Universe-Building Patchnotes: FTL Travel, Terraforming, and Aliens
The story of Children of Chaos takes place in the year 5419 CE, over 3000 years in the future. So, a few things have changed since then! Let's go over some classic sci-fi tropes and see what's happened, and alternatively, what's not:
Faster-Than-Light/Interstellar Travel
Today, humans dream of zipping across the galaxy and reaching the stars. In the future, though, this dream gradually recedes from view. Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel is regarded as firmly within the realm of the impossible, and theoretically possible ways around this - like wormholes, warp drives, etc - would require so much energy so as to be effectively impossible.
That's not to say that interstellar travel is entirely out of reach, but it's very, very slow. By the 55th Century, humans have sent unmanned probes out to several nearby star systems (the furthest being Tau Ceti, roughly 12 lightyears away), and they've begun exploring realistic proposals for sending humans out to other stars, too. But because they've only been able to reach a fraction of the speed of light, the idea of "conquering the galaxy" has largely lost its luster.
So, with one impractical sci-fi goal mostly discarded, humanity pivoted to an arguably equally impractical sci-fi dream: the rapid terraforming of the Solar System.
Terraforming Planets/Moons
By this point in the future, multiple planets and moons around the Sun have been Terraformed. It started with Mars, then Luna, and then the technology traveled to other parts of the Solar System. During this period, known as the Terraforming Era, desolate, rocky planets were turned into biodiverse, Earth-like worlds over an accelerated period of roughly 1,500 years.
Around Jupiter, 3 of the 4 main moons were Terraformed: Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter, never was. Io is a volcanic, highly radioactive and inhospitable world where the conditions for Terraforming were deemed to be impossible. Because people are stubborn, some still decided to live there, mostly in underground tunnels and underneath glass domes. Several people who still claim Ionian heritage live elsewhere due to the cramped living quarters.
For the other moons, though, by the time the story takes place, they have been fully Terraformed for nearly 1000 years. Europa, the smallest, was most recently finished its Terraforming process around the year 4500 CE. In that time, as new cultures and foundational myths were founded, humanity transformed just as much as the planets they began to inhabit.
Aliens
In this universe, the answer to the age-old question, "are we alone?", is...no! Aliens are real!
...but they're not very exciting. No alien invasions, no interstellar encounters, not even any extraterrestrial radio signals have been found. To date in this universe, there is no evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations existing, and if they exist, most people suspect they are so far away that we will never interact with them.
So, what aliens have we found? Regrettably, it's just some single-celled, undeveloped, microbial organisms in the water on a few different planets and moons. Around Jupiter, such microbes have been found on Europa. The Europan aliens are called the Kseni, and Europa's Terraformers went to great lengths to ensure they could survive an Earth-like environment; in fact, they actually flourished throughout Europa's oceans the more the moon warmed.
While the Kseni do have some religious and cultural significance for Europans, no one really pays them much mind anymore. When it comes to other kinds of aliens, like little green men flying around in UFOs, tragically (or maybe thankfully for humanity's continued existence?), we're no closer to finding them 3000 years in the future than we currently are today.
That's all for now! Follow for more sci-fi hijinks.
