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Orion's Arm Relevant Linksarranged according to topic |
Here are some web sites and links that are considered of relevance to the more technical side roof the Orion's Arm scenario.
Single web pages (or only several pages together) are indicated by
this icon 
. Complete web sites are shown by a somewhat larger icon: 
. This
is only a rough guide, as a single (large) page may contain more
information than a complete site (of small pages)
Note, further links will be added from time to time.
For more links, including SF, worldbuilding,roleplaying, and artwork, see the main links page
Recommended! The academic archives
contains just about every paper published on physics, mathematics,
nonlinear science and computer science; invaluable.
Greg Egan
home page - lots of great hard science tidbits by the
modern master of hard SF - see especially Diaspora
The
Alternate View
Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine
"The Alternate View" columns of John G. Cramer
"The Alternate View" columns are short (~2,000 word) essays about
cutting-edge science. They are informative and very readable essays,
aimed at readers (and writers) of "hard" science fiction. Includes some
good ideas for OA.
Even if some of this material is dated, and some not viable, there is
still a lot of great science background stuff there, in a form that any
non-specialist can understand.
rec.arts.sf.science - a very good place to check out for ideas for OA, as its purpose is the discussion of the science in science fiction.
Recommended! John Baez home page/FAQ
collection - John Baez, mathematical physicist and
moderator of sci.physics, his site contains vast quantities of clearly
written invaluable information for people who just want to learn a
little about what the 'Brains' start arguing about.
Recommended! Mathworld - an encyclopaedic
coverage of mathematics, very much the OA-style obsessive completeness
too! Very comprehensive, an invaluable resource
Recommended! Einstein's Special & General
Relativity
Recommended! C-ship: Relativistic
ray traced images - exploring flight near the speed of
light! C-ship helps you understand Einstein's theory of Special
Relativity intuitively through the medium of computer-synthesised
images.
General
Relativity - Werner Benger - includes a simulation of
gravitational distortion of light near a black hole. The bending of the
light rays around a Black Hole makes normally invisible parts of the
involved objects to come into view. Basic principles of gravitational
lensing are demonstrated on ordinary objects and the meaning of the
Einstein ring is also explained. Note - these same principles would
apply to a wormhole (exotic matter ring)
Atlas of the
Universe - a really neat series of star and galaxy maps!
There are nine main maps on this web page, each one ten or twenty times
the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars
and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the
scale of the entire visible universe. Also lists the nearest stars,
nebulae, galaxies, etc. The Orion Arm
shows the region covered in the present setting.
It has never been easier to find information out about the stars in the sky; here are some links which are very good for star data
Recommended! The Electronic Sky.
Coverage of the galaxy and beyond. Includes selected Asteroids, Comets,
Moons, Planets, Stars, Clusters, Nebulae, Constellations, Galaxies, and
mare; all well illustrated and nicely presented.
Recommended! The Internet Stellar Database
- detailed info on stars within 75 light-years, plus some of the more
well-known "name brand" stars farther away.
Recommended! Stars
- stars are illustrated by links to photographs of their parent
constellations, which are listed along with their stars arranged by
Greek letter name. A new star is added each Friday
Recommended! Star Data Pages - the
star data pages provides detailed information about all stars of the
Bright Star Catalogue, about different types of variable stars and
selected double stars.
There are a lot of fascinating stars up there, but sometimes information is different between databases, so compare and contrast where necessary...
