the end and beginning

[beejazz]

[note]Main Thread here.[/note]
So how did humanity come to this strange place? How did Earth's children fall into this new world; with its different laws of physics, its fickle sun, its strange life? Why do we live under such a strange sky?
[spoiler=Earth ends.] It has to happen sooner or later. The sun is going to go all red giant and humanity is going to fizzle. This stuff happens. Life goes on. Or it doesn't.

As might be expected, earth falls apart well before any fizzling happens. Global warming has many early and unexpected consequences. For example, a slight increase in temperature will make certain fungi more abundant worldwide, killing off frog species en masse (it's happening already). Well before there are any truly catastrophic meteorological effects, the food chain breaks at its weakest links. The recognizeable earthling species that make it to the new world are considerably more homogenized.

Catostrophic meteorological effects are avoided by a reliance on fission with the rare isotope helium-3, which can be found in lunar soil (maybe on other planets in our solar system; I'll have to look it up) and on lunar stations harvesting solar winds (the sun has its seasonal fluctiations; there are times when these winds are enough to cause blackouts on earth). New species must be created in labratiories to keep the food chain viable (we couldn't avoid suffocating without proper gas exchange, after all). The first transgenic intelligences are made as part of a PR move for the movement.

In the end, however, we still do live in a bit of a deathtrap of a solar system. When it became apparent that the sun was going into its red dwarf stage early, it was leave or die in a flaming ball of plasma. Mind you, I skipped maybe a century or two between near future and escape, but it's a depressing couple hundred years.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=seed ships]We didn't have spacial anomalies. We didn't have gates. We didn't have faster than light travel. What we had was cryogenics. We took what we had and left. It was a crawl. For many billions of years we crawled. Alot might have happened in that time.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=time elapsed] Have I mentioned the Titans? Only at every opportunity. In any case, it's funny what can happen in umpteen billion years. The Titans didn't even exist (at least not in their present state) when we left the Earth. When we get to our new home, there are titans and psychics and all kinds of crazy having to do with that.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=the new world] This is more for another thread, which I'll link later. In any case, the world changed. Now we live in a lunar system where psionics happen, there are ambient energy currents suitable for something like lightsails, night and day don't go at such a regular pace, and the sky is as likely to be a marbelized red-orange as your typical blue (depending on whether you're facing towards or away from the gas giant you orbit).[/spoiler]

I'll fill in more later. For now, my time is up on this library computer.

[Tybalt]

Interesting...I'd love to see what you come up with...I had a similar set of thoughts but haven't really fully developed them.

[SA]

Different laws of physics, eh?

[beejazz]

Yeah... in the Titan's stuff, I mention about how that works. Psychic constructs and all (because even though this isn't hard scifi, I felt it necessary to explain why psionics work far into the future where they obviously don't work here and now and on Earth). I haven't yet gotten to the ambient energy currents, new means of flight, or the freakish weather phenomena that go with them, but I've set myself up for it with the description of how "infinite energy" works.

[Xeviat]

I'm interested in this. I'll take a look at the main thread; where is it?

[beejazz]

I think you've found it... I'll link it here in a minute.

[Tybalt]

A few different SF novels have used the idea of huge ships with planned over millenia colonization intentions that use light sails (though they have engines for backup based on fusion or whatever) which I thought was a cool idea.

[beejazz]

Light sails aren't even technically necessary as "objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on..." and in space there ain't even friction. Of course, this is only in reference to the seed ships... in day to day life, something like light sails are used to move between the four moons of the setting.

[beejazz]

Why does my note eat up everything? I put [ / note ] (without those spaces) before the rest.