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Category: Status Reports

Status Report (14 September 2018)

Status Report (14 September 2018)

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Just a quick note, since it’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything here. Been rather distracted by finally picking up the video game Shadow of War, which is iffy from the standpoint of a Tolkien scholar but quite entertaining from a gameplay perspective.

I was about ready to wrap up my modeling of galactic history and drill down to the structure of the Khedai Hegemony (the interstellar polity that conquers and rules Earth in my Human Destiny setting). Then I had a sudden realization that caused me to re-think a lot of the chain of reasoning. To wit: stars move.

Okay, yes, that isn’t a great revelation. We all know that stars have proper motion in the sky; over long periods of time the configuration of stars around Sol (for example) will change dramatically. What I realized is that the time-scale on which this is significant is well within the periods of time I was working with for the Human Destiny setting. Interstellar civilizations can’t be treated as nice, compact, spherical volumes of space – not if they last long enough that their colony worlds are going to scatter across dozens or even hundreds of light-years.

So I’ve made a few tweaks to the chain of logic, and in the process have improved it somewhat. I can now model different interstellar civilizations based on the strategy they select as to which new cultures they choose to “uplift” into the galactic community. I also now have a solid chain of reasoning that indicates why any given interstellar culture might have neighbors, to serve as enemies or at least competitors. I believe I’m now in a position to publish my revised model here, and work on a larger-scale map of the entire Hegemony that I can use as reference when writing stories. Look for that over the next few days, so long as I can tear myself away from mowing through hordes of Sauron’s orcs.

Status Report (21 August 2018)

Status Report (21 August 2018)

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Still slogging along through the HIPPARCOS catalog – every day, I work through a dozen or so stars (and find myself wishing I had just written a C program for this already). At the moment I seem to have gotten through 276 entries in the database, out of a total of 327 reaching to the ten-parsec radius. Out of those stars, 23 have at least one planet with a complex biosphere, and at least a few systems have two each. It’s looking like a trend of about one in ten to twelve stars will have a more-or-less-Earthlike. I’m not bothering to count the “pre-garden” worlds, with liquid-water oceans but too young to have developed a post-Cambrian biosphere. There are quite a few of those.

Today I sat down for a few hours and started drawing a map of nearby space, including all stars of K class and above, and those few M-class stars that have Earthlike worlds. I’m using the same techniques that I once applied to this map of the solar neighborhood, and I imagine the end result will look similar.

I’m using a galactic coordinate system this time, rather than the usual equatorial coordinates, so a lot of stars will look like they’re in the wrong place if you’re accustomed to the maps from (e.g.) the 2300 AD or Universe tabletop games. I’m planning to include the appropriate coordinate transform in the Architect of Worlds draft, when I get around to writing the “using real astronomical data” section.

I’m also marking down tentative names for Earthlike worlds, instead of an abstract “resource value.” My vision for the Human Destiny setting has evolved quite a bit over the past few years. Today I’m assuming that the dominant interstellar civilizations won’t spend all that much time or effort exploiting star systems that don’t host complex biospheres. So the systems of greatest interest are going to be the ones that humans (eventually) settle.

If anyone’s interested in glancing at the work in progress, here’s a link to the appropriate entry in my Scraps folder. Only about twenty or so stars placed so far, or a little under one-third of the way through my data set. This is slow work, but it’s starting to come together.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a revision to my old notes about the density and structure of interstellar civilizations. Here’s a link to an article I wrote a few years ago, which lays out an argument about the limits to an interstellar civilization’s growth. (That article is also one of my few contributions to Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets website, in fact.) The Human Destiny setting incorporates that notion into its basic assumptions. I’ll probably publish those notes here within a few days.

Status Report (11 August 2018)

Status Report (11 August 2018)

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Still working through my data pull from the HIPPARCOS data set. I haven’t found any more planetary systems that the draft Architect of Worlds model simply won’t fit, although the famous Gliese 667 C system came close.

One thing I have discovered is that my assumption about red dwarf stars seems to have been premature. A little further research tells me that the photosynthesis problem isn’t an absolute deal-breaker. The problem isn’t that photosynthesis is impossible under red-dwarf starlight, it’s that an early photosynthetic organism would have to adapt to long periods of visible-light scarcity, punctuated by the nasty stellar flares young red dwarfs tend to generate. One might imagine mats or colonies of photosynthetic microbes that drift to the surface of a planet’s ocean to take in the sunlight, then submerge to ride it out when flare weather sets in. Eventually, most red dwarf stars seem to settle in and stop producing major flares, so if their planets can give rise to life at all, evolution to complex biospheres seems at least possible.

So, rather than forbid red dwarfs from having garden worlds at all, I’ve decided to impose a penalty, requiring them to take a lot longer to develop complex biospheres. Even so, since red dwarfs burn so steadily over many billions of years, an ocean planet has plenty of time to work on the problem. Red dwarfs that are at least as old as Sol, certainly the ones that are a few billion years older, are possible candidates.

