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What year is it?

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Wed, 2010-06-09 16:32
CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture
Re: What year is it?
2146 would make more sense. 2057 would mean that we would already have to of founded Legrange stations, as well as developing human like dumb AI.
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Wed, 2010-06-09 16:43
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: What year is it?
CodeBreaker wrote:
2146 would make more sense. 2057 would mean that we would already have to of founded Legrange stations, as well as developing human like dumb AI.
However, this is only true if they actually chose a specific date for both the orbits and the game timeline. It is very possible that they simply picked 2057 for planetary positioning, and for no other purpose. Posthuman Studios has made it very clear that they don't want people to get hung up on specifics. They left the dates intentionally vague. Choosing a close year for planetary alignment and setting the story much farther ahead would serve that purpose perfectly.
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Wed, 2010-06-09 16:55
RobBoyle RobBoyle's picture
Re: What year is it?
To my recollection, we did not give Matt Heerdt any specific instructions for placing the planets in accordance with a particular timeframe on the map. He may have picked a date himself to work with, I don't know, but I think it's more likely he just went abstract. I do have a date I run with in my head, but I'm fairly certain Brian and Jack have other dates in mind :)
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Wed, 2010-06-09 16:56
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: What year is it?
RobBoyle wrote:
To my recollection, we did not give Matt Heerdt any specific instructions for placing the planets in accordance with a particular timeframe on the map. He may have picked a date himself to work with, I don't know, but I think it's more likely he just went abstract. I do have a date I run with in my head, but I'm fairly certain Brian and Jack have other dates in mind :)
Called it! :D
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Wed, 2010-06-09 17:06
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
in my own setting, it's somewhere between 2150 and 2158 AD because it is uncertain how long the Fall took, and the lapse between the Fall, and the actual shift to the AF calendar. In the Gundam verse, for exemple, the shift from Anno Domini to Universal Century was a political decision, and was launched with what was supposed to be big celebration (but ended in tragedy, as the tore was destroyed and people aboard killed the AD system itself has some lapse, estimated to 6 years in average, if I remember correctly
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Wed, 2010-06-09 19:29
Eleazar Eleazar's picture
Re: What year is it?
Um, I saw somewhere in the book where it mentioned Eris as being 55 AU out from the sun, so I used the program "Celestia" to calculate when that would be. 2189-2192 (june & february, respectively) are the first dates that come up where Eris is 55.999-55.000 AU from the sun, according to Celestia. [Edit] And the next date at which Eris is 55 AU out is 2321, which seems farther into the future than the setting maybe should be. [/Edit]
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Wed, 2010-06-09 20:44
puke puke's picture
Re: What year is it?
Decivre wrote:
Called it! :D
no, i think it was made pretty clear from the begining that was the case. I think we're all just having a little fun probing at the inspirations for some of the random fluff in the book, i dont expect any of it to remain consistant in future publishings. also, your '57 date doesnt match the seasons on the uranus colony, as established earlier in the thread.
Eleazar wrote:
Eris as being 55 AU out from the sun, so I used the program "Celestia" to calculate when that would be. 2189-2192 (june & february, respectively) are the first dates that come up where Eris is 55.999-55.000 AU from the sun
you know, i've downloaded celestia to probe just these sorts of questions, but i'm having a hard time using it. for starters, i cant seem to get an overhead view of the solar system. also, i dont have any idea where to start in calculating distance between objects. But the answer to the problem you have brought up is pretty clear. The orbit of the earth was changed during the fall, and AU are not what they used to be. :)
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Thu, 2010-06-10 07:16
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: What year is it?
puke wrote:
no, i think it was made pretty clear from the begining that was the case. I think we're all just having a little fun probing at the inspirations for some of the random fluff in the book, i dont expect any of it to remain consistant in future publishings. also, your '57 date doesnt match the seasons on the uranus colony, as established earlier in the thread.
