What is the Diaspora? From an RPG to my own private deep future
[Part of this I originally wrote as a paean to VSCA's game Diaspora and shared on G+ in its waning days; part is my own schema for a deep future galactic science fiction that I find compelling.]
What is the Terhumene? The galactic civilization as such occupying the Diaspora and cognizant of the patterns of interstellar history. The Terhumene is people by terhumes, the people of the Cradle world, clever vicious apes that dream of heaven, and accompanied by variously clever machines, earth animals altered to think, speak, and prosecute lawsuits, and xenobiological organisms with the same dubious human intervention. There are no living xenosophont civilizations: aliens have had their Diasporae millions, hundreds of millions of years past; relics and fossils litter the galaxy; but there are no Others, no rivals, and no clear reason for complete disappearance.
There are periods with civilizations that spread by means like solar-pumped lasers and light sail vessels, robot vessels that build infrastructure ahead of human colonists, generation ships and other slower-than-light techs. Such was the First Age; such is still the way of worlds fearing dependence upon unreliable hyperspace access.
In a galaxy that has been colonized over an indefinite but long period of time, tens of thousands of years at least, there is a great variety in how connected any one star system is to the galaxy. There are isolated star systems, settled by STL ships and without hyperspace access. There are vast regions of stars blessed with slipstream connections to neighbors, star after star in a wide and redundant network.
Small, sometimes isolated handfuls of star systems linked by slipstream lanes into a "cluster" are quite common: hyperspace lanes open and close according to imperfectly known physics, never helped by the human tendency to jab sharp sticks into the universe and see how it squeals; messing with a star, messing with the hyperspace lanes themselves, building your own black hole — y'all KNOW humans will not be able to resist such cosmological adventurism. Clusters — three to twenty star systems, in common usage — are subject to repetitive expansion and collapse of civilizations at higher frequency than densely connected regions.
Technological civilization in isolated star systems is the most perilous of all: collapse can mean massive depopulation or local extinction, with no resettlement from outside populations for millennia, if ever.
The universe being inconveniently larger than is easy to know in detail is a reality we are all familiar with. The Diaspora and the Terhumene raise the surfeit of knowledge and the impossibility of complete knowledge to defining characteristics: where Humankind has spread so far across the galaxy for so many rises and falls of civilizations, that realm is larger than any possibility of reliable knowledge. You may come from a world that treasures its relics and knowledge of Ancient Earth, but has only legends of how you came to be on your planet. Or your education may have stuffed your brain with detailed and nuanced understanding of worlds and leaders, wars and movements, projects that dismantled stars and launched planets toward globular clusters of great curiosity; but scientific consensus is that human beings evolved in parallel on at least 8 planets across the galaxy, and hybridized over the course of 2 to 4 million years; but frankly, you've got a very promising smuggling route going, despite the competition, the war, the law, and your ex-grandmother's bookie. Your plate is full!
The Diaspora is the seed of earth cast into every hard and unforgiving soil of the galaxy, rising in riotous growth, blazing into sudden doom, and sending up tender shoots again to the stars. Humanity leaps into the dark from one fertile star system to its neighbor, slowly and haltingly, or plunges far and deep in search of ideal worlds. Humanity is a dogged and ineradicable weed breaking worlds and suns into its bed, and the galaxy will bear the marks of humanity for a billion years.
Slipstreams link one star to one to four other slip points, usually located about Jupiter's distance from the sun, above and below a star. Going through a slipstream is easy enough, once you get there; but do you know how far Jupiter is from the sun? Five AU, five times Earth's distance. Your interplanetary ship is the size of a skyscraper, 3/4 of it fuel and drives, and accelerating at a steady 1 gravity, the moon is less than 4 hours away, Mars usually 2 days, and that slipstream point, 6.5. The most impatient war ships and show-offs might built 3G ships: they save 2.5 whole days, with only a SMALL risk of stroke, organ collapse, breaking a bone... no, what you really worry about over 4 days at 3g is dropping something and causing damage to the ship that you can't repair until you decelerate!
What is Collapse? Humans have pretty much stayed humans across the galaxy. Radical alteration of the body and brain is usually a fringe pursuit, leading to secessions and migrations, unless the fad passes and you buy a classic body back. Until... conditions make it advantageous or attractive for whole worlds to change. Posthuman alterations occur, mass uploads into machinic consciousness, leaps into cybernetic telepathy that make whole worlds one, and mass translations of whole populations into another, better and brighter universe; these things happen, they will happen again, but there is no way to understand what is on the other side of that, and the after affects in THIS universe are usually messy: billions of discarded bodies, an entire star system converted to computational devices, holes in space and time, or eerie lifeless worlds filled with machines no one can use, buildings no one can get into or tear down... Then there are the worlds and civilizations that fall prey to the classics: nuclear annihilation, weaponized pandemics, wars of attrition against self-replicating home appliances, human invaders who want your planet and use neutron bombs to make a fresh start... there are as many Collapses as their are worlds.
And God knows better.
Lovely! A very enjoyable read.
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