Erulastant wrote:

1. Anything goes. Unless there exists alien life, "people" is always a pretty good one.

I was trying to think of an equivilent to EP's "transhumanity" and Orion Arm's "Terragen" to use as a shorthand in my writing rather than repeatedly writing "humans and human-descended intelligences". And, oh yes, there are aliens. Just one species, but they're called the Fermi--as in they're the answer to the Fermi Paradox: Where are the aliens? Answer: At least one species got there first and they go around wiping out potential competitors, and my transhuman setting is one where we were next on their list. Not as god-like as EP's ETI, though. Closer to Safehold's Gbaba.

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3. If this project is still going on in, say, November, I should be able to give you a much more certain answer. Right now I know enough to know that I'm probably not understanding things exactly correctly. But, as far as I can tell now, there should not be anything *too* weird with either FTL method. Since neither actually involves moving faster than c, there's no risk of backwards time travel involved. With hyperspace you still have to worry about good old sub-c SR, but that's no biggie. Passengers and crew just have a shorter perception of their trip than outsiders.

Alrighty. Given my progress (I'm still in the scaffolding stage), I have no doubt that this'll still be an active project multiple Novembers from now.

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(Are hyperspace gates more common than regular wormholes? Because I can't imagine anyone wanting to use them otherwise. Seems slower and more dangerous.)

The hyperspace gates are modified wormholes, designed to reach a different "brane" universe; once opened, they're open until destroyed (which radiates most of the wormhole's mass away as energy. Minimum safe distance is an appreciable fraction of a lightyear). It's the actually opening of them that's the hazardous part. Once they're open, they're capable of supporting two-way traffic. Meanwhile wormholes are strictly point-to-point, and you have to arrange them with considerable care to avoid CTLCs, as well as having to deal with transit time between the different mouths. In my setting, the hyperspace is new (less than 200 years old), while the wormhole network is millenia old, but the combination of the two adds significant routing advantages in fleet and commerce movement.

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Depending on how you're explaining wormholes, you'll probably run into a few GR issues. A suicidal observer travelling into a black hole will never perceive crossing the event horizon (And not just because of the whole dying thing, time stops in that reference frame). I expect wormholes may have the same problem (Though maybe not, the only presently imagined physical examples of wormholes are black holes, so if there is another way for them to exist, we (or at least I) can't tell what properties it would have that are different from a black hole wormhole)

I'm stealing liberally from Orion's Arm in the makeup of my wormholes, for the simple expedient that they've already done the research to make them theoretically consistant, and I'm not above saving myself some work, considering how much additional effort this whole project is going to take in detailing societies, cultures, history and technology, much less the part of actually writing the story :) Short version, massive, connected black holes that have been modified using exotic matter that allows physical matter and electromagnetic radiation to pass through between two widely seperated locations.

Holy wrote:

Nonetheless nice to know that you are alive, well up and involved in interesting projects. :-) All the best for your worlds to be!

Thanks. :)

Chernoborg wrote:

How does alt-humanity sound? It can invoke both "altered" or "alternate" as a descriptor. I almost suggested alt-terran as a way of avoiding the "human" connotation, but that just implies they could move through many different environments!

Hmm. Certainly a possibility.

Lorsa wrote:

Some thoughts from me: 1. Is there any specific reason why there couldn't be a multitude of names? If your setting is large enough, people in different cultures might use different names. So take all your ideas and use them! Add some derogatory words as well and you are set to go.

While there will no doubt be a multitude of names in the setting itself, I'm trying to come up with a decent name to use in my expository writing within the setting. Orion's Arm's conceit, for example, is that it is composed of excerpts from a future encyclopedia and uses a consistent name for Earth-origin intelligences--Terragen--in those entries. So I'd like to have a consistent name for when I'm doing my own background construction to avoid confusion ("hey, here you use "Earthkin" and here you use "Solars". What gives?"), and save the multitude of names for when I'm actually writing the story itself. Basically, I'm looking for a consistent shorthand for "humans, modified humans and human-created intelligences"

Lorsa wrote:

2. Everyone does body modification beyond the practical to some degree. Most of us get haircuts (or beard cuts), use hairdye, pluck eyebrows etc. Those are body-modifcations to some degree, so if you can understand those you could extrapolate from there. For more extreme modifcations it basically comes down to the same reason we do most things. It stimulates our pleasure centre. Many people who get one tatoo (either because they want to look pretty, or because it represents some significant event in their life or whatever), oftern end up getting more of them later. Same with plastic surgery. Body modification is addictive, because it stimulates our brain in certain ways. Apart from that, there are any number of core reasons why people might choose one thing or another, which has been mentioned earlier. Either they do it to blend in, or to stick out, or to simply express their personality. I think it's up to you to decide how 'weird' you are assuming that people will be in your setting, but things that are not too outrageous would be stuff like extra arms, minor animal features (gotta love those catgirls), non-natural skin- and haircolour, wings (even if they don't work), fantasy race appearances etc. I can give you a ton of more ideas if you want "mostly human but with cool mods". If you want more posthuman ideas there'll be others that are way better at that.