3D starmaps
by Winchell Chung - maps in various formats
Some good overviews of the galaxy, and a simple map of the local spiral arms which roughly corresponds to the Orion setting:
http://www.earth.uni.edu/astro/cosmos/part4.html
http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/mw/milkyway.html
- The milky way in different wavelengths
The local neighbourhood (likely where most of the old power centers still are in our current setting):
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/snbhd.gif
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/snbhdclose.gif
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/key.gif
Interstellar
Clouds - Birthplaces of Stars - shows the distribution of brightly
illuminated clouds. in the local regions of the Perseus, Orion, and
Sagittarius-Carina arms.
also
The
Interactive NGC Catalog Online
WEBDA
- A Site Devoted to Stellar Open Clusters
Gazetteer
of Planetary Nomenclature - working group for planetary
system nomenclature
"Extrasolar planets" means planets outside our own solar system. A number of gas giants, mostly in highly elliptical orbits or very close to the primary, have been discovered. These seem to indicate that the present theory of planet formation (which would imply mostly circular orbits and gas giants further out) is incorrect. Another possibility is that there are actually several types of solar systems - the Sol type one (our own solar system), the "irregular" one, and possibly others as well. It may also mean that the hot jupiters and elliptic jupiters so far discovered are rare in the general scheme of things, and their relatively frequent identification is more an artifact of current astronomy technology than anything else.
The Extrasolar
Planets Encyclopaedia - definitive listing on the subject
Known
Planetary Systems - by Alexander J. Willman - table
listing the (at last count) 59 known planetary systems around main
sequence stars
Encyclopedia Extrasolar
- by Eric Mamajek - extrasolar systems are listed in order of discovery.
Giant
Planets Orbiting Faraway Stars
by Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler - short but readable
intro. This article was written several years ago but is still useful.
Introduces the term "51 Pegasi--Type Planets" for large epi-solar
planets
The Search for
the Extrasolar Planets: A Brief History of the Search, the Findings and
the Future Implications - a more detailed review,
published in 1997 by Arizona State University, now a few years out of
date, but still interesting background reading
The Kepler Mission
- a special purpose space mission in the NASA Headquarters Discovery
Program for detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets, that is, rocky
and Earth-size.
Free-floating
planets confirmed - jupiter and supra-jupiter sized
planets not part of any solar system have been discovered in the Orion
nebula
NTT
Observations Indicate that Brown Dwarfs Form Like Stars -
More on Brown Dwarves in the Orion nebula
Failed Stars and
Super Planets - A Report Based on the January 1998 -
Workshop on Substellar-Mass Objects - rather technical, but still
interesting material on brown dwarves, which are important in the Orion's
Arm scenario.
Habitable
Moons - What does it take for a moon to support life? by
Andrew J. LePage.
Life and biospheres need not be confined to Earth-type planets around a
central F/G/K class star. A very readable on-line essay
White Dwarfs and Planets
Unless you understand life on Earth, how can you envisage which way life and evolution will go, both on alien worlds and in terragen biospheres?
Tree of Life - the diversity and
relationships of life on Earth, according to modern cladistic analysis.
This detailed site is unfortunately still incomplete as regards many
taxa
University of
California Museum of Paleontology - very good site on
Earth History and the diversity of life, including prehistoric life.
Also a good introduction to evolution, the geological time scale, and
cladistic analysis (phylogenetics)
Palaeos - very
comprehensive site on Earth History and the history of life, still
under construction and incomplete in parts. M.Alan Kazlev (co-founder
of Orion's Arm) is the co-author)
Laws of Developmental
Growth (Excerpt from Gilbert, S. F. 1991. Developmental
Biology. Third Edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland. Pp.
718-727.)
full of useful information on the growth of organisms. These principles
would apply equally not only with terragen and alien life forms, but
with the larger structures and alifes that would evolve in and from
nanecologies as well. Read (or just skim through) this and you
understand why you can't get baseline human giants, ants as big as
houses, etc. Also why do snail shells grow in the shapes they do, the
nature of allometry, and other interesting matters
Just how common are Earth-like extra-solar planets and developed extraterrestrial life anyway??? Here in OA we have assumed a halfway position - more optimistic than the REH, but more pessimistic then pop SF scenarios
John Cramer's
entry on the Rare Earth Hypothesis (says writers shouldn't
be too constricted by it)
Crucible of Life
- on the Cambrian Explosion and the REH - adopts the stance that life
on Earth is unique (pro-REH)
SETI review of
the original Rare Earth Hypothesis - anti-REH
Biological
factors in the evolution of intelligence - Using science
fiction and speculative exobiology to consider the evolution of
intelligence. The Evolution of intelligence: outline of a unit in a
college-level course that uses intelligence as a trait and exobiology
and science fiction to study evolutionary principles and processes.
