Have any of you
thought about other dimensions?
It's plausible at least, that the universe is layered. Although the
existence of other dimensions is necessary for some physics theories,
these dimensions are not like the standard SF trope of "hyperspace" or
"alternate realities”. Rather, they are sub-microscopic (planck
size) in scale, and only play a limited role in the setting, as tools
used by the most powerful intellects of archai level or higher. You
could look at this as having more dimensions rather than
‘other’ dimensions (i.e. 8-dimensional space-time
representations, but not two separate, parallel 4-dimensional ones).
Surely excluding
humanoid aliens makes the galaxy less creative, and put limits on the
range of alien types?
Not at all. In fact, it should foster diversity, because it forces us,
as the creators, to be more biologically innovative. Not being allowed
to take the easy way actually increases the creativity. As a hard
science setting, we feel the universe is far too wild and amazing a
place to have something as tame as the prototypical humanoid as the
norm for sophont lifeforms.
Do you think
adding more alien races to the setting would make it more interesting?
Maybe, but our focus within the project is humanities expansion. You
are welcome to submit your ideas, like any other, for review by the
group and potential inclusion into the setting. Before pursuing an
alien species you may want to look at the options available through
tweaks, splices, provolves, and genetically engineered life forms.
Why is there no
psionics in this setting?
Because mental mind control, radio-quality telepathy, telekinetics, and
the various other 'psionic' powers have not been proven so far in real
life in any replicable manner as generally defined by the scientific
method or community, so they are not included. This does not mean that
we are dogmatically saying they are untrue, mind you. We take no
definitive stance either way on this matter. Such things may exist, but
in the OA setting as in the present world, they are more likely to be
rumor and urban legend.
Why don't you have
artificial gravity? Surely this will be discovered after 10k or 100k
years?
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of anything credible that points to
the ability to generate gravitons/bend space-time aside from increasing
the mass of an object (i.e. natural gravity). The makers of popular SF
for movies and television find it understandably inconvenient to keep
all of their actors suspended on strings. This has had the unfortunate
side effect of encouraging viewers to assume that we will easily invent
artificial gravity eventually, despite the fact that the laws of
physics dictate otherwise. However, this setting does have artificial
gravity generated by centrifugal rotation. Apart from that the only way
to generate gravity is to use mass. You can compact the mass into a
very small space with OA tech, but you can't simply dispense with it.
Because of this OA does have technologies that can manipulate
gravitational effects to a limited degree. However, these technologies
are all based on the manipulation of very large masses compressed to
very high densities and often very small sizes.
New discoveries in
science are being made all the time. Surely in the future there will be
many new, and to us unknown, physical forces that will be utilized with
advanced technology?
While it is true that new discoveries are always turning up, in physics
and astronomy for example, this does not give us license to invent
hundreds of unknown fields and particles and radiations. New hypotheses
and discoveries still have to confirmed or refuted, and this may take
years or decades of observation and experimentation. Often the
apparently new phenomenon is a false alarm or turns out to be just a
variation on an existing phenomenon. For this reason, we would rather
err on the side of caution, and only
incorporate into the setting that which is known to exist, is not
logically impossible, and does not break the laws of physics as we
currently understand them.
Why is there no
Time Travel into the Past in the OA Universe?
see
this
page for a discussion of this topic.
Related Pages:
Why is
there no time travel in OA?
Why is there no
Faster-than-light travel in OA?
Design notes
- This page was originally part of the
OA Faqs page; however that page became too
large, so the various sections have each been given their own page -
MAK 10 Jan 04
