11-15-2013, 02:20 AM
(11-14-2013, 11:43 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: Hmm. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest the Ark leaving sometime after the Great Expulsion (lots of ships were leaving about then), although there are certainly opportunities before this as well. At .1c it'd take about 1500 years to reach the Hyades Cluster. Note that in OA the Hyades might not be a healthy place for biological intelligence, depending on when they arrive. The Hyades is the home of the Taurus Nexus:
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48e8a9ebbbdb7
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4675eb1f8688f
On a related note, we probably need to take a look at these two entries. They don't seem to quite sync up in various ways and also one mentions neutronium, which we've removed from the setting. It's also not clear how the TN went about making wormholes or who the transapient ruling power(s) was/were (probably because this dates from early in the project when lower S-levels could make wormholes or the like). Removing the neutronium reference or replacing it with magmatter is a quick-n-easy fix, but perhaps a more detailed and extensive update is in order? Theodore, if you'd like to set your story there (And the timeline can accommodate it - with or without minor tweaking), then perhaps you could take part in the update discussions as both a creative input and to familiarize yourself with the setting a bit more? The result could let the story 'meet the setting in the middle' with a part of the setting or the like.
Just a thought,
Todd
Yeah...I read that, and have been chewing it over. The thought I had behind choosing the Hyades was that I wanted a star cluster (the Hyades have about 300+ stars, two-thirds of which are packed into a volume about 17 light-years across, and a huge chunk of them are F, G, and K-type stars, which allow for a lot of Sol-like systems) which would in turn allow for a true empire-type setting...at relativistic speeds. At the core of the Hyades, too, there's a quartet of B-type stars and, if memory serves, eight white dwarfs...which would all be attractive to transapient intelligences. The basic structure of my universe was that the higher godlike intelligences pretty much stuck to the Hyades core...leaving the smaller stars to the less-evolved hominids...though these deities have a tendency to dispense god-tech artifacts to their favored lesser followers. (Who then usually proceed to enthusiastically blow each other to smithereens with them.)
Lot of possibilities, there. Not sure if it fits with the canon, though.
Definitely open to suggestions on how to merge my 'verse with OA. I'm not married to the Hyades, just the essential structure - somewhere close enough, cosmically speaking, that humans from the day after tomorrow could realistically get there...a central core where transapient intelligences gather, a volume where worlds are usually less than five light-years apart, and a couple hundred stellar bodies. The idea here is that there's a structure micro enough for people to get their heads around...no more than 4-5 really developed planets, with a bunch of less-developed colony systems around the fringe (some of which are hot messes due to strife between competing factions), and plenty of empty space for pirates and isolationist fringe groups to make themselves scarce in.
One thing I'm really committed to, in my stories - and this goes back to my earlier "windows into the Universe" comment - is that my viewpoint characters need to be from a time close enough to our own that they can serve as the eyes of the reader, like astronaut Crichton from Farscape. Now, IMHO, the situation that allowed Crichton bounce through a wormhole right onto a living ship that just happened to be carrying a bunch of convicts escaping prison was, shall we say, overly contrived...but I still really liked having a guy with a modern perspective sort of Forest Gump'ing his way around in a futureverse.
What occurred to me is, while all this futuretech could be quite a ways in the future, cryogenics probably isn't...and people from just a few decades from now could probably "freeze" themselves and just...wait for this glorious future to come to them...sort of a one-way time machine. (I was actually reading Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Baron, which centered around the political debate surrounding the Foundation for Human Immortality, where basically $150,000 bought you a freeze when you died, and it occurred to me: what kind of future would these frozen Ordinary Joes wake up to?) There were similar themes in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, but the tech required to "bobble" someone in stasis seems a whole lot further off than cryogenics. Whatever...with cryo, you've got the ability to freeze a cross-section of folks from all across the recognizable near future...and transport them into a much less recognizable far future.
Any suggestions on how to make this work...within the canon?