I didn't even know this place existed For some reason there are tons of comms I'm not subscribed to. I assume we're not automatically subscribed when they're created?

Anyways, I'm working on something for a game. I'm trying to follow Tim Cain's process of Setting > Story > Mechanics. If you're unfamiliar, setting is everything that exists and has happened up until the moment the game starts. The story is what happens during the game. He says you need to know both of those first because they inform what the player can and will be doing in the game, which tells you the mechanics. That's probably geared towards RPGs more than other types of games, but I wanted some kind of structure to follow. I have been working on the setting for a little while now and keep finding myself getting lost in the sauce.

How do you folks do it? Are there any widely regarded processes? What about methods of organization. I'm just throwing everything into an Obsidian Vault for now.

Also me: Spends an hour writing the names and functions of a dozen different ministries for a state that exists solely to get absorbed into a larger polity before the story begins

A world with two changes:

• People learn languages 20× quicker

• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true and 1000× stronger

In this world there are admired conlangers. New languages create new social/cognitive/scientific enlightenments. Oppressive governments forbid this and mandate Newspeak.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40388903

I have a science-fantasy world with intelligent non-anthro animals living in harmony, which I've posted some lore about this in the past. Think "communist non-anthro Zootopia with sci-fi technology." This is something that I've been thinking about for a while and combines my interests in worldbuilding and software. I want to create a fictional social media platform for the animals in my world, and stage fictional threads in the typical Reddit/Lemmy format discussing news and politics taking place within the world. Then post screenshots here with context explaining what is happening. I just thought this might be a more fun way of sharing lore about my world than just the articles themselves, almost like an ARG. I'll also be able to introduce some of my main narrative characters through their social media presence.

On the technical side of things, I don't know if I want to compile and spin up a local Lemmy instance at home and actually stage accounts and posts on it. But actually logging in and out of different accounts sounds like way more work than necessary so I could also just take the Lemmy UI and add my own mock thread data to it. Or, I could write my own code for a completely fictional GUI, since I don't want to just use the default Lemmy UI and break the illusion. The second and third options might be more important if I want to make this an actual ARG and host a website for it, since in that case I don't actually want people to sign up and post.

I would love some feedback in general on this idea, and maybe gauge interest on if this is something people would like to see.

They're fussy personalities so easy to annoy.

This contown is to the south of this conmountain, so when the conwind blows it causes a lot of conrain to fall on the conpeople there.

Post 1, intro/general

Post 2, flight enabled by plasma thrusters

Post 3, Immortality via brain-backups

Post 4, Global vactrain network

The Omni-factory is the biggest and most sophisticated type of factory in the world. It makes almost everything (including its own tooling). There are a few dozen to one hundred around the world.

It is fully-automated, human-free. In come shiploads of raw materials – and robots, computers, VR headsets, pharmaceuticals, and rocket-engines come out.

The factories are huge: 1km to 1.5km across and a few storeys high. Packed into that dense footprint is a station for every chemical, electronic, and industrial process.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the only kind of factory in this world. There are localised means of production elsewhere, e.g. an iron refinery is sited next to a iron mine. Smaller factories, and more specialised ones, are in other places.

High-level superhuman AI only does top-level planning. The AMIs (advanced machine intelligence; also French for 'friends') write the code for the factory, and (dumber) controllers at each module handle the detail.

It all goes on the graph

'Graph theory' is a fancy way of saying 'dots connected by lines'. A 'directed graph' just means the lines are arrows. A 'directed acyclic graph' just means the arrows never form loops.

People talk about 'technology trees', but next time someone says that you can tell them in a nasally voice, "Ackshually it's not a tree, it's a technology directed acyclic graph". You know, to win friends.

Say you want to make a CHAIR... you take inputs like WOOD and METAL. The METAL must be made into SCREWS using a process called THREADING. The WOOD undergoes a process called SAWING. The SAWN WOOD and SCREWS go into a process called ASSEMBLY and the output is a CHAIR. We could illustrate this as a directed acyclic graph...

...where each ARROW is a well-understood industrial PROCESS, and each THING is a NODE. Ultimately it leads to treats (T).

Making an MRI machine or vactrain is no different from making a chair in this sense. The graph is bigger. How big?

• Limited number of inputs into each product – This video about digital communism says (around 51:30) an average 160 inputs to one workplace.
• Limited number of products in the world – https://commerce.net/how-many-products-are-there/ says "the QRS Catalogue is now up to 100 million entries (up from c. 80 million a few years ago)."
• Limited number of industrial processes – There's really only 8 ± 2 things you ever want to do with matter: take some away (grinding, abrasion), add bits on, mould/cast, bulk deformation (like rolling, stamping, or extrusion), cutting/sawing, joining, and coating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_processes lists about 70. Each of these can happen at various scales (making a tanker full of solvent versus a test-tube of a pharmaceutical). Various versions for various materials (cutting wood versus cutting metal). And with various precisions (a bicycle seat can deviate by 1mm and that's no problem, but a microchip needs nanometre accuracy). But all-in-all I think 400-1500 stations will cover everything even in a very advanced economy.

There is no astronomical complexity. There are less than 300 inputs per product, 400-1500 processing stations, and fewer than 200 million products. A computer (not really an A.I.) can easily plan a graph of this complexity, then it issues commands for robots to execute them.

The robots know where the goods are and what to do with them. "Robot 576, carry 250g of hydrofluoric acid to etching station #5, go!"

Industrial Processes are the arrows on the graph

Each arrow on the making-graph is a well-understood industrial process. In the Omni-Factory, each has its own station/module.