Xenopsychology
by Dr. Robert A. Freitas Jr. (from Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact,
Vol. 104, April 1983, pp 41-53) - This paper is the first known
published reference to the "Sentience Quotient" invented by Robert A.
Freitas Jr., which first defined the computational density of sentient
matter along a wide spectrum spanning 120 orders of magnitude, as
defined by universal physical constants. The concept was first created
ca. 1977-78 and was described in Freitas' privately circulated but
unpublished Xenology (1979) manuscript.
Recommended! Reason Magazine (often with
excellent science articles by Ronald Baily) - Libertarian and free
marketeering webzine again useful for the NoCoZo, but also for the articles by
Ronald Baily on emergent science and engineering fields; in which he
completely avoids the hysterical technophobia of his colleagues in the
mainstream press.
Recommended! Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
- The origin of free enterprise, extrapolatable up through the NoCoZo
Recommended! The
Work of F.A Hayek - Frederik Hayek, former socialist who
became one of the leading capitalist economists after actually studying
the field; excellent for understanding the behaviour of the NoCoZo, rather than the usual
predatory capitalist light its painted in.
Recommended! Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
- Covers the history of philosophy in great detail, one of the core
underpinnings of memetics and science in general.
MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive
Sciences - "MITECS classifies the cognitive and brain
sciences into six domains: (1) computational intelligence (2) culture,
cognition, and evolution (3) linguistics and language (4) neuroscience
(5) philosophy, and (6) psychology. Each section contains an extended
series of brief entries on the defining research topics of the domain."
- just about the best coverage around. Many of these subjects will
still be as important in the current setting - at least as far as hu
psychology goes.
Recommended! Anders Transhumanist
Resources - simply the best source of this kind of
information anywhere
Recommended! Robert
Bradbury's home page/current work - Robert Bradbury;
Polymath, Extropian and Foresight senior associate, his site has
information from how long it would take to build an aircraft carrier
with general assemblers to how long it would take to take the solar
system apart and build a really big computer.
Recommended!
The
Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge - here is
the plain ascii edition of the seminal 1993 article.
Recommended! "Flatland - a
Romance in Many Dimensions" by 'A Square' (aka E. A. Abbott) -
Instead of dimensions, consider S-levels. This is a wonderful
allegory for a transcendent being (S>1) going to visit S<1's,
then animals, then up to the S>2 perception space.
Singularity Watch
- Understanding Accelerating Change - very good site on the Singularity
by John Smart. In contrast to the extended time-line in Orion's
Arm, the author assumes a very rapid singularity (or series of
singularities leading to an ultimate consummation in abstract places.
A
Critical Discussion of Vinge's Singularity Concept: Open Discussion
by Robin Hanson, October 1998 mirror
some
Singularity links I put up. The concept of godlike AIs
only makes sense if one assumes a Singularity of some sort at some
point in the near future.
Recommended! Extropian
Principles
Constitution
of the World Transhumanist Association
These two are current, real-world attempts at developing an ethics and
a set of mores to handle the technological changes predicted in OA
Recommended! The
Transhumanist FAQ - Nick Bostrom et al. If you want to
learn about transhumanism - the paradigm which OA uses as its launch
pad - this is the page to go to!
T. E. C. H. -
Transhumanist/Extropian Central Home - excellent list of
links to anything and everything in anyway relevant to Transhumanism.
