TRNTverse Timeline (beta test, RFC)

[Chris]

Pretty cool!

Chris

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by Chris

Pretty cool!

Thank you. Suggestions, comments, observations, critiques, requests? I do take requests.....

[archangel]

Originally Posted by Prof.Pedant

Thank you. Suggestions, comments, observations, critiques, requests? I do take requests.....

Please disregard my previous comment :embarassed: (Spanish is sufficiently different from my tongue that I didn't noticed the meaning of the word Joder* and I was very tired when I posted). It should be something more like Meseta Jodidamente Enorme (although this sounds like very profane language in Spanish).

*We start that word/verb with the same letter as English speakers.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

[snip] It should be something more like Meseta Jodidamente Enorme (although this sounds like very profane language in Spanish).

Thank you. By the time that the Meseta was named 'Jodidamente' was more a term of exclamation than a shocking profanity. Although there have been several instances of mountains, rivers, and other features being given profane names in obscure or non-local languages. Different cultures have different definitions of what makes a good name, and those definitions change over time....

[Prof.Pedant]

Mendel (Vega V) formed less than 444 million years ago, making it the youngest world yet settled by humanity. The planet had barely finished its ‘Hadean’ period when humans first set foot on its newly somewhat stable surface in late 2040. The first people to live on Mendel were biologists and geologists interested in thoroughly studying such a young world. Examining Mendel (then named ‘Vega 5’, or, more colloquially, ‘Hell’) taught the geologists a lot about the early history of terrestrial worlds. The biologists were not quite as lucky. They had hoped to discover lifeforms whose lineage was only millions of years old instead of the billions of most inhabitable worlds. Unfortunately humans appear to have arrived just a little bit too early, although later discoveries suggested that the early investigators may have been looking in the wrong places.

Once the biologists had concluded that there was no nascent native life on ‘Hell’ the Commonwealth Bureau de Terraformation selected it for terraforming. A huge variety of microbial life was introduced to the oceans of ‘Hell’, and the many cratons - the proto-continents and numerous volcanic islands - are seeded with specially adapted lichens and other weathering/soil-building lifeforms. The similarly numerous deep sea vents were seeded with terrestrial vent-life that did not requires dissolved oxygen and massive contragravity pumps were placed on the ocean bottom in strategic locations to increase ocean circulation and provide nutrients for the microbes processing the atmosphere and hydrosphere. After several years of moderate successes the introduced lifeforms underwent an explosive success and the oxygen level in the atmosphere and hydrosphere began increasing measurably every year.

Mendel orbits Vega with a perihelion of 5.7326 AU and an aphelion of 7.006515 AU, producing considerable planet-wide climatic variation. The planetary day is 13 hours, 11 minutes and 7 seconds long, and Mendel has an axial tilt of 17.1 degrees. The year is 4018.42 terrestrial days long (7314.068 local days), or 11.0018 terrestrial years long. With Mendel having such a short day the Mendel calendar uses ordinary terrestrial days instead of the local planetary day, although with an 11 year calendar. (Between the slightly higher air pressure and the high rate of spin Mendel has some truly awe-inspiring and dangerous storms.) Mendel has three small moons. Watson, the outermost (a 68-day orbit) and largest moon, is a bit more than twice the size of Ceres. The middle moon (a 34-day orbit), Crick, is about the size of Vesta, and the inner moon Franklin (a 17-day orbit) is midway between the other two moons in size. Obviously tides are complicated on Mendel, and a triple high-tide is pretty impressive.

Despite being comparatively metal-poor the Vega System, being young, still has a considerable amount of debris cluttering up the planetary orbits. Consequently Mendel and its moons are now protected by a formidable spaceguard system. Mendel Spaceguard maintains several thousand robot vehicles to alter the orbits of the smaller rocks and several larger ‘tow trucks’ to move the larger asteroids and comets out of the way of the Mendel system. Mindful of future uses for the debris most of it is moved into a stable non-intersecting orbit or impacted on Kalebesh (Vega VI). Kalebush is a frozen ‘wet Mars’-like world, with a nitrogen, methane, and intermittent carbon-dioxide, atmosphere and a lot of water-ice. Comets in particular are impacted on Kalebush for storage, the planet’s magnetic field will help retain the volatiles on the surface. Mendel Spaceguard also maintains several zetawatt lasers just in case they have to deal with an object that they will not be able to move in time.