Examples of stations –

• Electric arc furnace
• Fischer–Tropsch process
• Polymerisation
• Haber process
• Tempering
• Work hardening
• Laser cutting
• Baking (ceramics)
• Electroplating
• Casting into moulds
• Biomineralization
• Growing mycelium into specific shapes
• Stamping
• Hole punching
• 3-D printing is worth talking about because when people think about futuristic manufacturing they always think about 3-D printing. The weakness of 3-D printing is speed and throughput; its strength is that you get complexity for free in one step. 3-D printing at 100 nanometres has been demonstrated; that's one 10,000th of a millimetre. The Omni-factory includes printers that can achieve that precision with metals and polymers, and multiple materials in the same print.
• CNC micromachining is similar to 3-D printing: weak on speed, strong on complexity
• Laser sintering is similar to 3-D printing: weak on speed, strong on complexity
• Photolithography
• Surface finishing units like tumble polishing
• Chemistry: Various molecular sieves, MOFs and nanoporous membranes tailored to specific molecules: compared to distillation, these can perform chemical separation with 10–100× less energy. Compared to Terra, the production of pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals tend to rely more on solvent-free and solid-state reactions that proceed at ambient/low temperatures.
• Biology: bioreactors growing GM yeasts to make pharmaceutical precursors and bioplastics. Any sufficiently advanced production should integrate biology with machinery.
• Not smelting – that's done near the mines. Why ship ore to a factory?

...and each of these for different materials, different scales, different tolerances of purity and precision.

These stations will usually make big batchs, but the system is flexible enough to make one-offs when required.

Additive-manufacturing prints an injection mould. The mould is shuttled to the next module, where a production-run of 800 parts are made using injection moulding and stashed for later use. The mould is then melted down and made into a new mould.

Stations are sited rationally to minimise travel paths: after you make a silicon wafer, you need to etch it, so the etching station is next to the wafer-making station. But temperature-based co-location is a bigger consideration.

Traingang always talks about how dense cities are more efficient because they allow short bike-trips. Efficiently moving children to school is the same as efficiently moving ferrofluid rotary seals to centifuge assembly robots. You want things dense, co-located, with short trips. Products are moved around the omni-factory by gantries, pneumatic tubes, and wheeled robots.

Everything gets built far faster because components aren't being trucked around. Inputs move to the next step of the assembly graph in less than two minutes. Think how much of the manufacturing time of a laptop in Terra-2025 is hauling parts.

Inventory is the blobs on the graph

The global planned economy includes an exhaustive digital inventory. Every screw, every wafer, every vial of every chemical is tagged and tracked.

The inventory is global and includes the waste-stream. The Omni-factory ships your VR headset missing one screw and one panel, because it knows that they are sitting in your hometown from something someone threw out (robot garbage-men collected and tagged it). The headset is shipped to your town, the panel and the screw are added at the last minute, then it comes to your door.

Processing stations include systems to reclaim waste products. For example, if a piece of metal is milled, the metallic dust is swept up and added to inventory. Some waste products are biomined. Circular economy.

The AI can detect trends in requests, and anticipate demand. AI orders new factory-modules to be built to shift production from bulk polymer precursors to a pharmaceutical intermediate, anticipating demand. Processes are sunsetted as they become technologically obsolete or out-of-fashion.

Transport and robots

Imagine a room of stacked high with racks of boxes, screws, and panels. Gantry robots zip boxes from here to there. Vertical stacks of metal-organic frameworks and chemical feedstocks are marked with QR codes.

Robots (with wheels; no bipeds here), pneumatic tubes, and ziplines shuttle ingredients along the assembly line, with short distances from module to module.

Pipes are the best way to move fluids around at scale. There are pipes for oxygen (going from the cryogenic distillation wing where the oxygen's made to places like the hydrogen peroxide manufacture station), pipes for ammonia, for methanol, ethanol, deionized water type I, deionized water type II, etc. In-pipe robots inspect and the pipes.

Imagine a robot arm replacing catalyst cartridges in a chemical processing module

Robotic infrastructure includes: charging docks, spare-part storage. Robots and parts thereof can be made on-site.

A wheeled robot goes into the storage closet and swaps his screwdriver for a soldering iron.

• Inspection systems: Robots and embedded sensor networks continuously inspect every machine, every tool, every production-module for faults and cracks, and execute predictive maintenance routines. There are micro-robots for inspection and fine repairs. Distributed sensors for anomaly-detection. They might pause production when a fault is detected and you’ll get your treat a day late. Or an alternative production route might be found in the directed productive graph (technology tree) – for example the mould-injection system is temporarily offline so a part is 3-D printed instead.
• Containment & clean zones: graded cleanrooms (ISO levels) and isolated hazardous-process cells with active negative-pressure containment.
• Surfaces are made from advanced materials that use things like anti-corrosive and hydrophobic finishes to prevent corrosion and make spills easy to clean up.
• Emergency shutdowns with isolation valves and fire-doors.
• Safety & containment: blast-suppression zones around volatile processes, fire suppression using inert gases, automated venting and scrubbers for chemical incidents.

Temperature management

Think about Terran industry: in one place a furnace is hitting 2000°, and then that heat just leaks out of the building. Down the street there’s an chemical process that requires temperatures of 120°, and has to make its own heat from scratch! What a waste!

The Omni-factory is logically organised, with the hottest processing-modules at the centre (near the fusion power plant), medium-temperature processes in the middle, and room-temperature processes at the rim. People think of industrial processes as requiring huge temperatures, but there are lots of industrial applications of being just warm; "About 30 percent of industrial heat demand in Europe is below 100 °C".

There is a cold wing of the factory where processes like cryogenic distillation are all located. There are ways of making heat into cold (like the Einstein fridge or heat-pump).

Ocean site

Most Omni-Factories are built at sea (a few at the shore). Why?

• Shipping lanes
• Keep the noise pollution away from humans
• Dust is terrible for factories. Where does dust come from? Animals, plants, and soil – all things that don't exist at sea.
• Water is purified (via microbial desalination) and used in industrial processes. Water is the most important industrial chemical.
• Fusion plants extract deuterium from seawater, using graphene 1, 2.