I worked out a set of criteria to determine whether I should work out a red dwarf star’s planetary system at all: at least as old as Sol, bright enough that the habitable zone falls out where the inner planets are likely to orbit, and with metallicity high enough to permit terrestrial planets at least one-quarter as massive as Earth. I’d say maybe one out of three red dwarfs in the solar neighborhood have fit the criteria well enough for me to break out the calculator, spreadsheet, and dice.

Now another facet of the new model comes into play. The draft model often generates systems of planets whose orbits are more tightly packed than one would expect, just looking at our own system. Which in turn significantly increases the probability that at least one planet will sit in the liquid-water habitable zone. In fact, sometimes I’m getting two planets in the zone in the same system. That’s not a result that the GURPS Space 4/e model would have produced very often, if ever.

The upshot is that although any given red dwarf is unlikely to host a garden world, there are so many red dwarfs that I’m getting a significant number of them. Lots of “eyeball planets” out there, it seems; possibly as many as the more Earth-like worlds with reasonable day-night cycles.

So far, I’ve worked out planetary systems to about 25 light-years from Sol, including all the K-class and hotter stars, now also including all the red dwarfs that seem to be plausible hosts for garden worlds. 168 lines in the HIPPARCOS database, although a handful of those aren’t actual stars, and 16 stars that have complex biospheres present. Looks like roughly one out of ten stars is giving me at least one garden world. More than I expected, actually, but it’s a result I can live with.

Status Report (5 August 2018)

Status Report (5 August 2018)

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Most of my effort over the last few days has been directed toward two tasks. First, continuing to test the Architect of Worlds model for planetary systems by generating collections of worlds for stars close to Sol. Second, using those results to motivate the first definitions for the next stage of the design sequence: determining the physical properties of an individual world.

The first is going as well as can be expected. So far, I’ve only found one star system that I flatly can’t model properly (the HR 8832 system, about 21 light-years from here, which is believed to have an even stranger collection of super-Earths and close-in gas giants than usual). Otherwise, I’m getting a very plausible set of planetary systems, a significant improvement over the results I would have gotten from the old GURPS Space 4/e design sequence.

As far as the second task goes, I’ve had something of a breakthrough: I’ve found a model I can live with to help the user decide whether a given planet is tide-locked to its primary star or not. It’s a horrible kludge – but the question of how long it takes a planet to tide-lock is very complex, and there’s no consensus in the literature about it. If a planet could be modeled as a uniform and perfectly elastic body, the math simplifies pretty well, but planets just aren’t like that. The equation I’ve come up with seems at least plausible, in the forty or so star systems for which I’ve generated data so far.

Right now, I’m wrestling with how to decide whether a given planet (or moon) has a substantial atmosphere or not, and whether it has oceans or not.

In GURPS Space 4/e, I kind of took a backwards approach – I had the user decide which of several categories a world fell into, and then he generated the world’s mass, density, and so on to fit. I think that was slightly more useful for the gaming context, but the math was kind of annoying (not least because SJG editorial policy forbade me from using SI units, so I tried scaling everything to Earth and the Sun, with weird outcomes). The math is a bit more straightforward doing it the other way – define a planet’s mass and density, then figure out what its surface environment will be like.

Of course, now I have to wrestle with questions like why Mars has almost no atmosphere despite being massive enough to retain molecular nitrogen and carbon dioxide (and it can’t just be because Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, because Venus doesn’t either, and it has a very thick atmosphere). Or, say, why Titan has a substantial atmosphere when the almost identical Ganymede has none.

Slowly, a classification scheme is emerging, but it will probably be a few more days before I’m happy with it.

Meanwhile, the upcoming week is going to be unusually busy at the office. I’m teaching one course, taking a second course, and facing impending deadlines on writing two more courses after that. Generally, my life is not quite that full! I may or may not have a lot of time to play with my worldbuilding over the next few days. We’ll see how things go.

Status Report (13 July 2018)

Status Report (13 July 2018)

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With the release of “Pilgrimage” I was thinking that my next major project would involve getting the next Aminata Ndoye story (“In the House of War,” a roughly 20,000-word novella) polished up and out the door.

Going back and reviewing the most recent version of that story, though, I think I may need to do some world-building work first. I’ve done a fair amount of research since I first wrote that story, and my ideas about how interstellar civilization is structured have evolved a bit.

So, new plan of action:

  • First item will be to revise and improve the planetary-system design sequence for Architect of Worlds. I’ll be publishing the revised material here over the next week or so.
  • Then I’m going to re-work my current map of the interstellar neighborhood (and the associated database of nearby planetary systems). Along the way I’m going to double-check my computations from about 2014-2015 about the galactic density of habitable planets, sentient life, high-tech civilizations, and so on. It’s possible that my new design sequences will give rise to a somewhat different set of assumptions.
  • I may also do at least a sketch map of the local galactic spiral arm, just to give me a better idea of the “terrain” in khedai space.
  • Once I have all that done, I should be able to revise “In the House of War” for publication, and I might have a clearer picture to support further stories in the setting too.

Looks as if my fantasy novel, The Curse of Steel, will be going on the back-burner for a while. That’s okay. I’ve learned the hard way to let my muse go where it wants to go at the moment. At least I’ll be making progress on Architect of Worlds, and I should be able to get another Human Destiny story out the door at the end.