Oh I know, which is why I was still making calls on when the possibilities could be. I wouldn't be participating if I was just trying to stop the party. As for my date, it does fit within the given timeframes. The three years given for the middle of spring on Uranus were 2060, 2144, and 2228, and Mandella stated that there is a leeway of 5 years either way. That means the windows are 2055-2065, 2139-2149, and 2223-2233. My guesstimate perfectly fits within the first window. Of course, it's also possible that there is a better fit in a later window.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Thu, 2010-06-10 10:05
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
Re: What year is it?
RobBoyle wrote:
To my recollection, we did not give Matt Heerdt any specific instructions for placing the planets in accordance with a particular timeframe on the map. He may have picked a date himself to work with, I don't know, but I think it's more likely he just went abstract. I do have a date I run with in my head, but I'm fairly certain Brian and Jack have other dates in mind :)
Yup. Most of the design team are students of transhumanism, and one thing we found during discussions on the writers' forums was that we didn't have a consensus on how long it would take H+ to reach the tech level & achievements described in the pre-Fall timeline. AF/BF was a way of agreeing to disagree. Another reason is that leaving it indeterminate will save the game's editors from massive continuity headaches down the road. Look at the timelines given in early editions of Cyberpunk or Shadowrun. All that stuff had to be updated to push it farther out into the future when new editions appeared! Or, for that matter, look at some of the sci-fi written in the sixties and seventies, where you've got Mars colonies in the nineties and massive exploratory vessels reaching the Jovian system in 2010. The is one of the hazards of writing near future sci-fi, and AF/BF circumvents it.
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Thu, 2010-06-10 10:35
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
I think that's a reason why the original Mobile Suit Gundam's creator came up with the Universal Century. y'know, that anime was one of the first story about transhumanism, with the Newtype ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtype[/url]), the human 'spaceoids' 'Earthoid' Something that I'm wondering, too, is there been a third worldwide conflict before 60 BF? (a player of my party asked me that)
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Thu, 2010-06-10 11:35
Mandella Mandella's picture
Re: What year is it?
I understand the devs wanting to leave exact dates open. It makes sense, and avoids more problems than it causes. I just like to make computer models of sci fi systems, and of course I want my model to be accurate to the source material. Thus I was happy to notice the note on Uranus, before one of my players noticed I had the south pole in winter when it was supposed to be mid spring. I discounted the planetary positions shown on the map because I figured it was not meant to be an exact model but just an aid to understanding the relative positions of all the bodies of interest in the solar system. And the inner planets move around too fast for a static paper map to be much good for calculating travel times anyway. As for Eris, I just plain missed that. But what's a few AU between friends? ;)
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Thu, 2010-06-10 11:45
puke puke's picture
Re: What year is it?
jackgraham wrote:
Look at the timelines given in early editions of Cyberpunk or Shadowrun. All that stuff had to be updated to push it farther out into the future when new editions appeared!
Heh. long after we had set aside Cyperpunk as a sometimes-game -- an occasionally tedious to play novelty -- we were running through a one-shot game and bemoaning or lack of iphones or other portable internet devices... heck, the GM wouldnt even let us buy a portable radio scanner because the book described them as large -- even though one of our players had one in his briefcase at the game. anyway, we were looking at the whole domination of the EuroBuck and realized they got many things spot-on. several of their predictions were right on the money, even if their portable discman music players were a bit off the mark.
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Thu, 2010-06-10 12:03
puke puke's picture
Re: What year is it?
Decivre wrote:
As for my date, it does fit within the given timeframes.
Oh yeah, the 2060 number i was looking at on the other page. man my attention span is short.
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Thu, 2010-06-10 13:05
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
the downside of a neo-goldfish morph, mate! all kidding aside, I like the idea of having the exact year uncertain from the players' POV, but I keep an (un)official AD date as GM and game secret, held by the Promotheans Early after the fall, with so many people being reinstated, some believe it's mid 22nd Century, other believe it's early to mid 23rd. So, to prevent chaos from spreading more than it had, the Prometheans began to spread the meme of a new calendar, while keeping an estimated AD date by observation of stellar bodies and their own chronometers. Rob, Jack, what do you think of that idea?