Fusion provides the electricity for the factory. Geothermal can additionally supply hot steam and process heat. Also, putting the factory at sea provides an interesting look –

• Touching antennae as a friendly greeting (brief touches in more casual/formal settings, longer and more information-rich touches among friends and loved ones)
• Queens as revered philosophers/poets/mathematicians/etc. (critical to a hive's survival so kept healthy and comfortable, lots of time spent sitting around pooping out eggs and probably wanting something stimulating to do, bodies not really suited for most physical activity)
• Cities are half-buried arcologies that are dark and claustrophobic by human standards but resulted in strong institutional knowledge of engineering closed systems which means (if in an interstellar sci-fi setting) they contribute a lot to the galaxy's orbital habitat/spaceship design
• Children raised in communal creches by a class of dedicated workers, they don't really have a "parental instinct" as we understand it but their childcare workers are the best you could ask for. They view the nuclear family as akin to a society where everyone has to build their own car in their garage instead of just taking a damn train
• Their equivalent to the neolithic revolution was the rise of poly-queen societies, that is, polities that could organize around and maintain internal cohesion with multiple queens

Post 1, intro/general

Post 2, flight enabled by plasma thrusters

Post 3, Immortality via brain-backups

We love trains on Hexbear. Trains are fast and efficient.

The reason is because friction is low: steel wheels on steel tracks.

What's got even less friction than steel-on-steel? Maglev trains. Steel-on-air.

What would have less friction than that? Steel-on-nothing. Therefore: put the maglev train in a tube and suck out the air.

Linear electric motors in the track create a moving magnetic field which pulls the levitated vehicle along.

Maintaining a vacuum thousands of km long is the number one engineering challenge, but is by no means impossible with sufficiently advanced tech. Advanced materials like nanotubes will help.

No vacuum is perfect. These have a pressure of 1 Pa (0.00001 atmospheres)

Various concepts have said 2,000 to 8,000 km/h. In this worldbuilding, they achieve 6,000 km/h, which is ambitious but not maxing out ambition.

Travel time

Two very distant cities like Shanghai and Mexico City: 2h10m

Two maximally-distant places like Galicia and New Zealand: 3h30m

Then you have to get from the train-station to the party, but that takes you less than 30 minutes (likely 10) with the urbanism discussed in post #1.

Submerged floating tunnels

The sea is crossed by submerged floating tunnels.

These are an entirely feasible concept that has never been built for investment-risk and regulatory reasons. The tunnel is neither on the surface of the sea nor on the seabed, but tethered either to floating things at the top or anchors on the bed, so the tunnel is suspended mid-water.

Deeper than 150m, there are no waves at all, but 20-50m is fine. The pressure difference between 0 on the inside of the tunnel and a few atmospheres on the outside underwater: well submarines handle that pressure difference every day.

Post 1, intro/general

Post 2, flight enabled by plasma thrusters

I had mentioned the 'Singularity' in a previous version, but that was incorrect. Fully automated luxury communism is much more accurate.

To make personality/identity/memories survive physical destruction, we need to scan the exact state of a brain. Then a replacement can be 3-D printed from cloned cells and electrically/optogenetically stimulated until it has your connectomic pattern. Now if you get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus, you carry on from your last save-point.

A word on philosophy is necessary here. Some philosophical theories would say "that's just a copy, not a continuation! It's a different person, albeit an identical different person." For the purposes of this post, let's say Zhuangzi's philosophy is correct; the feeling of I-ness is the same everywhere it occurs. It's modified by different specifics, different memories and cognitive tendencies, but the sense of 'I' is universal. It therefore follows that an exact copy of a brain will be the same person; there is no unique identity that could be lost in copying; the thoughts, memories, tendencies, and the universal sense of 'I' are all there is.

First we need a perfect scan of your brain; that's the hard part. It's dark in there, and electrical signals all overlap and get lost in the noise.

Destructive brain-scanning is by far the most realistic

There's actually one very plausible way to scan the exact state of a brain. We cut the brain into very thin slices, and scan each with an electron microscope.

Those of you who know a lot of science might have spotted an issue. Slicing someone's brain into small wafers to feed into a scanner can have adverse effects on that person.

You would be dead for a while while your brain is analysed, and a perfect copy is made. At the end you walk out merrily, knowing your backup is now saved on the cloud with redundant backups. Current techniques would take weeks to scan a brain, but this will surely speed up in the future.

This would be one option for fictional immortality. The issue is: dicing up brains is extremely gothic. It was supposed to be a hedonistic utopia, not the surgical-horror genre. Vibes and science both matter for worldbuilding. I could go for the artistic fix: this backup system gives citizens a confident attitude towards Kali herself. That's the image at top: he is coming out of the clinic laughing about his death because he's beaten it. You celebrate your backup date, go in to the procedure, and come out happy your soul is safe. I could say it takes three days. The idea of a society where every joe routinely dies for three days then comes back to life having conquered death is religiously very funny.

Non-destructive perfect brain-scanning will require a bunch of microendoscopes

You may think you could scan a living brain from the outside, with a helmet. Put that out of your head. It can't be done, not to the level of detail we need here.

It must be done invasively. The challenge is to make tiny probes (microendoscopes) that run throughout the whole brain and scan from the inside. This is exactly the same idea as the neural lace from books I haven't read:

• The scanner must have spatial resolution good enough to map each neuron. (Perhaps even finer spatial resolution is required, scanning dendritic spine structures; the truth is we don't know how the brain works, so we don't know what information is relevant.)

• The scanner must have the temporal resolution to track each firing-event, in other words 1-2 millisecond framerate.

We can scan the brain thoroughly by putting in loads of things, but then 5% of your brain is gone and you're in trouble: (blue area represents scanning range)

So make the probes really small? But now we have unscanned brain regions, and the point was to get a complete map of the brain:

We must balance two conflicting goals: get probes 'close enough' to every part of the brain, while leaving as much brain tissue as possible alone/minimising the total volume of the neural lace. That link from before about neural lace says it occupies less than 0.5% of the brain volume.

Optical scanning can get to 1.6mm

The first decision to make is what scanning modality: electric or optical. The electric ones like Neuropixels allow very miniaturized shanks, which is good but ultimately they just can't scan far enough away from the tooltip. Electrical waves caused by neuronal activity get lost in background noise within 0.1mm. If you tried to scan the brain electrically, you end up with this again –

Photons travel further, so the neural lace will have to be a bunch of optical microendoscopes. These also have the advantage of seeing dendritic structures, which electrodes do not.

The paper 'In vivo two-photon microscopy to 1.6-mm depth in mouse cortex' shows photonic microscopy can go deep. 1.6mm is an impressive penetration depth (at least that's what I tell my girlfriend).

We can double that

Two opportunities for massive improvement...