The name Mendel was selected by the Terraformers as a more attractive, and eventually, more realistic name than ‘Hell’ (despite the numerous volcanoes and frequent quakes), and more poetic than ‘Vega 5’. In 2057 it occurred to the Commonwealth Medical Service that a world in need of such complete terraforming would be an excellent site for a biological research station. Because the world was still nearly as uninhabitable as an airless world each habitation was equipped with an airlock, providing nearly as much protection every day as would be found on a more habitable world during an emergency. Furthermore the ongoing terraforming effort had already attracted a number of people with relevant technical expertise and provided for some infrastructure construction. The CMS built several research complexes, both within the atmosphere and on the moon Watson. (Many of the complexes, like most of the buildings on Mendel, are flying structures because of the very frequent quakes.) The Commonwealth Agricultural Service (a division of the Bureau de Terraformation) soon followed the lead of the CMS and located a lab on Mendel for studying some of the more problematic crop and livestock diseases. Several commercial operations followed suit and over time Mendel has become the largest complex of bio-research facilities outside of Sol System.

One of the side-effects of having such a concentration of bio-researchers and bio-engineers is that the Mendel-born population is nearly one hundred percent gene-cleaned, more than fifty percent of those births were the result of selecting which genes from the parental genomes would be used, and approximately half of those also used genebank genes identified as particularly advantageous. One of the interesting consequences of this are the number of people with mixed physical features (blond hair, asian eyes, etc) instead of blended physical features, as well as the addition of purple, blue, red, pink, and green, to the natural hair-colors. Since nearly everyone born on Mendel is gene-cleaned the incidence of genetic diseases is nearly nil and the population tends to display truly robust good health. Since gene-cleaning has not yet spread to every branch of every human lineage it can accurately be said that the children of Mendel are all above average.

Industry in the Vega System began as light manufacturing and auto-factories that supported the researchers and terraformers. Industrial resources were gradually accumulated as the local market grew in size and today the Vegan System is potentially self-sufficient in nearly everything and is the leading manufacture - outside of Sol System - of biological research and engineering equipment. The research labs continue to be well-funded, with a lot of spin-off industries metaphorically and often literally clustered around them.

One of those spin-offs is the Mendel Institute, one of the best places to study bio-research and bio-engineering in the whole Commonwealth. The Mendel Institute is a publically owned educational and research institution that began as a pre-school for the children of the first geologists and biologists on Vega V. As the children grew older more classes were added until, after two generations, Study Hell was an accredited college. A generation later Study Hell became the Mendel Institute and began offering doctoral and post-doctoral degrees. The Mendel Institute has its own taxing authority, separate from the earlier colonial government and separate from the current independent government of Mendel. This peculiar situation arises from the funding mechanism adopted among those initial ungoverned researchers. The first researchers on ‘Hell’ formed the “Union of Hellions” and organized social and scholarly activities. A few (terrestrial) years later there was an increasing need for child-care, social opportunities for children, and children’s education. Since the UH had already been taxing themselves to finance their social and scholarly activities it was a small step to expand their system of ‘cash or sweat equity’ to childcare and child education. When the terraforming began the terraforming crews were invited to join the UH and did (the Bureau de Terraformation paid its employees taxes/dues so that they would be able to take advantage of UH facilities instead of needing BT to provide facilities of its own).