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Thu, 2010-06-10 13:17
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: What year is it?
A significant portion of the population lived through the Fall. Unless they changed calendars again between 2010 and the Fall, these people should have a pretty good sense of "well, it was 2142 back when we put the new hab together. Then there was all that mess on Earth which we watched on the sims. It's been about a decade since, so..."
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Thu, 2010-06-10 13:40
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
True, but remember two things: 1) during the Netwars, even before the TITANs' rising, lots of computer driven infrastructed were corrupted. Official calendars and schedule managing AIs could be among them. The modern version of the Y2K Bug done on purpose 2) many people were uploaded for their evacuation off-planet. With the time dilatation in Simulspace, the time-perception differences and post-traumatic psychosurgery might have thrown a whack in many people' continuity.
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Thu, 2010-06-10 14:20
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: What year is it?
Quincey Forder wrote:
True, but remember two things: 1) during the Netwars, even before the TITANs' rising, lots of computer driven infrastructed were corrupted. Official calendars and schedule managing AIs could be among them. The modern version of the Y2K Bug done on purpose 2) many people were uploaded for their evacuation off-planet. With the time dilatation in Simulspace, the time-perception differences and post-traumatic psychosurgery might have thrown a whack in many people' continuity.
Still, all it takes is a single person to escape the planet with an accurate calendar to maintain the dating system. I think the big reason that people are missing is the fact that the Fall was a [i]big event[/i]. 95% of the human race died in a single year. The singularity occurred. The human race lost its homeworld. Life has dramatically changed for the human race in exile. Moreso than in any other point in history, society has truly reached a new epoch. Considering this, and the all-time low for religion, I think that this event is surely going to stick out in people's minds as a point to set your calendars to... at least moreso than the birthday of "that quaint Jesus fellow".
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Fri, 2010-06-11 07:59
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: What year is it?
Right. Counting since the Fall is a matter of convenience, relevance, respect, etc. However, as I play (especially with players who have played all over this little timeline of Earth), I find it increasingly clear that, should someone want to translate the year to AD, they probably could do so, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and without too much difficulty (if only by tracking the blog of "Crotchety Old Space Miner").
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Fri, 2010-06-11 09:18
The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture
Re: What year is it?
I very much like that the timeline has been left vague, and not just for the sake of authorial fiat but because I think it can genuinely add a lot to the setting. Considering how amazingly fractious transhumanity has become, it's easy to imagine many wild and bizarre new notions of time and calendrical calculation being espoused by competing factions, and therefore there would be a major political dimension to any questions related to it. Maybe someone did make it out of the Fall with absolutely irrefutable evidence of the present date... but if that revelation didn't jibe with the agenda of the powers that be, deviating just a nanosecond or two from popular belief, then people likely wouldn't find out. Even the most unimpeachable of sources could all too easily be dismissed or smeared as the propaganda of TITAN-lovin' freaks, and anyone speaking in its favour could find themselves discredited, persecuted or murdered. Soon enough the issue becomes such an epic clusterfuck of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy that eventually everybody but the lunatic fringe gets burned out on the issue and the question is put to bed (9/11 anyone?). Ultimately it's just not worth the facepalms, vitriol and/or death threats you'd earn to pursue questions of an obsolete calendar used by a long-dead culture based on the movements of a planetary body humankind doesn't even inhabit anymore.
