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A Bit of Insight

A Bit of Insight

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I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.

The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.

Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?

I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.

The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.

It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.

There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.

So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?

I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.

I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.

Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.

Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.

Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?

Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.

All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.

“Fermi’s Nightmare” Article Now Available on Sharrukin’s Worlds

“Fermi’s Nightmare” Article Now Available on Sharrukin’s Worlds

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One of the few blog entries I’ve ever written that I thought was worth preserving was titled “Fermi’s Nightmare.” This was a brief examination of a corollary to a well-known observation made by Enrico Fermi back in the 1950s. For the last few years, that’s been hosted over at the Sharrukin’s Archive site. As of today, I’ve moved it into a static page on this blog. It should be visible in the Pages sidebar on the right.

At this point, the only thing still sitting at Sharrukin’s Archive that isn’t available anywhere else is some draft material for the Human Destiny setting. Fairly soon, I may either move that content over here, or simply decide to take it offline until I do some redesign of the setting. To be honest, there are things about the current concept that have me seriously blocked – I’ve been struggling for a couple of years to produce more stories for it than the one I’ve published.

Either way, expect the Sharrukin’s Archive site to come down entirely as soon as I’ve figured out what to do with the remaining material.

Status Report (9 February 2019)

Status Report (9 February 2019)

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I’m still plugging away on Twice-Crowned, although I seem to have lost some of my momentum on that project. I may spend a few days working on other items so as to stay fresh, then get back to the novel.

In particular, I’ve taken the first steps to move all of my archived content out of the Sharrukin’s Archive site and into this WordPress framework. For the moment, all I have is a parent page (visible on the sidebar to the right, under the “Sharrukin’s Worlds” link). I plan to hang several child pages from that, each covering a specific project or setting that I have in the process of development. For example:

  • The most recent draft sections for Architect of Worlds
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Human Destiny space-opera setting
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for Ancient Greece and the Danassos historical-fantasy setting
  • Setting notes, maps, and short fiction for the Tanûr planetary-romance setting
  • World-building articles I’ve written that aren’t tied to a specific setting
  • Any new projects that rise to the point of active development

This should give interested parties a chance to look at the content I’ve developed without having to dig through months of blog posts. It should also be far easier to maintain than the Sharrukin’s Archive site, which is frankly a royal pain in the nether regions to do anything with. Finally, I suspect this kind of structure might also be a convenient way to collect content on the way to developing books for publication via Amazon or a game-centered platform like RPGNow. Watch this space for further developments.

2019: Looking Forward

2019: Looking Forward

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So I’ve long since gotten out of the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, life is too unpredictable to nail down that way, and for another, it takes more than a line on the calendar to change habits. Still, the first few days of the year is a good time to at least try and make a few plans.

I’ve got a fairly crowded agenda for my day job, where I have several course-development projects lined up for the coming calendar year. I’ll also be “on the platform” to lecture more than I was last year. So there’s one irony: out of all my writing output for the year, most of it won’t be fictional and isn’t likely to be mentioned here.

Meanwhile, I’m taking steps to improve my health in the coming year. I’m an overweight guy in my fifties, and a controlled diabetic as well, and that means I have to pay a certain amount of attention to personal maintenance. At least, I do if I want to live long enough to enjoy a few years of retirement, subject as always to the whims of our lords and masters downtown.

Recently I resumed my membership at a local gym, and while I’m never going to be slim and athletic again, I hope to build up a bit of strength in my legs and maybe lose a few pounds. Possibly more productive is a suggestion my podiatrist made, not long ago. Apparently there exist compact elliptical machines that are ideal for putting under a desk, so you can be working your legs and burning calories even while you sit at a computer. I’ve got one on order for my home office, and if that works out I may order a second one to take to work.