Includes websites, mailing lists, books, magazines, movies, tv, and
humor
Extropy Institute
Resource Directory
A good resource site
The
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is a
techno-progressive think tank which seeks to contribute to the
understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and
societies by promoting and publicizing the work of thinkers who examine
the social implications of scientific and technological advance. The
IEET also seeks to help shape public policies that distribute the
benefits and reduce the risks of technological advancement.
Recommended! Creating Friendly AI 1.0 - The
Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures (and
other papers on that site such as seed AI) - "describes the design
features and cognitive architecture required to produce a benevolent -
"Friendly" - Artificial Intelligence. If you want to understand how
some the AI in OA setting work, then this is your site. Creating
Friendly AI also analyzes the ways in which AI and human psychology are
likely to differ, and the ways in which those differences are subject
to our design decisions." - want to know how to build a
Singularity-grade AI? Eliezar Yudkowsky tells all in this useful
instruction manual (part of The
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence)
Flare
- the A.I. programming language Flare.
Recommended! Bayes' Theorem
(Conditional Probabilities, Adjustment of Subjective Confidence)
- potential (probable?) mathematical underpinnings of AI judgement
calls - This is one site of many dealing with Bayes' Theorem. BT is
currently considered by several AI researchers to be the most likely AI
belief/reality crosscheck algorithm.
3 Laws Unsafe
includes articles by several authors, weekly poll questions, a blog for
announcements and commentary related to the movie I, Robot
and the Three Laws, a free newsletter subscription, and a reading list
with books on relevant topics such as the future of AI, accelerating
change, cognitive science and nanotechnology.
Robot - mere
machine to transcendent mind - Hans Moravec - on-line
extracts of his book and illustrations, worth checking out
Hugo de Garis - Published
Essays on COSMISM (Massively Intelligent Machines) and The
Artilect War I don't believe there will be an artilect war (in the
context defined here), or even a "cosmist-terran" dichotomy. Any case,
such a scenario is too simplistic for OA. But everything else Prof. de
Garis has to say is pretty interesting
Why
Robots Won't Rule the World - I think this is a very good
paper for seeing the other side of the argument. Too often
transhumanists are naively optimistic about future technological and ai
progress. I am not saying everything this guy says is valid
Recommended! Drexler's Engines of
Creation - The vision of nanotech, with moderate
maths, backing many of OA's nanotech (and, indirectly pico- and
smaller) technologies.
Recommended! Frietas' Nanomedicine
- A scholarly tome regarding the medical aspects of nanotechnology.
Larger yet more focused than Engines of Creation, it
helps cover many of the problems involved with nanotech within living
beings (amongst other topics)
The Foresight Institute (the site that
includes the above two on-line books) a nanotech thinktank founded by
Eric Drexler who first brought the idea to the world in a big way.
The site includes an art gallery of artists conceptions (of varying
fancifulness) of nanobots.
Moravec's
paper on bushbots. It includes some drawings and pictures of rough
models. Think of a nanobot as being a very tiny bushbot and you're
halfway there.
Soft Machines: nanotechnology and
life by Richard A.L. Jones
Soft Machines is a book about nanotechnology, published in the UK
and the USA by Oxford University Press.
The book, intended for the general reader, explains why things behave
differently at the nanoscale to the way they behave at familiar human
scales, and why this means that nanotechnology may be more like biology
than conventional engineering.
This website contains information about the book and its author.
The nanotechnology page contains general information about
nanotechnology, including links to other articles and reports written
by Richard Jones, and links to other reports and websites.
The Soft Machines weblog contains frequently updated news and
commentary about all aspects of nanotechnology.
Recommended! Matrioshka Brain
Home Page - all about Matrioshka Brains
Centauri Dreams -
Imagining and planning Interstellar exploration - very
good science and space exploration blog. "Centauri Dreams is a review
of research issues in deep space exploration, with an eye toward
interstellar possibilities."
Antimatter
Space Propulsion at Penn State University (LEPS) - using
amat and today's technology to send a small unmanned probe to the outer
solar system
Orbiter
- A Free Space Flight Simulator.