When a Colonial Governor was appointed for Vega the decision was made to continue the UH system based on the ‘if it isn’t broke don’t fix it’ cautionary principle. Successive Colonial Governors provided funding for significant increases in UH infrastructure, but the day to day funding and administration remained Hellion. Hellion taxes/dues remain payable by ‘sweat equity’, a detail that is partially credited with facilitating the significant community involvement in schools, team recreation, and other social activities. Technically teachers and other employees of the Mendel Institute - and therefore the UH - are performing ‘sweat equity’ and getting paid for it because they have ‘done more than the tax due’. The Union of Hellions, between its recreation centers, schools, university campuses, clinics, and conferences, is the largest employer in the Mendel system. Nearly everyone has worked for the UH at one time or another, and everyone knows several people who work for the UH. The Union of Hellions is as pervasive in Mendelian society as the syllable ‘uh’ is in much English conversation.

The Colonial Government financed the building of a lot of infrastructure on and around Mendel. One notable example is the large number of automated geothermal plants that were constructed to both provide energy for the colony and locally, if slightly, further stabilize the crust of the planet. (Because of the small size of the proto-continents and islands there are few true rivers on Mendel. The terraformers had dammed many of the creeks that drained those small land-masses in order to reduce erosion and produce alluvial soils, but those dams were not suitable for significant power production.) Another infrastructure effort by the Colonial Government was the construction of additional greenhouse domes, both on the ground and on mobile platforms. The primary reason for this effort, aside from the jobs involved, was the Commonwealth policy that every inhabited system should be self-sufficient in food. Legally the Commonwealth could have supported local food production through tariffs on food shipped between stars, but Parliament was then dominated by the Democratic Distribution Coalition and the Prime Minister was Louise Windsor. The DDC and Prime Minister Windsor’s egalitarianism envisioned a future for the Commonwealth when every Commonwealth world was at least as rich as Sol System and saw enhancing economic opportunities through infrastructure construction and basic research as more likely to achieve that goal than using tariffs or other legal mechanisms to create profitable bottlenecks in the interstellar economy. (A century later mathematicians from Gallifrey discovered a rigorous mathematical proof of the correctness of this approach.)

Even with their increase in number on Mendal and in space around Vega the greenhouses were only able to support a small amount of meat production. Since Sol System was only three days travel away, and other systems with a food surplus were even closer, this was not itself an impediment to meat consumption in the Vegan System. In addition, cultured meat production on Mendel was as competitive with natural meat production as it was elsewhere, and, largely because of advertising from the Vegan Vegan Society, ‘vat meat’ has the dominant and increasing share of the market for meat in the Vegan System. (The Vegan Vegan Society began as a potluck group that adopted the name - and, initially, the requirement that all dishes be ‘meat free’ - simply because they liked the alliteration. Those early potluck groups spawned restaurants, farms, and a gastronomic school. When ‘vat meat’ and ‘vat milk’ became commercially competitive the VVS accepted them as consistent with their charter and began promoting their inclusion in ‘a healthy and tasty diet’.)

The Vegan System contained over ten million people when it finally petitioned for membership in the Commonwealth as an independent government. This was two generations after Mendel reached a population of one million, like many Commonwealth Colonies the people of Mendel were largely satisfied with the status quo. They were largely self-governing, it was commonly joked that the most important role of the Colonial Governor is that he or she made it unnecessary to elect a Head of State. Locally the Mendelians (and the various habitats elsewhere in the Vegan System) elected town, city, and regional governments, as well as electing or informally appointing the officials of the Union of Hellions. They also sent their proportionate share of Representatives to the Commonwealth Parliament, lacking only the Senatorial representation of Member Governments. What precipitated their petition for Commonwealth Membership was a change in Commonwealth tax law that raised taxes on long-established colonies to a level which meant that the colony would owe the Commonwealth less money if it was being taxed as a Member-State (Parliament cannot raise taxes on the Member-States without a three-quarters majority, and that increase can only be for ten years).