As far as creative writing goes:

  • First priority is going to be producing the first draft for the current novel-length project, a pseudo-Hellenic alternate-history fantasy with the working title of Twice-Crowned. As of this evening, I’ve got close to 11 kilowords down, which should finish one long chapter. The total length of the story will probably be about 120 kilowords in rough draft, and I’m hoping to have that finished by summer. Whether I’ll get the novel actually self-published this calendar year depends on how much revision it needs.
  • Second priority is going to be getting at least one Aminata Ndoye story out the door, and possibly another short piece as well.
  • Third priority is to get back to Architect of Worlds and push that project forward through another big section. I want to revisit some of the material I’ve already written – the model doesn’t seem to be handling “super-Earths” very well yet – but the main objective will be to write the section that describes individual planets in some detail. If I can get that finished and tested, the main “game mechanics” sections of the book will be done.
  • Fourth priority is to finish a couple of fan-fiction projects. In particular, I’ve got a Silmarillion fan-fiction piece that got started and looked promising, but which has been on hiatus for a while so I can work on those other bullet items. There’s also a Dragon Age story that I abandoned in 2018 but that won’t quite let go of my imagination, so I may go back to that at some point. Of course, all of this is subject to Zeigler’s Iron Law of Prioritization: “Any item that falls to fourth on the priority list will never be completed.” I can hope for an exception.
  • Fifth, any continued blogging I may find to do on worldbuilding, writing, or the state of my muse.

Another thing I’m considering is shutting down the Sharrukin’s Archive part of this site, in favor of just placing any “persistent” items in this WordPress framework as permanent pages. Honestly, the Archive as it’s structured is an enormous pain in the ass to maintain, and I’ve never managed to populate it as densely as I originally planned.

Honestly, that seems like enough to keep me busy for the next few months. Watch this space for progress reports.

Status Report (31 October 2018)

Status Report (31 October 2018)

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It’s been a quiet month. I’m slowly emerging from the utter shutdown of creative effort that sometimes comes when a really good new video game comes out (see my review of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey from a couple of weeks ago). Now that I’m about finished with that distraction for the time being, I’m getting back into some world-building work and writing.

One effect of this recent immersion into all things Greek has been the possible revival of a very old project. Close to twenty years ago, my first attempt at writing an original novel stalled out when I ran out of plot about 30% of the way in. That novel was, by an odd not-quite-coincidence, an alternate-historical fantasy piece set in the classical Hellenic period. In the last few weeks I’ve realized that I may actually have what I need to get through that old blockage – maybe I can finally write that novel after all. Still thinking about that and gathering some notes.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten back to assembling setting notes for the Human Destiny stories, and may be publishing revised versions of some of those notes here soon. I’m also re-reading the draft novella In the House of War with an eye toward rewriting and publishing that.

So, in general, things are moving again.

Modeling Galactic History (Wrap-up)

Modeling Galactic History (Wrap-up)

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This post is a little math-heavy, and yet I’ve left out a few explicit steps here and there. Consider this a wrap-up of the posts I made a few weeks back, laying out the assumptions I’ve made with respect to the prevalence of interstellar cultures in the galaxy.

Assumption #1: In the solar neighborhood, there exists about one stellar system for every 300 cubic light-years of space. Stellar systems average about 1.2 stars each.

Assumption #2: There exists one habitable world for every 16 stellar systems, or about one habitable world for every 4800 cubic light-years of space.

Commentary: As I remarked before, these are based on HIPPARCOS data for the solar neighborhood, with some educated guesswork as to how many very dim red dwarfs are not properly accounted for by HIPPARCOS. The Architect of Worlds draft design sequence was used to generate planetary systems for a large sample of the solar neighborhood, which yielded a rough estimate for the prevalence of habitable worlds.

Assumption #3: On any given habitable world, a sentient tool-using civilization will appear about once every 500 million years.

Commentary: Based on the experience of Earth as our one data point (one sentient tool-using civilization – that we know of – since the Earth became habitable back in the Devonian era).

Assumption #4: Left to themselves, sentient tool-using civilizations have a 75% chance of an average lifespan of about 12,400 years, remaining in a pre-industrial status, followed by extinction. They have a 25% chance of an average lifespan of about 12,800 years, attaining industrial status late in that period, followed by extinction. The probability of a sentient tool-using civilization attaining interstellar capability on its own is vanishingly small.