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Mon, 2010-06-14 16:55
Eleazar Eleazar's picture
Re: What year is it?
puke wrote:
you know, i've downloaded celestia to probe just these sorts of questions, but i'm having a hard time using it. for starters, i cant seem to get an overhead view of the solar system. also, i dont have any idea where to start in calculating distance between objects. But the answer to the problem you have brought up is pretty clear. The orbit of the earth was changed during the fall, and AU are not what they used to be. :)
I am not an expert user of it myself (I hear you can even add your own astronomical data, etc to it), but for browsing the Solar System, just open the "Navigation" tab and find "Solar System Browser". This will open up an [i]extremely[/i] handy box that will show all included objects related to whatever star's solar system you are focused on. Since the program defaults to our Solar System, it should show you all the expected information on planets & moons, along with dwarf planets and a few asteroids, I think. Just click and it will zoom you along to the target. The next highly useful thing is found in the "Render" tab, where you should find and click on "View Options". This will open up a box where you can set your preferences as to whether Celestia should display orbital paths, labels, etc. I prefer leaving most of it unchecked, as the number of orbital paths in the Solar System gets quite cluttered when they're all selected, but for seeing how moons are arranged around Jupiter, this is the tool that will give you the best visual result. Some useful keys: Left Mouse Button: Select stuff Right Mouse Button: rotate view Mouse Wheel: Zoom G: go to selected object J: Toggle time flow (backwards or forwards) K: Slow down passage of time L: Speed up passage of time Hope that helps! As for an overhead view, you'll probably want to make the orbits of the planets visible, and then focus on Sol and just rotate and zoom out with the mouse.
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Sat, 2010-06-19 13:43
RobBoyle RobBoyle's picture
Re: What year is it?
Speaking of Celestia -- you can indeed add your own material to it (see this add-on repository. It would be extremely cool if someone put together an Eclipse Phase universe add-on, with all of the locations we cover in the solar system. Just sayin' :)
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Sat, 2010-06-19 14:07
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
How do you add the addons in Celestia? I have the main program, but no addons
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Sat, 2010-06-19 14:32
RobBoyle RobBoyle's picture
Re: What year is it?
It's been awhile, but I believe you just download the add-on files and add them to the appropriate folders in your Celestia directory.
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Rob Boyle :: Posthuman Studios

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Sat, 2010-06-19 16:30
Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture
Re: What year is it?
Thanks! I've got Pandora somewhere. I'll move it to the appropriate folder. are the coordonates included, or do I have to find Alpha Century B and Polyphemus before I can place Eywa's home? oh, and... Does anybody got the habitats from the Trojans and Greeks?
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Sat, 2010-06-19 20:40
Mandella Mandella's picture
Re: What year is it?
RobBoyle wrote:
Speaking of Celestia -- you can indeed add your own material to it (see this add-on repository. It would be extremely cool if someone put together an Eclipse Phase universe add-on, with all of the locations we cover in the solar system. Just sayin' :)
How about in Orbiter? Then you can put in the habitats and cities and actually fly spaceships between them! Actually, I'm in the process of doing just that (hence my interest in the exact time of the Fall), but to be honest I probably won't be finished for weeks or months, and I usually just drop placeholders into place for locations I don't plan for my players to be seeing up close. But once I "finish" I'll drop a link in here.
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Tue, 2017-02-28 13:01
briansommers briansommers's picture
If the year is ours to choose
If the year is ours to choose then I think when could EP actually happen for real? It's hard to believe that we could be at EP in 150-200 years from now. I'm thinking more like the year 2500 and beyond?
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Tue, 2017-02-28 14:28
Evaris Evaris's picture
briansommers wrote:If the
briansommers wrote:
If the year is ours to choose then I think when could EP actually happen for real? It's hard to believe that we could be at EP in 150-200 years from now. I'm thinking more like the year 2500 and beyond?
