Orion's Arm

Orion's Arm (or "OA" for short) is an online science fiction world-building project, founded by M. Alan Kazlev. Anyone can contribute articles, stories, artwork, or music to the website. A large mailing list exists, in which members debate aspects of the world they are creating, discussing additions, modifications, issues arising, and work to be done.

OA is set over ten thousand years in the future, and adheres to plausible, or "hard" science fiction; that is, no human-like aliens, no faster-than-light travel or other contradictions of the laws of physics, no "naval analogy" space battles, et cetera. The denizens of this universe are ruled over by god-like, superintelligent artificial intelligences (AIs), called "archailects". These beings are so powerful that they can create new miniature universes. Their bodies exist as distributed intelligences in networks of planet-sized computer brains; their subroutines are themselves sentient, making an "archai" an individual and a civilization at the same time. Extraterrestrial life exists, but the focus is entirely on the descendants and creations of Earth life, here collectively called "terragen life". Normal humans, called "baselines", are an endangered species. Their genetically and cybernetically enhanced descendants have supplanted them. There are many types of intelligent life: nearbaselines (enhanced humans), posthumans, cyborgs, vecs (intelligent robots), aioids (intelligent computers), uploads (intelligences transferred into computers), neumanns (self-replicating robots), provolves (animals with enhanced intelligence, similar to "uplift" - see below), rianths (humans with animal DNA spliced in), splices (similar to provolves, upgraded with human DNA), neogens (life genetically synthesized from non-life) and xenosophonts (aliens). Nanotechnology, picotechnology, and femtotechnology are common. Ringworlds, Dyson spheres and other "megastructures" exist. Known space is connected by a network of wormholes.

OA is a part of the transhuman space opera subgenre. The world was influenced by Iain M. Banks' Culture series, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and David Brin's Uplift Universe, among others. It takes the concept of the technological singularity from Vinge's work, but changes its meaning considerably. In Orion's Arm, there is not one singularity but at least six, and they refer not to stages in the technological development of civilizations as a whole, but to different levels of consciousness in individuals.

A computer game and a role-playing game are being developed by the community, within the OA milieu.

Prominent fictional technologies

Technologies that feature prominently in the Orion's Arm setting include:

• Nanotechnology, and sub-atomic analogues.
• Extremely advanced artificial intelligence.
• Space megastructures.
• Production and manipulation of exotic matter, for use in reactionless space drives and wormholes.
• Stable wormholes, allowing faster-than-light travel between star systems (albeit with physical limitations intended to prevent time travel).
• Several types of reactionless space drive, including almost all of the types described by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program.

Prominent fictional artifacts

Types of megastructure that feature prominently in the Orion's Arm setting include:

• Dyson spheres (shells around stars), both swarm-based and rigid.
• Ringworlds (rigid hoops around stars at a distance of about 1 AU).
• Bishop rings (large ring-shaped habitats), described as the largest spinning ring-shaped habitats that can be built using non-exotic materials.
• Complex orbital ring variants (suprastellar and supraplanetary shells) that perform functions similar to Dyson spheres.

Types of nanotechnology-based artifact include:

• Utility fog (swarms of microscale robots that act as a reconfigurable bulk material).
• Disassembler swarms (grey goo-like swarms of nanorobots that dismantle hostile craft/objects).
• Angelnets (nanotechnology-based infrastructures for mind uploading that provide functional immortality).

Other noteworthy artifacts are usually unique items whose principles of operation are unknowable to "baseline" humans (named Clarketech, after Clarke's third law).

External links

• Homepage (http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html)
• Mailing List (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/orions_arm/) (Note: requires Yahoo! membership to view messages).
• Introduction page (http://www.orionsarm.com/intro/intro.html)
• Full text (http://www.orionsarm.com/whitepapers/SpaceRings.pdf) of a conference paper about suitable light sources for Bishop Rings, from SPIE's (http://www.spie.org) non-imaging optics (http://www.spie.org/web/abstracts/4400/4446.html) proceedings.