Commentary: This is one of the foundational assumptions of the Human Destiny setting, and a partial solution to the Fermi Paradox. Effectively, I’m arguing for a set of “Great Filters.” Most civilizations never reach an industrial era before falling to some natural disaster. The few that do almost invariably destroy themselves.

Result: Assuming no interstellar-capable civilizations appear, then at any given time there should be about one tool-using civilization for every 40,000 habitable worlds.

Assumption #4: The first culture to attain interstellar capability filled up the galaxy in a short period of time (<< 250,000 years) and gave rise to an era of pan-galactic civilization which lasted several hundred million years. This period is usually called the “era of the Precursors” today.

Assumption #5: The Precursor meta-civilization collapsed in an era of pan-galactic conflict. The winning (or surviving) Precursor faction gave rise to a meta-civilization called the Synarchy, which has carefully limited the growth of all subsequent interstellar-capable cultures. The Synarchy “cultivates” the galaxy by recruiting new interstellar-capable cultures as its proxies.

Assumption #6: Once a civilization has attained interstellar capability under the Synarchy or one of its proxies, its average lifespan after that point is about 250,000 years.

Assumption #7: The Synarchy normally permits one of its proxies, together with its client cultures, to occupy no more than about 25,000 habitable worlds. This allocation is divided between the proxy and its clients, with the expectation that the proxy itself may occupy no more than 5,000 habitable worlds, and each client culture may occupy no more than 1,000 habitable worlds. Within those constraints, a given proxy culture has broad discretion as to how to manage the volume of space under its supervision.

Commentary: More foundational assumptions. The specific numbers have been set to lead to a model which permits many small interstellar societies to exist at the same time in the galaxy. More to the point, aside from the very first “Precursor” civilization, no culture has ever had the opportunity to overrun the galaxy. The Synarchy values variety and acts to prevent such runaway growth.

Results: The policies maintained by any given Synarchy proxy can be characterized by several variables.

  • M, the number of habitable worlds considered to be within the proxy’s supervised volume. In a typical case, many or even most of these worlds will be maintained in a “fallow” condition, unoccupied and waiting for the appearance of a naturally evolved tool-using civilization.
  • N, the number of client cultures normally maintained by the proxy at any given time (can be any value but is generally <= 20).
  • KP, the number of habitable worlds occupied by the proxy (must be < 5,000).
  • KS, the average number of habitable worlds occupied by client cultures (must be < 1,000).

We observe that if RE is the rate of extinction of client cultures, then:

R_E=N/250,000

To maintain a steady state, the proxy must have a rate of uplift RU equal to RE. The rate of uplift is dependent upon M and the proxy’s level of selectivity when choosing candidate cultures to uplift. Some typical values are:

  • If the proxy uplifts no candidate cultures, then R_U=0 , N=0 , and M can be any value < 5,000.
  • If the proxy uplifts all candidate cultures which reach the industrial era, then  R_U=M/2,000,000,000 and M\approx8,000\times N .
  • If the proxy uplifts all candidate cultures, even at a pre-industrial level, then
  •  R_U=M/500,000,000 and M\approx2,000\times N .
  • If the proxy seeks out pre-sentient species for uplift, then RU is undetermined but possibly as large as  R_U=M/50,000,000 , which would imply M\geq200\times N .

Assumption #8: The volumes of space occupied by a proxy culture or by one of its clients will tend to obey the following guidelines.