• A paper called 'In Vivo Deep-Brain Structural and Hemodynamic Multiphoton Microscopy Enabled by Quantum Dots' reported 2.1mm deep scanning by replacing the photonic flashes with quantum dots. (Quantum dots are nanoscale crystals (they're not quantum-sized; misleading name) that trap and emit photons in special tunable ways.)
• Most challenges become much easier if you take a moment to clear your head first. 'In Vivo Optical Clearing of Mammalian Brain' on biorxiv shows how some simple non-toxic molecules can make the brain more transparent to light temporarily. And their gains are huge: they report the signal-to-noise ratio improved by 385%. That means 2.2× scanning distance, from 2.1mm to 4.6mm (signal falls off with distance (inverse-square) so distance scales to the square root of signal-to-noise ratio.)

How big is the probe?

A paper from 2011 with DOI 10.1117/12.874883 describes a side-viewing, all-optical probe 250 micrometers in diameter.

I would have preferred much smaller; human hair is 50 to 100 micrometers. However this is a hard limit; if you miniaturized any more there wouldn't be enough photons to count. Electric scanning would have allowed something much thinner, but has a worse scanning depth (and ultimately a worse ratio of probe diameter to scanning depth).

How big is the neural lace?

We said we could get scanning depth of 4.6mm. In theory you could have a space between probes 2× their scanning depth (9.2mm); their ranges would meet in the middle. In practice, you should allow a good overlap. Let's put them 6.8mm apart.

If the distance between probes is s, and probes are packed hexagonally (the correct choice of geometry when covering a field with radii), then each probe is responsible for scanning an area ≈ (√3/2)·s²

• If the probes are 6.8mm apart, one probe per 40mm² That's the area of unpoked tissue.
• And the area of the pokers: the diameter (as we already saw) was 0.25mm, so r 0.125mm, and πr² = 0.05mm²

So the lace occupies about 0.125% of the brain.

We said each probe scans a cross-sectional area of 40mm². The human brain is less than 320× that in cross-section, so picture about 320 threads, each 2½-5 times thicker than a human hair (depending on what kind of hair you have lol), running through your brain back to front, and meeting at an external plug behind your ear that you'll use for backups.

Snapshots, not life-logging

Don't mistake this for something that reads all your thoughts all the time. It enables you to go in for a backup. Maybe you go in for a backup every year on your birthday. Your memories are backed up to that point and if you are thrown into a vat of acid, you'll (subjectively) revive at the backup clinic.

Reasons it takes a few hours once a year –

• The photons have to be excited by shooting infra-red lasers into the brain. This will inevitably generate some heat. The backup-technicians do it bit-by-bit to avoid cooking the brain. Your head has water running over it throughout to remove heat. This is part of the strange but strangely pleasant experience, like getting your hair washed professionally at the salon.
• You have to get injected with the quantum dots
• You have to get take the brain-clearing chemicals.
• Light inside the brain has chemical effects that are themselves toxic, so a few hours exposure a year is best.
• Brain activity has to be logged for a few hours to give sufficient data. When we are measuring single neurons firing from 'distant' (3mm or so) probes, we are counting photons on our fingers. We need a decent logging window to make valid inferences with good p values.
• Some neurons are dormant, won't naturally fire during a few-hour logging window. So these get stimulated by external non-invasive brain-stimulation (doesn't have to be neuron-level precise). This adds to a trippy experience.

This is great news for privacy; it's not a thought-tracking technology, it's a backup-storage technology.

After considering a few technologies for flight, I settled on plasma thrusters, because their ear-æsthetics and eye-æsthetics are both – take a look.

Any time you see a flying car in fiction humming and shooting glowing stuff out the bottom, that's plasma.

Ion drives have received a lot of attention for spacecraft propulsion, but here I am talking about in-atmosphere air-breathing ones, like the one in this 2020 paper from Wuhan University. (There's video of their thruster firing in the link.)

The study demonstrated a plasma drive that would be sufficient for an all-electric flying car or jetpack. Let's see what that would look like...

Thrust density –

• Thrust density (the amount of thrust per square-meter of exhaust) is low in other kinds of ion-drive, but the air-breathing one in the paper gets "2.4 × 10⁴ N/m²"
• This means a square meter of exhausts could lift 2400kg
• A flying car would need to lift less than 1600kg, so need thrusters ⅔ of a square meter spread across the bottom of the car.
• A thruster the size of an A4 sheet of printer paper could lift 136kg, sufficient for the jetpack in the top picture. These thrusters are spread across boots, gloves, and backpack for extra stability and ccontrol.

Energy

• The thruster in the paper "can generate approximately 10 N of thrust at 400 W", so 400W to lift 1kg. (It takes 10N to lift 1kg in Earth's gravity.)
• The flying car is an all-electric vehicle, electricity-to-flight. Hydrogen liquid has an energy density over 30,000 watt-hours per kilogram, way over even advanced batteries. So the vehicles will compress or liquify hydrogen and use them to power the flight. This is wasteful on energy (because compressing it takes energy) but we don't care about being efficient here.
• The jetpack will use about 36 kilowatts (call the person plus their clothes plus the device plus their stuff 100kg). If you store 1kg of hydrogen you get one hour flight-time
• Call the flying car 1500kg, and it'll use 535kW to go straight up, but going vertically up or down "requires about three times more power than forward flight". When the engines are pushing forward (not up) and wings are lifting, it'll use more like 200kW

Post 1 about this world

88-word prècis

Superhuman AIs called the AMIs (advanced machine intelligences) run a fully-automated luxury communist economy for humans on 15% of the globe (mostly in dense megacities). The rest is a wildlife preserve.

Immortality is achieved by brain-computer interfaces that create a cloud-backup of your connectome. Disease and aging ended by biotech.

Fusion creates abundant energy.

You have a brain-computer interface that controls 2-3 helper-robots.

This creates a leisure society. It’s like living in a luxury hotel with room service and maid service.

Advanced transport including pods-in-tubes, vactrains, and flying-cars.

