A while back I started thinking about the distant future. What can humanity expect if we don't invent a magic FTL drive, don't go extinct, and our civilization mostly putters along the way it has been since the invention of agriculture? I described some of my thoughts in this blog post from 2018. Extrapolating with quite modest expectations gives amazing results.
Then I started thinking about what it would be like to live in that kind of future: one where humanity has filled up the Solar System, terraforming everything that can be terraformed, hollowing out asteroids and moons or breaking them up for raw materials, and capturing most of the Sun's energy output. This is what Freeman Dyson meant when he described his famous "Dyson Sphere" (not a giant ball around the Sun.) It would be a true Kardashev Type II civilization.
I made a few ground assumptions. First, that there will be no major alterations in our understanding of basic physical laws. Thermodynamics, conservation of momentum, Relativity — those all apply. No psychic powers, no magic.
Second, I decided to focus on a time when the majority of recorded human history has been in a Dysonized Solar System. Our own history goes back to about 2000 B.C., and construction of a Dyson Sphere probably wouldn't get rolling until at least A.D. 3000, so that pushes us to the Ninth or Tenth Millennium at least. I picked the Tenth Millennium (the thousand years ending in A.D. 10,000) because it sounds cool.
Third, I assumed that while some beings can and do ascend to Godlike (or even super-Godlike) levels of power and intellect, a vast number of humans will remain more or less unmodified. And while there will doubtless be post-post-post-scarcity societies where one can conjure up whatever one wishes with a handwave, a great many places will not have those levels of abundance. People will still want things and strive to get them.
Fourth, the focus is on humans and human-created beings. If aliens exist, they are known only from radio transmissions.
Some basic math indicated that such a civilization could support quadrillions of humans (that's a thousand trillion), with abundant room and energy for all. If the average space colony is as big as a modern city, then you'd have a billion worlds circling the Sun. The Billion Worlds. That's a pretty cool title . . .
A few other notions just pop right out: with so many worlds you'll have a vast variation in social customs, local technology, attitudes — not to mention life forms. Genetic manipulation means each of those worlds could be populated by intelligent descentants of Earthly animals, wildly varying modified humans, or new organisms cooked up from scratch. So even without actual aliens, one can still have intelligent nonhumans as weird as anything SF writers can imagine.
On such a scale, a space habitat with a million people living in it is about as important as one human on Earth today. That means it will be almost impossible for any being (except a Godlike artificial intelligence, of course) to remember or keep track of all the worlds of space. It also suggests a certain degree of callousness about individual lives in such a setting: a catastrophic war that destroys a dozen space habitats would be as important as a shootout among gang members in Sao Paolo would be to a modern resident of Kazakhstan.
Hmm. A vast number of worlds, with tremendous variety in their inhabitants and local societies, all within a reasonable distance of each other (in space, time, and energy required). What does that remind you of? It's the classic space-opera universe!
Which means all the great old "discredited" tropes of old science fiction can come roaring back with perfectly valid hard-SF credentials. Want to rescue a scrappy Space Princess from dastardly Space Pirates in a hidden Space Fortress, with the aid of your smartass Space Gorilla sidekick and a hyper-logical dude with green skin, before blasting off in a beat-up tramp Space Freighter? In a setting as broad as the Billion Worlds, that's not just possible, it's practically inevitable.
Right now I'm working on a novel for Baen Books set in that future. My working title is The Godel Operation. I've also written a couple of short stories. One of them, "Calando," is in the new original anthology Retellings of the Inland Seas, edited by Athena Andreadis, coming soon from Candlemark and Gleam. I'm still trying to place the other one. Watch this space for more developments.
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