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

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Pivoting from the project I worked on through most of June, I’ve decided to spend July getting some stories self-published. Specifically, the first two or three of the stories I’ve written in my “Human Destiny” universe.

This is a setting in which humanity is conquered in the mid-21st century by an interstellar empire called the Khedai Hegemony. The Hegemony then proceeds to govern Earth with a surprising degree of detached benevolence, providing peace, long life, prosperity, and more individual freedom than most humans have ever enjoyed under human rule. The cost, of course, is humanity’s control over its own fate.

Two hundred years later, and much to everyone’s surprise, the Hegemony opens the door to permit a few exceptional humans to serve as officers in the “interstellar service,” a starship fleet with combined roles of exploration, contact, and enforcement of law and policy. Kind of like Star Trek‘s Starfleet, if that was run by non-humans, and if it very much did not have a Prime Directive of non-interference.

One of the first humans to earn a commission in the interstellar service is Aminata Ndoye, a woman who grew up in what we would think of as Senegal. Eventually she reaches command rank in the service, many thousands of years before anyone expected a human to do so. From there she plays a part in establishing humanity’s long-term role in the galaxy: the human destiny.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve already written two stories about Aminata, and my work through June has given me a fair amount of inspiration for a third. So I’ve decided to stop sitting on these stories and start self-publishing them. Which means I need to be thinking about cover images. So, over this weekend, I broke out my favorite 3D-modeling tools and started putting together a cover image for the first story. That work isn’t finished, but I have a pretty good start, a head-shot of Aminata herself as a young woman, just starting out on her career.

Here she is:

This image fits a scene late in the story, in which Aminata dresses up very formally (including the hijab which Senegalese women rarely wear) before a visit to the local Hegemony governor, an encounter which sets her on the path that eventually leads her to the stars.

A bit more work and I should have a complete book cover. One more editing pass through the story itself, and I’ll transpose that into e-book format for publication. With any luck, that story will be up on Amazon by the end of this week.

Status Report (3 June 2018)

Status Report (3 June 2018)

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Some more work on the world map over the weekend, rather painstaking. I’m flipping back and forth between continuing to paint in elevation contours at lower and lower levels, and adding ocean currents. Neither of these is finished, but another day or two of effort should have me there. Then the fun part begins – actually mapping out climate zones.

Here’s the current map:

Status Report (31 May 2018)

Status Report (31 May 2018)

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Not a lot of time over the past couple of days to work on this, but I’ve managed to tweak some of the landforms a little. The planet resembles a mirrored Earth a bit less now. I’ve also started painting altitude contours on the map. So far, just the very highest peaks, the Andes- or Himalayas-equivalents, but the next few layers should cover all of the land areas with colored zones to indicate altitude.

Status Report (28 May 2018)

Status Report (28 May 2018)

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A few hours of work this evening, while I had Wonder Woman playing in the background, and I ended up with a decent set of land-masses for my world map.

I seem to have reinvented an Earth, although flipped east-to-west. That not-North-America stands out in particular, and all those island arcs in the far western not-Asia are kind of reminiscent too. It makes sense, I suppose, since plausible plate tectonics aren’t going to generate completely arbitrary shapes.

There are differences too, of course. The pseudo-Atlantic ocean is a bit wider, and the continents are in general separated by stretches of sea. There’s a narrow gap between the not-Americas, and instead of a Mediterranean Sea there’s an open ocean between the not-Africa and the not-Asia. That’s going to do some interesting things to ocean currents, I think.

No matter. The actual stories I intend to write are going to be on a much smaller scale, so if the layout of the continents looks a little derivative, that won’t be obvious to my eventual audience. What’s important right now is that I’m reasonably satisfied with this layout, so I can move on to the next steps again.

Status Report (27 May 2018)

Status Report (27 May 2018)

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One of the major stumbling blocks with world-building, at least for me, is that even when I’m momentarily satisfied with the outcome of a task, it doesn’t take much to rob me of that satisfaction. In this case, while staring at my world map draft in progress, I began to compare it to both the real world and to other world-builders’ efforts, and found it lacking. Too crude.

So I’ve gone back to first principles and started over, this time rebuilding a map of tectonic plates without pre-designing any of the continental land masses. This time I strove to come up with something to resemble the general pattern of tectonic plates on the real Earth, at least as far as the number of major and minor plates was concerned. I also paid attention to the way plate boundaries are arranged – whether they tend to be convex or concave, and how they form seams and three-way intersections.

One thing I found useful was to simply mark off the polar regions and ignore those. One of the things that was giving me fits was the transformation from a flat projection to the globe and back, and that switch always introduces the most distortion close to the poles. By assuming there will be no major polar land masses, I can gloss over how any plate boundaries might be laid out in the arctic or antarctic regions.

The result (equirectangular projection only) is as follows. So far, so good. I haven’t marked continental plates yet, but there will be five major continents and a few minor land-masses and island arcs.

Next step will be mark out the relative movement of plates at each boundary, and then sketch land-forms to match.