Hexbear will hate some stuff about this –

• Techno-optimism. AI optimism
• Individualistic, alienated culture
• A hierarchy. AIs are superior to people in many ways

And things Hexbear will like –

• Centralised means of production. AI Gosplan. Fully-automated luxury communism. There's no money, no markets.
• There's no class hierarchy within humanity. Everybody lives in roughly equal luxury as a passive recipient of the fruits of the means of production (the Marxist definition of 'class' is 'a person's relationship to the means-of-production')
• Profit has become zero so capitalism can't exist. Marx said profit is exploited human labour. Full automation = no profit.
• Environmentalism. 85% of Earth is given to Nature. No animal agriculture.

If I create a world that you can't decide if it's utopia or dystopia, then that's better art.

Brave New World illustrates how a world where abundance, pleasure, and luxury make life meaningless and holllow. Same here. But there's a lot of perks too. Like Huxley, I'm leaning into the alienation. My tech-stack is very different; Brave New World has low-caste workers doing menial work whereas this world has inanimate machines.

This is the opposite of the solarpunk world (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in two ways –

• The solarpunk world was heavy on decentralised unalienated labour. Things there were made by hand, and production has a lot of positive externalities like community-building and Right Livelihood. Here all the work is automated and humans are useless but materially wealthy.

• The solarpunk world was frugal on energy. A watt saved is a watt earned. This world is the opposite: create energy abundance and just let 'er rip. There's a theory that development happens by maximising energy throughput and not worrying much about efficiency. However, I will make some mentions of energy efficiency coz I couldn't help myself.

Immortality in 250 words

Firstly, there’s biological immortality. Like a vampire, you don’t age or get sick. This is due to medical interventions that mop up senescent cells and the other hallmarks of aging.

But even youthful people can be killed in a violent accident. (This is rare because of good transport, strong architecture, good emergency services etc. Also, the skull is reinforced with titanium or carbon fibre or something.)

In those cases, your mindstream is kept going by putting it in a new cloned body. A cloned body is grown in a lab (this takes months), and the cloned brain is stimulated to replicate your connectome. Your connectome has been mapped by a neural lace.

I want people being people, unlike some post-Singularity visions. I don’t want them merging their minds into something digital. And there’s a scientific justification for this: digital information can be transferred between machines seamlessly (I typed these words on my machine and now they’re appearing on yours) (Claude E. Shannon's 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ proved this), but the brain is an analogue computer. In analogue machines, the information is inseperable from the hardware. Only a cloned brain that is physically identical to yours can be you. You can’t sublimate into a VR world. You can’t directly transfer thoughts or skills or memories to another brain. This is explained here.

The experience of dying is: your flying car blows up. You wake up in a lab six months later, with memories intact as far as your latest cloud-backup.

Fully-automated luxury communism in 250 words

The AMIs (advanced machine intelligences) have designed a fully-automated means-of-production. Humans don't have to work, either physical or mental work.

Cities are built by huge and small robots, giant 3-D printers, biomimetic self-assembly. Architecture by generative A.I.

Want some new clothes? Order it on your personal computer (described below) and it shows up at your door. Fashion design by generative A.I. You could even input a bunch of outfits you like and the generative A.I. would give you more of the same.

Hungry? Your auto-kitchen can cook for you at home, you can order delivery (from automated kitchens) or the cities are packed with restaurants and buffets. Culinary arts by generative A.I. The world feels a lot like a fancy hotel or resort.

Want a new gadget, toy, or product? Just order it on your computer. The software that runs the economy fulfills most requests. A request for a personal flying car or a mega-robot will likely be denied. No money changes hands; the request is either accepted or denied. (This suggests a plotline: what if one human finds her requests for 100-tonne megarobots, personal airships etc. are all fulfilled? Why her? The reasons of the AMIs are inscrutable.)

Want a tropical beach holiday? Those are a bit scarce; not even the AMIs can put 100s of millions of people on the Bahamas at the same time. But request it. You are free to request an apartment on the other side of the world, and things will be shuffled around if possible. Or you can request two weeks in a holiday resort –

A future post will describe one kind of robotic factory.

Transport

90% of people live in high-density cities. Everywhere the AMIs have built their cities, they have built tube-transport like in 'Logan's Run'

In that film you can't see what type of track it is; let's say it's maglev as energy isn't a priority, and a smooth, silent, luxurious ride is.

Electric micromobility to compliment that (all good cities have several ways of getting around):

Flying cars are used occasionally, especially in rural. They are generally not privately owned, more like robotaxis. They ionise air and expel it to generate thrust using technology developed by scientists in Wuhan in 2020. This is very energy-hungry (400 watts per kg) but exploring application of energy abundance is the point. This gives you an ion-drive or magnetoplasmadynamic flying car like I was trying to think about here. Here they are portrayed on screen –

• Black Panther: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_yQD_s8f8 (youtube link 1)
• Altered Carbon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s3ciq4uYZk&t=60s (youtube link 2)

This same tech could be used in a jetpack. I'll try to download a picture from the multiversal interwebs for a future post.

For international travel, there is a global vactrain network. This will have its own post. It goes at 6000km/h around the world, replacing airports.

Hypersonic planes and futuristic cars are leisure-vehicles, there mostly for æsthetics.

Exoskeleton

Why use a vehicle at all? You're in superb shape from bio-engineering, you can just run.

In fact, let's go further... A top athlete can generate like 1500W from their body (1, 2).

If you could output 4000W you'd run like a superhero. Strap on an exoskeleton with tiny powerful motors, strong ceramics, advanced algorithms for smooth motion and intuitive control (it just reads what you're doing and amplifies it), and hydrogen fuel (hydrogen's an inefficient supply-chain but we don't care about that, and is a superb weight-saver over batteries) –

There are exoskeleton-sports and non-exoskeleton-sports. It's a leisure society so sport is important.

Nanotechnology

I could've gone the alternative route of drexlerian nano assemblers where everything is made with decentralized desktop fabs, but I chose not to. It would probably have been more realistic, because a civilisation with enough technological sophistication will understand how to manipulate atoms. This would make factories obsolete: production would be very decentralised.

