State of the world
Quick Summary
It's the future, baby, specifically 852 and a half years into the future. Humans have expanded into space through a lot of hardship, and settled an area called human space. Culture, technology, and people have changed and evolved, wars come and gone, nations risen and fallen and risen and fallen and risen again, and through it all, humanity has continued. There's robots, spaceships, empires, democracies, and lots and lots of places to see."I've seen so much over my half a millennium of life, Quaken, and yet, it feels like nothing at all compared to everything there is. I've been to Earth, Cellea, this backwater planet, and everything in between. Human space is incredibly diverse and vast, despite its relative scale compared to the galaxy. I've seen wars, immense in scale. Entire continents scorched of life and a million people from a shattered habitat condemned to the cold, uncaring void. I've seen people with enough augmentations to be more machine than man, I've had discussions with all sorts of people, from Admiral-Captains of Cellea to common folk making a living in a barren planet's orbit. I've fought and killed more people than you've ever met. I've walked the ground of a thousand worlds and a thousand more habitats, seen the Homeworld's diverse natural environments and sprawling cities, flown in a gas giant's clouds, looked down from an orbital ring, and beheld the beauty of Janor and Mosi close up. Human space is a wondrous place, but als o full of pain. A throughline of human history, I suppose. All of that, done by people like you and I. If they did it, what's stopping you from doing this? The universe cares nothing for us, and so we are free to make our way however we please."
Human Space
Human space is the term universally accepted by mankind to describe the volume of space wherein it exists. Currently, in the year 2876 CE, human space is a bubble with an average radius of about 320 light-years, give or take. It houses about 700 000 star systems, and within those, several million planets. This may consist only a ten thousandth of a percent of the Milky Way's star systems, but it is still an enormous volume of space. Naturally, people need a way to travel between these, which there is. Several, in fact. Prior to the 2660s, large spaceships, often called Cyclers (though that term has a specific definition that isn't just "interstellar spaceship"), such as the Void Traveller, had to undertake long trips between stars at about 0.7c, 70% the speed of light, propelled by enormous antimatter thrusters. This was the only method for a long while, until FTL travel was finalized in the 2660s, and quickly proliferated and became the standard method of interstellar travel. FTL Communications do not exist. They can't, by current human science, and communications between stars are carried by News-Merchants, ships capable of FTL."Woah, this ship is enormous up close. No wonder it felt like we'd never reach it." "First time for everything, eh? This, my friend, is the Void Traveller. Back in its day, it was a fine ship, traversing enough kilometers to make your head spin. And look at it now, even with all the erosion of 300 years, it's barely damaged inside."
A map of human space, with some story-relevant and otherwise notable locations.
Clusters and distances from the Core
The term "cluster" will pop up a lot in my worldbuilding. This denotes a section of space with a concentrated amount of human inhabitation. For example, the Core Worlds is not quite a cluster as much as it is a larger area, but calling it one isn't inaccurate. The Dragon's Hoard Cluster is a fairly small cluster, and something like the Omega-Aerutka-Rakt'Akla cluster is fairly standard for its distance from the Core. Distance from the Core Worlds, and thus Earth, is a useful tool to gauge a given region's development, though not exempt from deviations. As a general rule of thumb, the further something is from the Core Worlds, the lower its rough level of tech (generally measured in equivalent level on Earth at a time; i.e. Ochtotne Prime, about 330 light-years from Earth, is about 2300s level, while Shiumri, much closer, is well in the 2500-2600s). This isn't absolute, but works well enough, due to how information travels fairly slowly even with FTL travel.People
Humanity now numbers roughly 70 trillion people, spread out over most of human space. Due to several reasons, mostly life extension tech, this number is growing, albeit somewhat slowly. Human space is also incredibly diverse, and while ethnicities and such have mixed, in other places they have not; the relative inconvenience of travel between stars makes most star systems, with exception of large clusters, largely isolated communities. Travel between them is common, but large-scale migration is not. That said, travel within star systems is incredibly common, even in small ones like Omega-Aerutka; trade and travel between Ochtotne Prime and Jett is very commonplace. The general population of humanity is split into two main species, in a way. Regular old flesh-and-blood Humans, and robots, androids, roughly human-level intelligent Sapient Synthetics. While individually they are very different from your average human, in large populations they behave exactly like regular humans, due to their mental architecture being modeled off of humans. Synthetics make up about 35% of humanity, and are regarded as people like any other. Human space has about 700 thousand stars, but the number of them that are inhabited is impossible to determine. However, the number of them with populations over 100 000 people is close to a hundred thousand. The majority of people, about 72%, live in orbital habitats, most in orbit of a planet. That said, significantly settled planets number a couple thousand, most terraformed. The amount of planets bearing life in human space is less than a thousand, and ones with human-breathable atmospheres, like Ak'Thakra, are rarer still.Did you know?
The whole idea behind the world is roughly how I'd expect the future to become. Specifics are obviously impossible to predict, but the rough idea remains. A good existence, though not one without its issues.
Giant Komodillo by MadToxin
The Void Traveller, on Ak'Thakra by MadToxin
Political Climate
Within human space there are millions and millions of nations and states of various kinds. This is mostly due to to how, in smaller settlements, most habitats and cities prefer to be individual habitat- and city-states. In more settled star systems, there tend to be larger, multi-habitat and -city nations, but most places have some. Even the Sol system, home of humanity and oldest and most thoroughly settled system, has plenty, such as Memory of Opportunity, Mars' oldest city. Within the setting at the moment the main story takes place, there are two major players at war; the STUN and the The Coalition of a thousand Free Worlds. They are engaged in the The Fifth World War, have been for a while, and will be for a while more. Both are enormous, disparate superstates of sorts with limited influence over their constituent states, to different extents. There existed another major power back about 300 or so years ago, the Cellean autocratic space, but it collapsed long ago, leaving behind an enormous power vacuum and a region of instability that would make the modern Middle-East blush.
Kriegsmaschine Firing Position by MadToxin
Technology and Science
As with everything else, technology changes and develops over time. With this setting being hard scifi and me being an enormous nerd, it is a major focus, naturally. Being nearly a millennium into the future, there is all sorts of wacky technology out there. From weapons tech to FTL travel, 50-kilometer long spaceships or harnessing Antimatter, humanity has achieved a lot. Besides FTL travel, Fusion power, and the like, radical life extension technology was an incredibly important discovery; biological immortality. Coupled with improvements to other medical technologies, old age and the diseases and issues that brings were no longer a factor in human life. Death was no longer inevitable."I know Quaken will probably be fine, he's got the machine-gills, like he said. But, Kyra, you sure about following him? With those metal legs of yours, you'll sink like a stone, just like him." "Come on now, Jon. I'm a Mode. You think I don't have something for that? No, I have literal gills. I got them a while back on some weird habitat that was mostly flooded, the people there just swam all the time. Weird, ain't it?" "You are in no place to call other people weird, Mode. That said, I never do get used to the stuff you people can do. Gvanhla was wild enough with his cybernetics, now I gotta comprehend organic augments too, huh?"
- Carbon-Interlaced Aluminium Alloy
- Nanomachines
- Modes (not much of a tech, but relevant)
- Layered Chain Blade
Stringer - Cover by MadToxin
Further Reading
Some other, general articles to read;
Did you know?
Human space as term comes from the book Revelation Space and it's sequels by Alastair Reynolds. Fantastic series, couldn't recommend enough.
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