What is "Orion's Arm" you might ask? That is an excellent question, and in a nutshell here is your answer:
Orion's Arm is:
The next step in the evolution of science-fiction
A collective hard science fiction world building endeavor
A space opera
A communal background for science fiction stories
A universe ready to be brought to life through illustration
A forum for cutting edge science
A roleplaying setting
A transhumanist projection of what the future might look like
A bunch of semi-sane sentients having fun together
Why are we here? The answer to that question can be found in our Statement of Purpose:
Our purpose is to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. We embrace speculative ideas like Drexlerian assemblers, mind uploading, posthuman intelligence, magnetic monopoles, wormholes and the technologies, and developments that will make all this possible.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke's Second Law:
The only way to explore the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Our task is to create an ever evolving universe that is interesting, inspiring and provocative - to theorize on a future that may, or may not, come to be.
Would it not be unstable? Gravity pull and thus orbital velocities would be wildly different at different points of the segments...
I wonder if I can bring the project to "harden" their SF, if this is truly collaborative...
Or, at least, if there are discussion pages where they can convince me of the existence (at this point in future) of suitable techs rendering the megastructure viable ;)
Project Rho is an amazing site with completely horrible navigation. It taught me as much rocket science as Kerbal Space Program, but every time I visit it, I can never find what I want on the table of contents (bottom of the page) and have to search the site. It has some nice sections like this page on pre-electronic computers and nomograms: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php#i...
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>Our purpose is to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. We embrace speculative ideas like Drexlerian assemblers, mind uploading, posthuman intelligence, magnetic monopoles, wormholes and the technologies, and developments that will make all this possible.
Just looking at anything on that site means that if you happen to use any similar ideas you're at risk of violating copyright. It seems kind of like the same reason why none of the dolphin emu Devs can even look at the nintendo leak. You'd have to then prove your ideas are original and not lifted from Orion's arm.
Wow. So considering the edge case in which something contributed to this universe gets popular (consider a novel which becomes a screenplay), what would prevent this entire concept from becoming a minefield of asinine copyright litigation?
Interesting, but "hard sci-fi" with traversable wormholes seems questionable. Why not have Alcubierre warp drives too if all that's required is a theoretical physics paper and a thousand years of engineering progress? :)
Really good stuff here, I love the Archailects bits the most. Kind of reminds me when SCP used to be good before it was inundated by Dr. Soandso self-inserts.
The setting really allows for some fantastic stories:
- There's a story about a world where the local archailect forbids all non-animal power sources for some reason, but high tech itself is still allowed. This leads to hyper-optimised tech like computer-stabilised bicycles on metal rails that have so little resistance they get up to hundreds of km/h.
- The "rebuild nanotech civilisation from scratch" reality TV show where a group of people gets dropped naked onto an uninhabited planet and have to work their tech level high enough up to get back to orbit, kinda like factorio but as a game show. The current record is 72 years, set by a group of superhumans who gene-engineered themselves to need less food and no sleep.
- The whole sub-genre of humans who don't trust the ruling AIs and build their ships to be invisible against the background radiation of the universe.
I only feel the future itself is going to be properly astonishing... Even in the mid term...
Nevertheless I just crazy love science-fiction, so, thanks for this project!!!
Btw I see that not just as a fiction works, but as an exploration of the evolution paths for our real future as well, so that's just as important as real science.
That's our compass for science and technological progress.
What is "Orion's Arm" you might ask? That is an excellent question, and in a nutshell here is your answer: Orion's Arm is:
The next step in the evolution of science-fiction
A collective hard science fiction world building endeavor
A space opera
A communal background for science fiction stories
A universe ready to be brought to life through illustration
A forum for cutting edge science
A roleplaying setting
A transhumanist projection of what the future might look like
A bunch of semi-sane sentients having fun together
Why are we here? The answer to that question can be found in our Statement of Purpose:
Our purpose is to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. We embrace speculative ideas like Drexlerian assemblers, mind uploading, posthuman intelligence, magnetic monopoles, wormholes and the technologies, and developments that will make all this possible.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke's Second Law:
The only way to explore the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Our task is to create an ever evolving universe that is interesting, inspiring and provocative - to theorize on a future that may, or may not, come to be.