Really pushing nano gets into weird territory and I wanted a more understandable world (same reason I don't have digitised/uploaded minds). "One of the most remarkable figures calculated in Nanosystems is the power-to-weight ratio of the electric motor described in section 11.7. For comparison, a typical automobile engine might produce 100kW power. Drexler motors producing the same power would occupy a volume of a tenth of a cubic millimeter, about the same as a single hair from one of my eyebrows." – A world where something barely visible can produce enough mechanical force to punch a hole right through me is weird to think about and scares me as an animal. Utility fog is weird to think about and changes everything.

Geography and Nature Preserves

The human population is nothing unusual; it's between 8 billion and 11 billion.

Hugely increased population density, and most of the world left to wild nature.

90% live in dense cities. The general historical trend of urbanisation justifies this.

City population density = 25,000/km² (Comparable to Manhattan's 28,873.0/km²)

• 9 billion city-boys at that density = 360,000km² = the size of Germany is built up (spread around the world)
• 1 billion rurals @ 130 per km² = 7.7 million km² = the size of Australia lives is rural human habitation (spread around the world)
• Everything minus a Germany and an Australia is a nature preserve!

The Nature Preserves aren't off-limits. You can camp there with permission and there are some lodges. Enter without permission and the AMIs will throw you out.

The cities are 90% park, 10% tall buildings averaging 24 floors in height. That gives the city a floor-to-area ratio of 2.4 to 1. It means each person has 96m² of floor space (and 36m² of park). Rather than being just vertical towers, they also have a lot of spaghetti-like tunnels and horizontal corridors in the sky.

No reason a city can't be floating in the sea.

Personal computing and helper-robots (231 words)

You can draft commands using a simple brain-computer interface. These exist in Terra; people with locked-in syndrome can transcribe to computers at 78 wpm as of 2022. You confirm the command with a wave of your hand. (I might do a future post focusing on brain-computer interfaces; this is the simplest kind; the mind-state-backup is much more complex.)

You can use these commands to interact with a computer like you're doing now. It's simply a more advanced keyboard. You can text a friend, search for information, talk to a chatbot. You can also issue commands like 'clean my room' to your helper-robots. The robots have enough onboard smarts to take care of the details, though they are still well below human-level intelligence.

Different people have different robots. A typical example: one hexapod robot the size of a terrier, one 40kg humanoid robot, and a swarm of cockroach-sized robots too (useful for cleaning small spaces). Overall you have 50-80kg of robots under your exclusive command, wired to your brain, commanded by a thought + a wave of the hand. The effect is like an extension of your power to influence the physical environment.

Computer output consists mostly of a speaker embedded in your ear plus a contact-lens display. You can think messages, send them to your friend on the other side of the world, and she will hear them in her ear.

Culture

It's an individualistic culture. The base (in the Marxist sense) doesn't make you depend on other people. It promotes indulging your whims. If you want to flex your inner Calvinist, you can work hard at self-improvement. There's no work to do, you could create art but A.I can do it better – as for science forget about it. A lot of people devote their lives to practicing Buddhism.

Does the luxury make you lazy and despondent? Maybe, but a counterpoint is that you're biologically hearty, have a strong constitution.

You can choose to have children in the normal way (not pod-people like in Brave New World). But many people simply don't. A low death rate often statistically corresponds to a low birth rate. Childrearing would be easy because you have loads of time and helper-robots.

There are reasons to expect loneliness and reasons not to. Bowling Alone attributes some to urban sprawl (solved), some to time-pressure (solved), and a lot to technology (exacerbated).

James C. Scott in his book on Zomia has a section about 'The Advantage of Not Having a History'. What political forces shaped this world? How did we get from 2025 to here? Was there a resistance, and a massacre? Ask a citizen of the world and they won't know; they don't think about things like that.

Agriculture

Although there are a billion people living rurally, they don't farm (except as a hobby). The food is made by the automated system. A lot of food (not all) is unicellular. GM yeasts can be programmed to produce any protein (that's a scientific fact, not worldbuilding). Microalgae.

That might make it sound like you're eating gruel without texture, but the robots know how to transform those base materials into excellent food. Every meal is fine dining, plus maybe one bowl of spiced flavoured porridge a day. This is nutritionally-optimised by advanced bio-medico-nutritional insights. Everyone is in superb health.

There are also greenhouses where vegetables etc. are grown under LED lights (energy is abundant, remember). This has the effect of saving land for the Nature Preserves. Cultured meat.

Energy

It's mostly deuterium-deuterium fusion from seawater.

• Fusing six deuterium atoms yields 43.225 MeV
• Converting this to moles and megawatt-hours, each mole yields 193.05 megawatt hours
• There are 33 grams of deuterium in every m³ of seawater
• Number of m³ of seawater to use daily – There are 1.3 quadrillion m³ of seawater on earth = we can use 35 million m³ a day without running out of seawater for 100,000 years
• Deuterium is extracted from seawater by graphene 1, 2
• Number of megawatt-hours per m³ of seawater – 33×193 = about 6369, but lets call it 5600 after inefficiciencies.
• 5600 × 35 million = 196 billion megawatt-hours per day. Divide that by the hours in a day = 8 billion megawatts

That's not even counting other sources, like boron-fusion, solar, and geothermal.

So if the world population is 8 billion, you can use up to a megawatt per day. That's where I got the personal megawatt idea. (Personal Megawatt also happens to be the name of my prog-rock band.)

I basically scrapped half the timeline. I was trying to focus on historical material forces, basically writing out broad trends instead of just event, event, event, Great Person doing stuff. then backfill with events as the trends start to collide.