Orbiter is a realistic space simulation using proper physics for the modelling of planetary motion, gravitational fields, free space and atmospheric flight etc. As such, it is more challenging to master than an arcade game - you should at least have some basic idea about mechanics and planetary motion to get the most from it.
A hard science 3d space simulator; free to download and only uses real physics to accelerate and decelerate its spaceships in the solar system . Some trekkists have started creating DS9 ships for it even though they are limited to non-Trek physics.
Some
Novel Space Propulsion Systems by Forrest Bishop
(Foresight Conferences)
Next
Exit 0.5 Million Kilometers - Interplanetary Superhighway
- a vast network of winding tunnels in space� that con-nects the sun,
the planets, their moons, and a host of other destinations as well.
Pertains especially to early (Interplanetary Age) timeline, but has
implications for the setting as a whole
Solar Sails
- This website contains information on solar sailing, an old idea but a
new technology for moving around and doing things in space. Solar sails
are pushed through space by sunlight, using very large and lightweight
mirrors. Traditionally, spacecraft have used rockets or thrusters,
which propel material in one direction to travel in the other.
G. A. Cavagna, P.A Willems, & N.C.Hegland, Walking on Mars, Nature
vol. 393 18 June 1998, p.636 
pdf
Timothy M Griffin, Neil A Tolani, and Roger Kram, 1999 Walking in
simulated reduced gravity - mechanical energy fluctuations and exchange
Journal of Applied Physiology The American
Physiological Society pdf
Recommended! Space
Settlements: A Design Study This link goes to the html
conversion of a 1975 study commissioned by NASA on O'Neill-style
colonies. It contains many hard details on building such details. These
include measurements, so the artistic might have an easy time modelling
and rendering images.
Two blog essays, where an engineer looks at what near-future space navies might look like, and how technologies will drive ship design as well as tactics:
One might not agree with all his postulates, but Mr. den Beste's systematic consideration of how available technology will drive ship design is well worth the reading, as a model for extrapolators.
Note - the first essay only deals with naval warfare and is mainly of historical interest (showing how tactics and strategy change through time as technology develops). The second essay is much more applicable; dealing with outer space tactical warfare, with some very pertinent notes on weapon types, problems of heat dissipation, etc
see also:
Comments: Well, we tend to think in terms we are familiar with and the 'space as sea' metaphor (itself based on the history of sea travel i.e. 100s of years) has been around a long time. 50 years or so at least.
Based on an admittedly quick skim of the article I notice a number of assumptions that might not necessarily hold in reality. For example, the idea of a warship crewed by up to 'hundreds' of people. While the Orion propulsion system could certainly manage something like that, this approach apparently presumes no advances in automation or AI which would permit far superior performance in a vessel not limited by accelerations that biologicals can withstand. Automated vessels would also be vastly cheaper w/o life support systems. As such more could be built for the same resources. The same also applies for smaller, less (?) capable vessels.
Some of these concerns are commented on, in turn, by SDB; the following "notes" are notes only by SDB's standards of thoroughness:
Rocket
Science: Interstellar Flight: The Possibilities - Paul
Woodmansee
Starflight
without Warp Drive - Forget SF's magical warp drives. Can
today's science give us the stars for real? Conducted by Geoffrey A.
Landis, participants: David Brin, Robert L. Forward, and Jonathan Vos
Post (14 May 1995)
Dave
Dietzler's starship pages - real hard science ideas of how
to colonise the galaxy
The
Valkyrie Antimatter Rocket:
INTERSTELLAR
Conference - Hydrogen Ice Spacecraft for Robotic
Interstellar Flight by Jonathan Vos Post
The Challenge To
Create The Space Drive Marc G. Millis - from
Millis, M. "Challenge to Create the Space Drive," In Journal of
Propulsion and Power (AIAA), Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 577-682, (Sept.-Oct.
1997). web version 08/20/99 Note: Figures did not transcribe correctly
from original report.