  • The supervised volume of a proxy culture is likely to be a compact volume of space, such as a sphere with radius roughly equal to \sqrt[3]{1,150\times K} . A habitable world which drifts away from that volume will no longer be monitored, and any civilization which arises there will be on its own.
  • The volume occupied by a given culture will not be compact, since stellar drift and the requirement to leave certain habitable worlds “fallow” will create gaps and voids. If K is the number of habitable worlds currently occupied by a culture, and A is its age as an interstellar-capable civilization, then as a rough estimate its occupied space will be bounded by a sphere of radius S, where:

S>\sqrt[3]{1,150\times K}+\frac{A}{6,000}

  • The first term in that estimate is related to the size of the compact volume that might contain the appropriate number of habitable worlds, while the second term is related to the scattering of stellar systems over time due to their different space velocities.
  • This last estimate may be reduced if the culture in question practices migration, moving populations back toward the core as their stellar systems drift too far away. Most proxy cultures will engage in this kind of behavior. Otherwise, some of their occupied systems would tend to drift out of the supervised volume over time.

Assumption #9: For at least the last 600 million years, and until quite recently, Sol and Earth have not fallen within the volume of supervision of any Synarchy proxy culture.

Results: Within the past 600 million years, the 25,000 nearest habitable worlds to Sol would have given rise to 30,000 tool-using civilizations. This suggests that without intervention and uplift, the probability for any one tool-using civilization to attain interstellar capability is no greater than about 1 in 60,000.

Combining this with the galactic-history model developed earlier, we find that:

  • The Precursor civilization most likely appeared 9.8 billion years ago, and the era of great galactic conflicts was about 9.4 billion years ago.
  • Today, depending on the typical lifespan of a proxy culture (probably longer than the quarter-million years of a client civilization), there are likely to be several thousand such proxies in the galaxy at any given time.

Another result is that it would be very unusual for more than one proxy culture to appear independently in the same galactic neighborhood at the same time. However, it may be possible for client civilizations to “graduate” to independent proxy status rather than “ascension” or voluntary extinction. Proxy cultures might be thought of as reproducing by “budding” during periods of stability. Also, when the proxy eventually passes on, it may reproduce by “spawning” some of its last few client civilizations into independent proxy status.

Khedai Hegemony Reference Map Complete

Khedai Hegemony Reference Map Complete

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Well, this map stretched my technique a little further than before, but after quite a bit of research and development, and a couple dozen hours of painstaking Photoshop work, it’s done. I now have a reference map for the galactic neighborhood of the Khedai Hegemony, covering a decent chunk of the Orion Spur in the process.

Here’s a thumbnail for the new map:

As before, this is a pretty hefty file, so you might do well to download it and view it locally. Alternatively, here’s a link to the pertinent page in my DeviantArt gallery.

This was world-building with a purpose! Not only did this exercise give me a new reference map for our galactic neighborhood, on a larger scale than I had ever done before, but it drove me to build a definitive model for interstellar cultures that I can continue to use later. I also came up with at least a high-concept description for over a dozen alien civilizations that I can now use in my stories.

In fact, once I get my notes collated and write down all the conceptual material that’s floating around in my head, I may have the basis for a fairly complete world-book for GURPS or some similar tabletop game. Between this map and the previous one, I have capsule descriptions for dozens of star systems, and by the time I’ve fleshed out all sixteen or so cultures I’ll have plenty of alien character templates. I may need to confer with the folks at Steve Jackson Games and see what the current limits are for publishing anything using GURPS language. It’s been a while since I was on their editorial staff, so their policies may have changed. At the very least, I ought to be able to post all of the pertinent material to the web for free.

Short term goal, though, is to buckle down and produce a publishable version of the novella In the House of War. With this map, I now have a much better idea where everything is, and what sort of aliens Aminata is likely to encounter during her first ventures out into the galaxy.

Real progress. Feels good.

Status Report (22 September 2018)

Status Report (22 September 2018)

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Very good progress, over the last few days, on a draft map of Khedai Hegemony space. Rather than post the unfinished map here, I’ll give you a link to the item in my Scraps folder on Deviant Art. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this project to have a look.

Probably a few more days to work on the map itself, and then I may also be able to put together a gazetteer for Hegemony space. I’m beginning to think this may work as a high-space-opera GURPS setting, among other things. Most importantly, of course, the exercise of finally mapping all of this out is giving me lots of ideas for Human Destiny stories . . .

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.