Eh, given the advancements we're presently looking at, the 2100's seem more likely to me, to be honest. The Chinese are this year making the first attempts at mechanical resleeving and longevity gene therapy this year, through the world's first human brain transplant as well as CRISPR based gene editing trials. We have had direct brain control prosthetic limbs for a couple years now, and the first prototypes with neurofeedback are being tested as of this moment. NASA is being repurposed to space exploration again and a number of countries have initial lunar or mars settlement plans between 2020 and 2050. Data storage density continues to improve at a rate consistent with Moore's law, even if computing power has hit a slump, which may be overcome when we transition to fullerene based transistors or optical computing. We already have instanced a human brain for an hour at 1/10th speed, and our most powerful supercomputers are reaching processing capabilities equal to about 1/8th that of the human brain at their maximum potential. So I personally see 2150ish being fully plausible with the exponential rate of human knowledge that has been observed since the invention of telecoms.
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Tue, 2017-02-28 17:35
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
Shoulda made a new topic guys
Shoulda made a new topic guys. IIRC one of the source books hints that lady gaga may have been one of the earliest adopties of immortality tech like uploading and cortical stacks So near 2100's seems likely
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Tue, 2017-02-28 19:45
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
IIRC you can use the seasons
IIRC you can use the seasons on Uranus to gauge the year with fairly good accuracy. Using that method you have AF10 corresponding with the late 2130s or early 2140s (2141 IIRC, but there's inaccuracy there). That puts The Fall in 2131 and the start of the EP timeline at 2071.
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Wed, 2017-03-01 10:07
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
Yeah, I snuck the Uranus
Yeah, I snuck the Uranus thing in there without Rob noticing based on my own thoughts about this. ;) But really, we are never going to state a canonical year, because we don't want to be rejiggering the pre-Fall timeline every 10 years based on things that have/haven't happened like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun have had to do over time. EP will always be set in the near but not too near future. I actually don't mind the thread necromancy on this one, since this topic has come up so many times.
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Wed, 2017-03-01 10:21
RobBoyle RobBoyle's picture
Oh I noticed :) I left it in
Oh I noticed :) I left it in because little hints like that are fun for conversations like this. But, yeah, as Jack says, it's intentionally vague. I remember I was originally leaning towards early 2100s while Brian was leaning 2150 or later, and others had their own opinions. Ultimately, though, we didn't want real life to bite us, and this way GMs can tailor it to fit their own personal settings.
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Wed, 2017-03-01 10:44
sysop sysop's picture
Not that we're not still
Not that we're not still trying to update setting detail for new science discoveries about our system... ;)
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Wed, 2017-03-01 16:35
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
jackgraham wrote:Yeah, I
jackgraham wrote:
Yeah, I snuck the Uranus thing in there without Rob noticing based on my own thoughts about this. ;)
Between Lady Gaga and the Uranus thing, you've pretty much got it pegged as ~2140 anyway. Any earlier and it just defies belief that humanity could have become Transhumanity that fast; any later, and Lady Gaga still being alive defies belief. I use 2141 as 10 AF.
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Wed, 2017-03-01 16:55
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
Damn. I always thought I'd
Damn. I always thought I'd gotten away with that. :)
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Wed, 2017-03-01 17:02
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
jackgraham wrote:Damn. I
jackgraham wrote:
Damn. I always thought I'd gotten away with that. :)
Well, you did. It's pretty much a fait accompli. Also, I think you meant "Nooooooooo, my scheeeme!"
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Thu, 2017-03-02 05:34
MrWigggles MrWigggles's picture
Obviously the the year is
Obviously the the year is 2258. And the name of place is Babalon 5.
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Sat, 2017-03-04 08:25
Tzimize Tzimize's picture
Sorry for the rise deads,
Sorry about the necromancy, but with the arrival in Spain of EP, the question "what year is" refresh with relevant to some
NiallNai wrote:
I know that it is AF 10. What is the year as for as Old Earth reckoning?
jackgraham wrote:
2174
jackgraham wrote:
*Restores order to thread.* Oh, yeah. Niall, the year is 2218. And yes, I know that's a different answer than I gave last time. But world events force me to re-ballpark every few months. You know how it goes...
Jack, do you still think that the year 2218 is equivalent to 10 AF? :-P
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