Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.
The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers – just
short of three light-years – behind the speeding starwhisp
the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history
– and more unforeseen accidents.
Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome
and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences
are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures,
understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and
contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal:
small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in
the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming
microwave ovens.
The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand
MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term – all but a
fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the
accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass
ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other
posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has
already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has
sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now
surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of
a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best
brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of
extensions that outthink their meaty cortices by many orders of
magnitude – minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the
first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.
Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major
economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality
adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the
bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a
continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition – disease,
senescence, and death – looks like a good way to lose money, and a
deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths
of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now
considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest
backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of
intelligence.
Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature
nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to
widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode
across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive
semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear
war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the
IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids
and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more
survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a
simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing
Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.
New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive
force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe
after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental
implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits:
a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be
evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology,
where some of the more recherche researchers are bickering over the
possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device,
with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And
theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial
wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners
of space-time.
Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial
transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know
anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little
later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the
beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit.
(Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's
magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers:
energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon's orbital momentum.)
Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the
backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems
complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years
from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds,
the one-kilogram starwhisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the
best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is
beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter
system – near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a
big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous
generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of
nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states
of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its
occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned
bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have
overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia – the sum
total of
But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit
around the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56 will be worth the wait.
* * *
Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the Field Circus. He's supervising the sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. The master control VM – like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's virtualization stack – is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in