The Vegans named their new nation “Cộng Dồng Vega” (The Communities of Vega), not because Vietnamese was the dominant language on Vega - it isn’t - but because Vegans overwhelmingly liked the sound of it. There had been a fairly wide variety of names floated and the general consensus was drifting towards ‘The Communities of Vega’ when it was pointed out that while nearly everyone in the Vega System spoke English that was no reason that the name of their new nation had to be in English. One calendar day later the Hades Symphony Orchestra released three different version of “Cộng Dồng Vega”, an eleven minute dance and audio-video collage, a heroic operatic version, and a ‘national anthem’ version sung by a digital crowd of 1,000,000 Vegans in the Amphitheatre (a natural rock formation outside of Gehennaville that has been domed over and is used for concerts) with a fully terraformed Vega occupying the background. The song - loosely based on the century-old and many-times revived “Gangnam Style” - was a huge hit from nearly the moment that it was first released. Many of the parodies were similarly popular, with the most popular ones emulating the patriotic semiotics of “Cộng Dồng Vega”. The voting for the national name had begun without Cộng Dồng Vega on the ballot, but it quickly went from being a write-in to an official option and then the majority choice and the reluctant new nation had a name and a national anthem.

Prior to Vegan Independence there had been a significant number of Vietnamese on Mendel, perhaps as much as five percent of the population by self-identification or familial association. The immigration of culturally and linguistically Vietnamese people to the Vega System increased after the new nation was named, an immigration both attracted and repelled by the general interest in Vietnamese culture and language among Vegans of all ethnicities and cultural affiliations. English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and Vietnamese, are the most commonly spoken languages in the Vegan System, and each of those languages has adopted a number of Vietnamese political, gastronomic, and aesthetic terms into their own languages. Each of the languages spoken on Vega appears in “Cộng Dồng Vega”, but it was the Vietnamese title and refrain that caught the public’s imagination. The general sentiment was that Vegans needed a ‘national cultural identity’ and that trying out a Vietnamese-derived one was as good an idea as anything else in human history, and besides - people were having fun. Vietnamese and Vietnamese-descended people had played important roles in Mendelian history several times, a coincidence that fit well into the new national self-image. Why the Vegans so readily and spontaneously focused on using a superficially-Vietnamese identity as a Vegan identity remains unclear - that it “seemed like a good idea at the time, and worked out pretty well” is pretty much what the Gallifreyan sociodynamicists who studied the history of the Vegan System half a century later concluded.

(They also noted that while the Vegans had historically had a very strong community ethos, with lots of interactions and mutual support, they had little to no sense of themselves as ‘Mendelians’ or ‘Vegans’ - those were just places they lived. Nor did the Vegans have any interest in being a nation, that was a condition forced upon them by a tax policy their Representatives had voted against. What the Gallifreyans identified as crucial to subsequent events is that the Vegan public, the Union of Hellions, the Terraformers, the Research Institutions, the various businesses, and nearly every important individual or organization in the Vega System all recognized that they were making up all of this ‘nation’ and ‘national government/sovereign currency’ stuff as they went along and that ‘history was watching every move’. A majority of the people in the Vega System had themselves, or had ancestors, who had come to the Vega System to do scientific work. The general cultural ethos on Vega was to experiment and analyze and value evidence over supposition, an attitude that permeated their politics as well. The Gallifreyans note that a whimsical sense of humor is common characteristic among people with a scientific approach to life. A whimsical sense of humor does tend to be a Vegan characteristic, as does a love of puns - as the ‘national epic poem’ “Life, Entendre, O Algo Parecido” shows at great length.)

Vegan chefs, in adopting Vietnamese cuisine as the ‘Vegan National Cuisine’ have been far more interpretive than copying. Since they are ‘making it all up’ they do not hesitate to play, seeking combinations of foods that seem appropriate to adopt as ‘Vegan’. Often, for the ‘exoticness’ of them, they use a variety of alien fruits, vegetables, spices, and other ingredients. (Since everything in the Vega System is grown in a greenhouse Mendel and its orbital facilities grow an immense variety of crops, with widely differing sunlight, temperature, and other requirements.) Vegan cuisine is generally regarded as some of the most imaginative outside of the Solar System, and Mendel boasts some of the most respected restaurants in the Commonwealth.

