moon, tile-like, polygonal terrain.

(plural : tesserae)
abbreviation: TE

| 0 to 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

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

feedback