I'm reformatting it. will still mostly be by "month" instead of dates unless something important happens. going to be formatted like this (example): 1946 (North America) (Economic) March: Stuff here

location could be regional, national, global, or hemisphere. Economic, military, social, personality(ies). i need this to better organize the mess. also i'm getting stage fright i really don't want to come across as sectarian or whatever. this isn't a utopian wishcast project I have a narrative reason for stuff to happen as they do (it's going to be an RPG setting and I need conflict, antagonists, threats).

still though, my primary goal is to create a semi plausible modern world worth fighting for against forces beyond Earth. but the timeline should have utility for more historically accurate stuff, but be aware as it closes onto 1985 it will become increasingly cyberpunk (colonial powers) and solarpunk (socialist/progressive/communists). after 85 all bets are off and it will be my own personal project

first 5 years coming soon! enjoy seeing my creative process it's a messy bitch

That's the post

it's pretty useful. you can do it by nations or sub-divisions within nations. great for alt-history

paid features aren't needed they are just extra frills.

something i'm working on. FDR dies in January of 1945 before the dems can replace Wallace with Truman, and he finishes WW2 without dropping the atom bomb and works towards cooperation with the Soviets while alienating the old European colonial powers.

i have a general timeline that I'm cleaning up right now and doing more historical fact checking and adding more granular events (right now it's just month to month and general summaries). the timeline is coherent and has a theme. I'm nervous about doing the Soviet Union stuff (it's been very vague) because i don't want to sound uneducated (i am). so I'm welcome to any suggestions. i'll post the first couple years shortly

but i'm afraid to embarass myself too much and come across as too libshit

my biggest struggle is what (if anything) would Stalin do if he no longer felt under siege (immediate post war)? did he have plans to clean up the party bureaucracy and bolster the constitutional order? assume he has extensive economic support, no threat of hostile intelligence ops, and a friendly U.S. admin sincerely trying to build a "one world, two systems, one end goal" order.

just know that in the end the U.S. is going to be more or less market-soc/dem-soc with one party (multiple faction) dominance, and the Soviets will be mostly centrally planned, embracing cybernetics, but maintaining an NEP style consumer economy. Market socialism (with various levels of planning, from full Cooperative economies to Dengist-style) will become the dominant and median economic ideology of the Free World, with various strains of social progressivism (much accelerated from our own timeline)

also expect a lot of thematic inversions from our timeline, mostly done for narrative reasons. I still need conflict and a sort of "cold war" to make a good story, it's not just pure utopian wishcasting. yes the nationalists win in China, but Mao gets to take his forces to Korea and helps lead Sung's forces to victory

EDIT: I will post the first couple years in a separate post. i need feedback on the Stalin stuff. so far it's just a secret meeting between Eleanor Roosevelt and Stalin, mediated through Eleanor's bestie Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She delivers him a letter (may or may not be legit) from the late FDR telling him to put on a big show about rooting out "corruption" and "ensuring full democratization" for the world stage. With the letter is a list of names of British and French agents, as well as some promises and call backs to them making fun of Churchhill for being cringe. FDR admits to being a liberal capitalist at his core, but tells Stalin Wallace may be more ideologically aligned with him then he believes.

One of the key things that has halted so much progress of my worldbuilding project is trying to get the "science" or "foundational physics" of it right.

I don't want to spoil too much, but it's a vaguely SCP-style project, so if you know what SCP is, you might know a little bit about my project, but only a bit, because I'm trying to solve a lot of my perceived criticisms with SCP in my own project.

At first, it was generic multiverse stuff. I said, "The reason anomalous things exist is because they came through a multiversal portal and they infested the earth." Looking back on it now, it was not only atrocious and trope-y from a writing perspective, but it was also racist as fuck.

A lot of my old writing was pretty bad, in a thousand ways, but at least I put shit out back then. Now I can barely put shit out with how much I feel like I need to tweak and change.

I keep on revising and revising and revising. At least I'm abandoning the "multiverse" thing and trying to integrate dialectical materialist philosophy into it, not solely due to the fact that it's based, but because it might actually enhance my project's quality a bit, in my opinion.

My basic premise is "a sub-quantum layer of reality exists, it's chaotic, but sometimes it can become stable, and this is when reality is formed, but reality dissolves when it reverts back to being chaotic, in an endless cycle." But, that's really just the basic premise, and I still feel like it'll need a lot of tweaks / specifications before it becomes solid enough to base my entire project around.

It's just such a headache, 'cause I don't think I can ever get a final draft, I just keep revising. I'm balancing entertainment value, dialectical materialism, and possibility, and it's a headache.

Any advice / discussion welcome.

Musashino Animation (Japanese: {武|む}{蔵|さし}{野|の}アニメーション, Hepburn: Musashino Animēshon), often abbreviated as Musani (Japanese: ムサニ, Hepburn: Musani) is Japan's state-owned animation studio under the Ministry of Culture, Athletics, Science and Education. It is a parent organization to Musashino Litera, a publishing house for manga and light novels; Musashino Animation and Musashino Litera in fact share the same offices, with headquarters in Musashino, Tokyo, and regional offices in Uji and various locations across Tokyo.

Musashino Animation was formally established on April 1, 2035, in the wake of the Japanese Revolution which conclusively ended the War of 101.5 Islands and established socialism in Japan. The studio was created through the revolutionary government's forced acquisitions of a number of prominent animation studios and production companies in the country, including Toei, Kyoto Animation, Studio Ghibli, Deen, Pierrot, MAPPA, MADHOUSE, Satelight, OLM, Nippon Animation, Bandai Namco Filmworks, Twin Engine, Bones, Tezuka Productions, Triangle Staff, Khara, BENTEN Film, J.C.Staff, Shaft, WIT STUDIO, Bee Train, Production I.G, Silver Citrus, Tatsunoko Productions, Artland, Studio Ponoc, and P.A.WORKS.

It was in fact from a 2014 original animated series created by the last of these studios that Musashino Animation got its name: a defictionalization of Musashino Animation from Shirobako by P.A.WORKS. In Shirobako, the name "Musashino Animation" was chosen as a reference to Kyoto Animation, also referencing the Musashino area of Tokyo as a historic center of Japanese animation.

The creation of a state animation studio, following a precedent set by previous socialist states such as Korean April 26 Animation Studio in Korea and Soyuzmultfilm in the Soviet Union, was seen as a particularly weighty decision in Japan: the country had by the time of the socialist revolution come to create a majority of the world's annual output of televised animation, with Japan's animation industry being a major entry-level employer for young adults. The Japanese animation industry was in pre-revolutionary times infamous for its widespread labor rights issues including sexism, as well as for the often highly reactionary content of its output, and for the pre-revolutionary government's financial support for the industry as a tool of soft power in bourgeois interests as part of the "Cool Japan" project. For these reasons, the revolutionary government found it worthwhile to "seize the anime national asset and utilize it in the interest of the global proletariat".

