Work In Progress: The Billion Worlds

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.

Comments

[MadRocketSci]

In Larry Niven's Ringworld, it seems he nerfs the vastness of his construction by making all but a very few of the inhabitants primitives (due to lack of access to metals and minerals with which to work.) The protagonists (IMO, though it's been a long time since reading the series) meet a few civilizations, and the assumption is that though there are billions of them, they're all more or less the same because there's only so much you can do with no technology. Then there are the Pak protectors in charge of the ring. (Perhaps the best innovation is that the ring makes sense in the context of their psychology - not many pull off a good reason for a megastructure like that.)

Paul Lucas wrote a post-dyson-sphere apocalyptic civilization book called "Shattered Sky": The builders are long gone so the viewpoint is confined to civilizations on a technology level we can deal with.

It always seems like these sorts of settings end up trying to avoid, one way or another, the actual building-civilization of the structure. (I suppose then you'd have to be less vague about what "godlike AIs" get up to, and that can get cringey if they're Heinleins evaluation of our ideas of gods with "the manners and morals of a spoiled child".)

[MadRocketSci]

One other thing about the "hard-sci-fi" straightjacket that tries to "discredit" the tropes of space opera: If you're genetically uplifting animals and building AIs, you've probably got beings with a long lifespan. If you can build space-habitats, you can build laser-lightsail craft, and it should be no trouble at all to travel between star systems at high STL speeds. (Robert Forward describes a straightforward way to decelerate a lightsail craft at the destination star with just the sending beam.)

A dyson civilization may develop over millenia, but I would think people spreading over interstellar space would also be going on: Less conflict over resources. Eventually, matter to build habitats would get scarce in the home system as it gets filled up: You can't go digging for more iron if your hull is filled up. Maybe you can do some sort of starlifting trick to pull matter from the sun, but that's likely to be 99.999% hydrogen.

I dunno: I think the hard-SF "discrediting" of space opera is like the technical difficulties with Jules Verne's cannon (if we're that generous! Of Daedalus's was wings!) "discrediting" the possibility of interplanetary spaceflight.

[MadRocketSci]

typos!: (can't go digging for more iron if you've already disassembled all the major rocky objects)
(Daedalus's wax wings)

Anyway, write it. I'll buy it.