Another tourist attraction that Mendel boasts are its volcanoes. Since humans first visited ‘Hell’ the planet has continuously had at least 100 volcanoes erupting, with magma eruptions predominating. Many of these volcanoes are immensely large, there are seven peaks on Mendel that are over five miles above sea-level and 17 whose volume is so large that they are distorting the evolving plate tectonics. One mountain in particular is known for a surprisingly reliable ‘lava falls’ that erupts almost every triple conjunction of the moons. (The Hades Tourist Commission sort of cheated just a little bit. They sent some burrowing robots up to the edge of the cliff that the lava flowed over and installed coolant lines so that the edge would build out a little further from the cliff and result in more of the lava falling over the cliff instead of flowing down the cliff. It made for a more dramatic show.) The volcanoes increasingly have multiple automated geothermal plants on their slopes, pulling out as much energy as possible and using it in a variety of different ways (batteries, chemical synthesis, atmosphere/hydrosphere cleaning, and so on).

Both because it is a thoroughly modern colony and because going everywhere outside of a habitat involves being one variety or another of canned ape there are a lot of robots and remote-controlled equipment in the Vegan System. Since there is a continuing local need for robots there are a number of robotized factories with robot-manufacturing capacity on Mendel and in orbit. This and the thousand or so years that are expected before Mendel is shirt-sleeve habitable affords the terraformers, most of whom still work for the Bureau de Terraformation, an opportunity to approach erosion control in a somewhat different way. On the living-but-fallow worlds the usual approach is to have eroded material fill up the volume behind a dam, forming a deep mineral-rich sediment.

The terraforming crews had built small dams across the streams and creeks of the Mendelian islands and proto-continents, but it belatedly occurred to them that they could set their robots to constructing terraces on the mountainsides. The terraces that they set hundreds and eventually millions of robots to making are all made without mortar and are wildly varying in style. When a section of wall is completed the area behind it has a number of smaller walls constructed to further slow water flow, deep holes are dug to allow water to flow into any possible aquifers, and the area is filled with the standard habitat greenhouse mixture of powdered/crushed rock and ‘baked comet’ (carbon aerogel with a lot of other elements embedded in it) and whatever mixture of soil bacteria will survive the then-current local conditions. The current estimate is that every slope on Mendel greater than 17 degrees will be terraced by the time that Vega has a shirt-sleeves environment. Animations of the future appearance of what various designated wilderness areas will look like show verdant islands that have a real ‘lost city’ feeling to them from the stonework in the background.

(A group of Vegan artists, writers, and retired terraformers have taken to using the stone-wall-building robots to actually build a fantastic ‘Lost City’, a self-conscious and ironic attempt to create ‘evidence’, once Mendel is fully terraformed, that the cộng đồng on Mendel has ‘really’ been there since ‘forever’. They have an extensive ‘museum’ detailing what life was like in ‘Thành Phố: the Lost City”; they solicit suggestions for future exhibitions, have a taste for the bizarre, and copyright their exhibits under the Vegan laws pertaining to fiction. Their exhibits are often seen as satirical political or social commentary. Most recently, and probably without political intent, they have said that their next exhibit is going to be on the plants and animals of ‘Ancient Mendel’ and how the Bureau de Terraformation should ‘restore’ them. They are soliciting suggestions for what those species should be and for ecological designs.)

[Chris]

I like.

(And I bet they have problems with people claiming that they're the Mengle Institute.)

Chris

[archangel]

They may end up with two terraformed planets in the long term.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by Chris

I like.

Thank you. Any ideas or suggestions as to what I do with the TRNTverse next?

Originally Posted by Chris

(And I bet they have problems with people claiming that they're the Mengle Institute.)

Sort of/Not exactly. Mengele is not forgotten by history, but despite being a very nice poly-cultural place to live the Commonwealth has a couple of more recent horror stories about the misuses of biological technologies and unethical experimentation.