Modeling Galactic History (Part II)

Modeling Galactic History (Part II)

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So far, I’ve gotten through some of the chain of logic that sets up the structure of galactic civilization in the Human Destiny setting. Today I’m going to work through a few more steps.

Assumption #7: On the average, one Synarchy proxy can manage a volume containing about 100 subordinate cultures.

Commentary: This is a remarkable span of control. No empire in human history has managed to survive for long with a 100-to-1 disparity between the subordinate populations and the metropole. I’ll assume that the Synarchy chooses its proxies carefully, supports them effectively, and permits them a little more expansionism than the client species. Also, the Synarchy’s normal methods probably involve guiding client civilizations into a quietist lifestyle, thus discouraging rebellion.

I’ll assume that no proxy ever grows much larger than this, no matter how long it remains stable.

If the typical proxy can manage 100 subordinate civilizations, that implies that it will govern a volume containing about 40,000 habitable worlds. In the solar neighborhood, that implies a volume of about 192 million cubic light-years, or a sphere about 360 light-years in radius.

At this point, I should be able to place an upper bound on the rate at which interstellar-capable civilizations appear in the galaxy.

Consider that for all the 4.6-billion-year history of Earth, there has been a population of the 10,000 habitable worlds “closest” to Sol. Here, “closest” is in the sense that if an interstellar civilization appeared on any of those worlds, it would have been recruited by the Synarchy as a proxy, and Earth would soon have been terraformed and colonized by one of the proxy’s client civilizations.

Now, across 10,000 habitable worlds and during 4.6 billion years, we expect 92,000 tool-using civilizations to have arisen (number of habitable worlds, multiplied by the time, divided by 500 million years). If we want the expected number of interstellar civilizations to be less than one-half, then only one in about 184,000 tool-using civilizations will attain interstellar capability on their own. Let’s round that up to 200,000. That’s a very strict Great Filter (or, more likely, a very strict set of several Slightly Lesser Filters).

Assumption #8: Faster-than-light travel has three modes, which tend to limit the reach of any one interstellar culture.

Commentary: Based on the lore I’ve already established in completed stories, the primary interstellar mechanism is a relatively slow Alcubierre-like warp drive. Under the GURPS definitions, this functions as a “hyperdrive” (see p. 37-38 of GURPS Space). Ships can enter FTL anywhere, so long as they’re a safe distance away from any large mass (say, a few AU away from a star or solar mass). While in FTL, a ship is entirely isolated from the rest of the universe – all it can do is wait until it emerges at the pre-planned point. Emergence from FTL can also be done anywhere in open space, although navigation to a point of emergence tends to be rather inexact. The machinery for the FTL drive is carried on board the starship itself, and it’s the only means available for a ship to travel FTL independently. The warp drive provides variable interstellar speed, but most ships can manage up to about 90c, or about one light-year in four days. It’s available at GURPS TL10 to all interstellar cultures.

The second method of FTL travel is by wormhole bridge. Wormhole bridges are built between pairs of stellar systems, usually placed in orbit around a gas giant planet or some other convenient gravitational anchor. They are very expensive, but once built they permit almost instantaneous travel between their endpoints. Synarchy proxies build wormhole bridges between major worlds in their space, to facilitate trade and military movement. The technology for wormhole construction is available at GURPS TL11 to Synarchy proxies.

The Synarchy is believed to have a third FTL method, its operating principles mysterious, which appears capable of transiting the entire galaxy at will. This method is inferred only by those who have witnessed the Synarchy itself in direct action. Fleets appear, carry out their missions, and then vanish, never to be seen again. This method would seem to be available at GURPS TL12 to the Synarchy alone.

This combination of FTL methods has implications for the physical layout of space controlled by a Synarchy proxy culture. There’s probably a dense inner core, where the member civilizations are packed as tightly as they can go, connected by a network of wormhole bridges. On the edges of this core, there may be a middle region that’s more loosely packed, where the proxy doesn’t bother to uplift all the candidate civilizations that appear. Beyond the last outposts of the wormhole network, there’s probably a frontier zone, where the proxy keeps an eye on things but is very unlikely to uplift any civilizations that appear.