Except that I don't even get really out-there haircuts. :) I've dyed my hair for Halloween once (aparently I make a rather convincing redhead). And then I look at people with mohawks and the like and my only thought is how impractical they are. Hence why I need help with understanding the motivations and mindset. Your comments do help with that.

Lorsa wrote:

3. From a purely narrative perspective, as long as people don't travel "backwards" in time, you should be fine. The problem is usually when your actual speed increases beyond the speed of light, as then you will disagree with other observers about the order in which events take place. Simply jumping from one place to another [i]should[/i] (I think) retain causality.

And that's what I need help with. I guess at a minimum I should put an expository comment in the story itself about unspecified "bad things" that happen when people tried to use the FTL systems for time travel.

Zarpaulus wrote:

Well, Terragen actually isn't exclusive to Orion's Arm, it's been used in David Brin's Uplift series, though in that case it's used because Terra has at least three sapient species: Human-ul-chimpanzee-ul-dolphin, chimpanzee-ab-human, and dolphin-ab-human. Actually that's why it's used in OA too, because AIs and Provolves aren't genetically descended from humans but are genetically or memetically of Terran descent. If there's no Uplifts or AGIs, just variants of human, transhumanity could work.

By the time that my actual narrative will be set, there will be hundreds of thousands of varieties of human, an equal if not greater number of uplift species, and AIs ranging from human-level intellect to inhabiting Jupiter-brains and Dyson Swarms. Cool to know that Terragen isn't original or exclusive to OA, though. :)

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

1. I'd say go simple – Solars.

Hmm. Certainly a possibility.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

2. There are loads of reasons. If you're talking purely cosmetic enhancement, then a lot of stuff is going to be to evoke a reaction on others, regardless of positive or negative. In that case, you modify because you think you'll be more beautiful, or because you want to freak out the normals. If you're talking about something a little... deeper, then it's a different story. Speaking personally, there's an... attraction... to the unusual. It could be called xeno- or neo-philia, but it's ultimately a deep seated desire to not just look but to actually be something fundamentally different. There's perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to condemn that behaviour because it can be driven by self-loathing or dissatisfaction in everyday life, but it can also arise from the desire for self-improvement, self-actualization or just plain old hope. Even cosmetic changes can be satisfying to that urge, either from the view that your appearance is just another aspect of yourself to improve or from the changing reactions of people reaffirming your other-ness. With every modification, you take a step further from the pale, and one closer to the endless wonders of Potential. That's of course completely ignoring boring stuff like modifying yourself as a way of showing your membership to “augmented culture”, or getting mods “just in case”. In any case, it's hard to imagine what “non-practical” would be, beyond cosmetic, and there the limit is simply the tech level of the setting, or rather the ruleset. Differing bone structures, including extra or removed limbs, spikes, barbs, antlers,extra eyes, compound eyes, scales, an exoskeleton instead of an endoskeleton, flippers, tentacles, metal plating, plastic shells, extra organs, visible organs, antenna, whiskers, and claws all in differing colours and textures, and bio- or electro-luminescence on everything. Seriously, if it exists on a living or artificial thing, then people will get it as a mod. You're probably best off looking at fantasy races (because there's no way in hell people won't be turning into elves, werewolves and vampires) for the more mundane stuff, for the hardcore look at mixes of insects, ocean creatures and animals.

Excellent! That sort of help with the mindset is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

As an aside, have you considered using material from one of your other universes as the material for wormhole stabilization, or in general about what happens to stuff from the other side of the gates that's brought over here?

Yep, I have indeed. I got the idea in the first place from an old Asimov book called The Gods Themselves. Materials that transition between universes will be subject to the new universe's physical laws, and if those laws would render them unstable, then, well... boom. Or worse. The "hyperspace" that they use is simply another universe that has physical laws nearly identical to that of our own, simply with a "shorter" coordinate distance, meaning that baryonic matter and electromagnetism as they exist in our universe can exist there without spontaneously exploding or somesuch. (that universe, in addition, has one other significant difference than ours: no matter-antimatter asymmetery. So it's empty... and utterly black.) Other universes that they've connected to are "mined" for energy and as a source of exotic matter, but they have to be very careful. At the gate location itself, the physical laws of both universes "meet" and mix, and if they're too dissimilar, bad things happen. For example, there is at least one region about 20 LY across where there was what amounted to a lab accident that's simply called "The Death Zone". In the current era of the narritive, it's stabilized and started to shrink as our universe's physical laws re-impose themselves, but within that sphere, no baryonic matter can exist--just a soup of quarks and other subatomic particles. The AI that was in the process of experimenting with new gates to open made a tiny mistake and "dialed in" to open a gate to a different universe than it had intended. That different universe had such rampantly different physical constants that even the short mixing and bleed-through for the few seconds that the gate was open was enough to damage the local fabric of space-time and the local expressions of the physical constants. I'll leave it up to people's imaginations the results on baryonic matter--and the living beings and stars that that matter makes up--when suddenly the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity all suddenly start acting as constant as a politician's integrity.