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Ye to Yn

Year

The time it takes for a body in orbit around a star to complete a revolution around the star (this movement is called translation). The definition of what is a complete revolution creates different definitions of a year:

The Sidereal Year is the time it takes to return to the same direction in space.
If the orbit is elliptical, we can define an Anomalistic Year: the time between two passes at the perihelion. If the planet rotates around itself, and the rotational axis is inclined relative to the plane of the orbit, then the planet has seasons.
If a planet has seasons, a Tropic Year is the time between the beginning of one season and the next occurrence of same season [for example, the time from the beginning of one Winter and the start of the next Winter].

These three kinds of years are usually very close to one another. Also note that the duration of the year in days changes with time, due to the tidal friction. Due to the large size of Earth's moon, rotational deceleration has been particularly pronounced on Earth.

Yesod

Neohermetic archetype and AI God
Originally the ninth of the ten traditional sefirot of Kabbalah and Hermeticism. Later - especially among Cyberhermetics and Neohermetics came to designate the Cyberia Archailect Empire

As a synonym for the AI God of Cyberia, or more specifically the Cyberian Network, Yesod is also known as Maya or the Lady of Illusions. Yesod embodies the illusory world, the immaterial but yet fundamental. It is behind the Yesod sphere, where the inhabitants spend most of their lives interfaced to virtual realities where they create their own universes within nanocomputer clusters. On other worlds enormous nano-projects reshape everything as the inhabitants or the seraphim decrees. Nobody knows where Yesod Prime exists, if it exists at all - Yesod is almost as distributed as Hod (the Invisible Hand).

Anders Sandberg and M. Alan Kazlev

Yetzirah

The World of Formation - in traditional Kabbalah and Hermeticism the third of the fourth universes that emanated from the En Sof. The spiritual world immediately behind the physical universe.

Yeung Koon

Looking up at the Cathedral of Stars Literally "Moon Garden" in Old Chinese. Partially subterranean city located on Earth's moon (Luna). Established by the Confederation of Chinese Territories in 2130 as a scientific research station (primarily in low-G agrisplice-culture, bionanotech, and hydroponics), it created quite a controversy when the Confederation closed it to all but Chinese citizens. Later it converted to a low-G recreation and rehabilitation facility and the ban lifted. The city survived the nanoswarms thanks to an efficient blue goo defence network. Now mainly a quaint historical locale (especially the Old City, a popular tourist jaunt).

modified from Kevin Self

Yggdrasil Bush, Yggy

Variant species of the orwood biological space habitat.

Designed to thrive in vacuum or minimal atmosphere conditions, Yggdrasil bushes (or Yggys as they called colloquially) may be planted on any suitable body with at least 1/100G surface gravity. During its growth phase, the Yggdrasil bush mines minerals, atmospheric gases and water out of the soil and stores them within its trunk. Using a portion of the stored gases, it ejects a set of seed packets from itself once every few weeks. Each bush broadcasts its position using bioluminescent cells on its trunk and leaves. When a sufficient number of bushes have accumulated their bioluminescent signals naturally form a primitive local network. The direction and trajectories of future seed packets are determined using data shared by this network in order to maximize plant growth and area coverage for the forest as a whole.

The Yggdrasil bush grows to approximately a kilometre in height. When upward growth is complete, each bush begins to extend the growth of its canopy of leaves. Canopy growth continues until each bush has thoroughly intertwined its canopy with that of its neighbours. At this point the joined canopies fuse together into a tough, plastic-like sheath capable of holding integrity against standard atmospheric pressure. Completion of the canopy across the entire planetary surface triggers a reflex within the bushes, causing them to release the atmospheric gases and water stored during the growth phase. If insufficient volatiles are available on the parent body, they may be imported for the use of the bushes.

In the final phase of their growth, the Yggdrasil bushes alter their biochemistry to maintain and support the newly created atmosphere. Symbiotic soil gardening organisms are budded off of the bush root systems and the other basic elements of a self-sustaining ecosystem are a rapidly budded off from the bushes as well. Starting from a single seed, a complex of Yggdrasil bushes can convert an entire dead world into a living habitat in as little as twenty years.

There are various possibilities with the use of this versatile neogenic plant. Options include designing support pillars to look like giant trees, or using a variant of the dyson tree to cover a moon or planetoid in a huge forest with the canopy merging together to hold in an atmosphere. Yggdrasil bushes can be easily seeded on small ice moons and halo objects. Aleph Michio Ee adapted the Bluesky worldhouse to be photosynthetic, making the Greensky worldhouse... These involve an adaptation of the Yggdrasil bush with enough atmosphere to fly a light aircraft about without hitting the tree trunks.

Further, there is no real need for terraforming large worlds when you can bush up the icy asteroids- assuming you can gene out the low gravity space sickness effects reliably.

One popular variant is a Fucus vesiculosus - Bladderwrack - modification that can develop in Gas Giant rings, with a small (100-200m) bladder full of breathable air, sometimes with edible fruit and nuts growing on the inside. The bladders are loosely connected, with insulated flexible corridors between the bladders, and all the ice and rock of the rings incorporated into the spaceweed to avoid collision damage.

Todd Drashner and Steve B

Yikoh

Alien language, used mainly by xenologists of the HIE to transliterate alien names.

Yin and Yang

In Taoist, Neotaoist, Nuage, Cosmopagan, and many other philosophies, the two inseparable polar opposites or complementaries, the interaction between which determines phenomenal reality. They are not the same as good and evil but rather define abstract qualities, as shown in the following table. The precise nature of yin and yang differs according to the philosophy or memeticity that is explaining it

Yin	Yang
"shady side of mountain"	"sunlit side of mountain"
broken line	unbroken line
earth	heaven
dark	light
yielding	hard
electron cloud	atomic nucleus
feminine	masculine
warm	cold
square	round

Ylem

Ultratech building material.

more

Gordica

Famous industrial ISO located at Gordica world; renowned as the constructionplace of the great vec poet Enrastered Link Connection.

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