One example that I've referenced elsewhere is a group that tried 'uplifting' chimpanzees to human intelligence, enabling them to speak human languages, and have opposable thumbs. They succeeded, but neglected to account for the tertiary and other effects of the modifications they made. This shortsightedness left the chimpanzees with a number of medical problems, and in particular psychological problems. Eventually one of the chimpanzees escaped and made it through the wilderness and across the continent to Marseilleville. She knuckle-walked into a Gendarmerie with some human friends she had made and said to the surprised officers that she would like to report a crime. The experimental facility was raided a few hours later, and a few days later the chimpanzees filed a class-action suit against their creators. They won, and the damages bankrupted the Frisch Provence branch of Veridian Dynamics and the individuals involved. The money went into a trust fund for medical treatments and research into how to repair the problems so that future generations of sentient chimpanzees could have better lives.

Hmmmm...... Maybe I should write up something about some of the other incidents....

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

They may end up with two terraformed planets in the long term.

The 'cold wet Mars'? Yup. That one will require lots of mirrors, but there are plans for eventually getting around to it.

[general_tiu]

I wonder...

Do the Israelis and Palestinians have their own colonies, as Filipinos?

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by general_tiu

I wonder...
Do the Israelis and Palestinians have their own colonies, as Filipinos?

Sort of yes. There is a quasi-official Israeli colony named T'Zivn. There are a number of worlds that Palestinians live on, and two 'Palestinian nations' located on worlds that have multiple nations. Both Israelis and Jews are well-represented among the stars.

The Philippines colonized two worlds: Bagong Lupa and Lakampati (so named because it is actually more human-habitable than Earth). Like many terrestrial countries the Philippines dropped out of colonizing worlds fairly early on in Commonwealth history, although Filipinos continued to emigrate to the stars. (By the second century of the Commonwealth no terrestrial governments were still interested in colonizing worlds, although the emigration from Earth remained the same. Colonies were increasingly an Non-governmental organization effort, a Commonwealth effort, a profit-intending endeavor by developers, or something done by a government on the fringes of the Commonwealth.)

[general_tiu]

Does it occur to me that Space Mormons, Space Scientologists, Space Amish, Space Gypsies, and Space Jehovah's Witnesses also occur? Looks like even the poorest of the Third World countries wanted something in the stars, which was good.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by general_tiu

Does it occur to me that Space Mormons, Space Scientologists, Space Amish, Space Gypsies, and Space Jehovah's Witnesses also occur?

Yes! It does occur to you, and to me as well. There are three worlds that are settled by Mormons - Deseret, New Nauvoo, and Zion. There are also four Mormon countries on worlds with multiple nations, and Mormons have settled on a number of other worlds as well.

No 'Space Scientologists' because Scientology fell apart after the scandals of 2027, but the planet New Teegeeack was primarily settled by ex-Scientologists.

Lots and lots of 'Space Amish'. There are no Amish countries or exclusively Amish worlds, but Amish can be found on nearly every world that can be farmed with horse and plow.

Space Gypsies: there are some 'Space Gypsies' who are actually of Gypsy or Irish Traveler origin, but most 'Space Gypsies' are either extended families who run 'tramp freighters/traveling stores' out on the edges of the Commonwealth, or members of one of the Terraforming/Construction 'companies' opening up new worlds. (Many of the Terraforming companies are more like extended families, egalitarian feudal states, or a traveling village. Since most of them operate several days to several weeks travel from the rest of civilization most workers bring their families along, and many families have several people working for the company.)

Space Jehovah's Witnesses. The Jehovah's Witnesses are proportionately less common than they are in the present day, but are still well-represented on many worlds. They also settled one world, Parousia, and are doing quite well there.

Originally Posted by general_tiu

Looks like even the poorest of the Third World countries wanted something in the stars, which was good.

Yup! Not every country had its own colonies, but every country sent a great many emigrants to the stars.