Working through some back-of-the-envelope calculations:

  • If 80% of a proxy’s member cultures are within the packed inner zone, that should be about 80 subordinate civilizations, packed into a compact volume containing about 32,000 habitable worlds. In the solar neighborhood, that implies a sphere about 335 light-years in radius.
  • Suppose the remaining 20% of the member cultures are in the middle zone, and that zone is about one year’s travel by slow FTL deep (90 light-years). That shell has inner radius 335 light-years and outer radius 425 light-years, for a total volume of about 164 million cubic light-years. That implies about 34,170 habitable worlds, of which only about 2,000 are occupied, or about 6% as opposed to the 25% or so in the inner zone.

Some Corrections

After writing the section I published here on 1 September, I became more and more uneasy with one of my assumptions – the wild-guess estimate that the first interstellar-capable civilization would appear about 6 billion years after the formation of the first stars. Instead of continuing to press forward with that guess, I went back and did some modeling of the history of star formation in the Milky Way galaxy.

With a little digging, I located a recent paper which yielded a reasonably clear profile of the galaxy’s star-formation rate throughout its history:

  • Starting at the beginning, and running for about a billion years, the galaxy formed stars at a little higher than the present-day rate. At this point, the galaxy had little shape – stars forming in this era were in the galactic halo.
  • Starting about 12.5 billion years before present, the galaxy began to form the “thick disk” of stars, forming stars at about three times the rate we see today. This burst of star formation seems to have lasted about 2.7 billion years.
  • Once the thick disk had formed, about 9.8 billion years ago, star formation fell off to about its original rate, slightly higher than today. This period lasted about 1.3 billion years.
  • From about 8.5 billion years before present, to about 7 billion years before present, star formation in the Milky Way almost stopped. Very few stars appear to have formed in this period, which marks a clear deficit in the age distribution of stars to the present day. This period seems to bracket the era during which the “thin disk” was forming. This probably isn’t a coincidence. The compression of the interstellar medium into the thin disk would have heated it, slowing down star formation.
  • Star formation from about 7 billion years ago to the present day seems to have been happening at a reasonably constant rate.

Okay, so given this profile, and a few wild-guess assumptions about the rate of stellar deaths and the rate of enrichment of the galactic medium with metals, I built a rough model of the number of stars, the number of habitable worlds, and the number of civilizations that might have existed in the galaxy throughout its history. I ended up with the following charts:

Looking at these data and applying the natural rate of appearance of interstellar cultures derived above, I found that the first interstellar culture in the Milky Way – the Precursors discussed above – probably appeared about 9.6 billion years ago. Their home stellar system was probably a halo star, remarkably rich in metals for its time, and their home planet likely reached the stage of complex ecologies much more quickly than the norm. Mildly surprising . . . but here’s the thing: the galaxy is big, and even rare cases are likely to occur somewhere.

As we’ve seen, the Precursors would have filled the galaxy in the blink of a cosmic eye. By about 9.2 billion years ago, the Precursors would have had to deal with a dozen or so local civilizations that managed to reach interstellar capability on their own. I’ll pin the era of galactic conflicts to about this time, and the foundation of the Synarchy within 50 million years or so after that.

At about this time, my spreadsheet tells me that new interstellar civilizations were appearing in the galaxy about once every 50 million years. That would have given the Synarchy plenty of time to place the whole galaxy under monitoring, so that it could begin recruiting any new interstellar cultures as its proxies.

While the galaxy’s thin disk and spiral arms formed, the Synarchy would have remained in control, “cultivating” the galaxy and preventing any new episodes of chaos such as had occurred under the Precursors. By the time Sol formed in some obscure corner of the galaxy, Earth would have been well-protected from being overrun many times over by undisciplined interstellar cultures.

With the Fermi Paradox secure, I think I’m ready to build an outline of galactic history, and to sketch out the shape of the Synarchy proxy that conquers Earth in the Human Destiny setting. All that will be for next time.