Hard Science
Fiction Tools - especially (for flight time from one star
to another) Relativistic
Rocket Equation
Continuous
Thrust Acceleration Time Calculator - This site's
calculator is very useful. How else could I tell you that it takes 24
hours to cross 36.43 Million km at 1 G and achieve a speed of 845 kps?
;)
Interstellar
Travel: a review for astronomers - I. A. Crawford a very
technical paper, originally published in the Quarterly Journal
of the Royal Astronomical Society, 31, 377, (1990), which shows
that the technical difficulties are such that starflight is not likely
to be possible any time soon.
The Terraforming Information Pages - Terraforming other worlds to make them more like Earth and more habitable to terragen bionts is a central theme of the OA setting, and vital if terragen beings are to colonise a universe hostile to higher life. The site's author, Martyn Fogg, has published numerous technical articles and also written a good book on the subject of Terraforming.
Spacetime
Engineering - One possibility with warp drive and
wormholes is that it enables time travel to some extent (it is hard to
avoid with FTL, and you might need some restrictions on how wormhole
networks work in fact due to this
Traversable Wormholes:
some implications by Michael Clive Price, some important
insights on wormholes and empire time.
Negative
Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive, argues that wormholes
and Alcubierre Warp Drive both require near-absurd amounts of negative
energy (negative energy creates, or is, exotic matter in the Thorne
model of a traversable wormhole, and there do not seem to be any other
forms of traversable wormholes that don't require negative
energy/exotic matter. However, this essay does not mention Krasnikov's
proposal (below)
Dreaming Distant
Voyages - summary of a proposal for a viable traversable
wormhole by Sergei Krasnikov. originally appeared in the New Scientist.
Krasnikov's
original paper. Even if Krasnikov's wormhole turns out not
to be viable, if normal sub-singularity Homo sapiens can come
up with so many plausible proposals for a traversable wormhole, then
the hyperturing AI gods are going to have a lot more.
Matt Visser's personalized
homepage
also check out www.arxiv.org/find
and do a time-unlimited, search on Visser as author and wormhole in
abstract
Two hits that may appear applicable to the subject of "Visser tax"
(preventing wormholes being used as time machines etc) are:
To the Stars in
No Time - More about Wormholes - from "The Alternate View"
columns of John G. Cramer (Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine)
Traversable
Lorentzian Wormholes: An Overview
"An overview of the history and relevance of wormholes is given. Morris and Thorne�s description of a traversable wormhole is revisited, and the requirement for exotic matter is derived. The null, weak, strong, dominant, averaged null, averaged weak, and averaged strong energy conditions and the ways that traversable wormholes violate them is discussed. The connection between topological censorship and the averaged null energy condition is shown, with the result that wormholes are not topologically censored. The existence of a method for extracting a sufficient amount of exotic matter from the vacuum stress energy to build a wormhole with an arbitrarily large throat is proven. The connection between wormholes and time machines is explored, and how theorems related to closed timelike curves (chronology protection) or global hyperbolicity (cosmic censorship) might prevent their creation. Finally, it is stated how physical theories might be reconciled to the notion of traversable Lorentzian wormholes.
Adam Getchell references Visser's book as well as numerous, more recent papers in the literature. "
Some Generic Links
- this is a good site which has links arranged according to topic, for
SF writers.
The
ITSF Project - Innovative Technologies From Science
Fiction For Space Applications) -
The European Space Agency (ESA) requested the Maison d'Ailleurs
and the OURS Foundation to conduct a study on technologies and concepts
found in Science Fiction, in order to obtain imaginative and innovative
ideas potentially viable for long-term development by the European
space sector. The study was concluded in late 2001, but identification
of enabling technologies as well as advanced technological concepts is
still ongoing. The Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for
Space Applications (ITSF) Web site and e-mail forum are devoted to the
continuing discussion and development of this project.
includes both valid/hard and soft sci fi ideas