Musashino Animation today primarily makes animation for public broadcasters such as Japan's own Shin-NHK. Musashino Animation's works are often international co-productions with animation studios in other countries, such as Studio Mensôre in the Ryukyu Islands. Musashino Animation announced the Open Sign Language Animation Project — an official partnership with Locoti's public broadcaster PDS — on March 1, 2061; this partnership pioneered the practices of slubbing, which have profoundly improved media accessibility for Deaf people, promoted sign language proficiency among the general public, and aided in the revitalization of once-endangered sign languages such as Hand Talk.

Musashino Animation was recognized as a world leader of the open culture movement prior to the Coordinating Body's Resolution to Abolish Intellectual Property in 2067. Musashino Animation holds frequent writing contests and training programs and encourages fan labor. Musashino Animation also maintains LibreToonz, the most popular fork of the now-discontinued 2D animation software OpenToonz.

It is important to note that although Musashino Animation is by far the largest and most prolific animation studio in Japan today, it is certainly not the only animation studio in the country. Some Japanese animation studios which survived the Japanese Revolution and continue to operate today include A-1 Pictures, David Production, PINE JAM, Science SARU, and Fanworks, among a number of others; all of these studios are today worker-owned. Many other animation studios in Japan, however, ended up shutting down in the period immediately preceding and following the Japanese Revolution. Contrarily, post-revolutionary Japan has over the course of the past few decades seen the growth of a number of new regional animation studios such as Mosir Doga, reversing the historical trend of agglomeration.

I've found worldbuilding starts with one thought –

• What sort of world would see indigenous cultures flourish instead of colonial ones?

• "I believe in benevolent dictatorship, provided the dictator is me"

It's crazy how one sentence can lead on to thousands of words of detail.

Does anyone else have a similar process?

The Fina Venko (Esperanto for "Final Victory") refers to the sudden and sharp rise in the prominence of the Esperanto language during the 2060s, with the number of proficient speakers of the language sharply rising from an estimated 10 million in 2050 to approximately 2 billion by 2070, or 1/5th of the human population at the time.

The Act to Establish the Official Languages of the Union, passed by the Council of the Leagues of Commons of Turtle Island on January 17th, 2060, is generally recognized as the beginning of the Fina Venko. This law, intended to break the disproportionate political power of Anglophones in early Locoti, designated Esperanto as Locoti's spoken lingua franca on the basis of its similarities to the three most widely spoken languages in the union at the time: English, Spanish, and French. The law simultaneously designated the then-endangered Hand Talk as Locoti's signed lingua franca, with primacy over Esperanto as part of Locoti's Indigenous language policy. The law further enacted a number of other policies as part of the Crush Anglo Chauvinism campaign of Locoti's first five-year plan.

Following Locoti's embrace of Esperanto, the European Federation designated Esperanto as one of its own federal languages at the conclusion of its own socialist revolution in 2062. The Constitution of the European Federation also designates Interslavic and European American Sign Language (EASL) as federal languages, with Interslavic being favored in the Slavic-speaking states of the federation, and Esperanto being favored in most other states.

Being an official language of two of the four founding member states, Esperanto was also designated an official language of the Coordinating Body (CB) at its foundation in 2063. Esperanto has been included in every edition of the CB's list of Languages for Cultivation as Lingue Franche ever since, and the momentum provided by the Coordinating Body's embrace of Esperanto kept global interest in the language growing for the rest of the 2060s. By the end of the decade, however, Esperanto had only managed to gain a foothold in the rest of Abya Yala, and had otherwise been outcompeted by languages such as Standard Chinese, Swahili, and Modern Standard Arabic as regional lingue franche, with International Sign establishing itself as the global lingua franca.

Nonetheless, although Esperanto's growth as a second language had leveled off by 2070, Esperanto's growth as a first language would continue until 2090. These native Esperantists now comprise the largest share of the Esperanto community, as the ultimate success of Esperanto left non-natives with fewer reasons to participate in the community.

While working on what is basically just glorified fan fiction I thought about how true space exploration/colonization will likely not be possible without world socialism.

A Hypothetical Future, likely hundreds of years from now

Social Background

This is following collapse of the U.S., a large regional war, the rise of China as industrial and research superpower, various climate wars, mass migrations, and expansion of a new international socialism that will be unlike anything we could predict today (and might even upset some, it could borrow from a variety of normally oppositional sects). Whatever it is, the material conditions of that moment, as well as historical forces, will give birth to it. Likely a number of currents, some Marxist, some ad-hoc, will form a mutual project and later a Federation. A glorious tapestry of local flavors of worker dominated governments, from libertarian socialist/anarchist collectives to Marxist-Leninist state powerhouses, all united under a world forum government against the bourgeois and exploitation of old.

A short history over a century or so

As capitalist nation after nation falls to rule by the working class, more frantic efforts will be made by the bourgeois to both make Hail Mary colonies (planetary or orbital), set up basic industry to sustain them, and otherwise bootstrap. They will flee from one nation-state to the next, trying to outrun the inevitable and strip their new "homes" for resources for this endevour. Con-men and grifters, they will bring wealth to poor nations and whisper promises, but really they are just there to build a few more rockets and leave wreckage in their wake. Eventually they will start to run out of places to loot, and some of these nations might even force ably exile these former rulers to space (basically a "you ruined the planet, you like space so much, why don't you go there and never come back").

As the world socialist project works on a massive climate change mitigation project, this nascent space society of capitalists, libertarians, reactionaries, and their lackeys is allowed to do whatever it wants outside of Earth's orbit. Eventually the last of the supply launches cease, and it's do or die. Using their stolen wealth, they manage to just barely establish a stable space economy that goes from Earth's Lagrange points, to Mars, and even the asteroids. It relies primary on large orbital stations, spun up to 1G, that receive unlimited energy from the sun and materials and volatiles from asteroids and intercepted comets.

There is an implicit threat here at all times: Leave us alone and we won't direct an asteroid at Earth. Vulnerable and recovering, the socialist nations of Earth make no moves against these "Spacers" as long as they stay out of low Earth orbit. Secretly, China and Russia (or their successor states) place weapons platforms in orbit. A promise of mutually assured destruction. Nobody can hide in space.

Over time (let's say it's around 2200ish), the world socialist project becomes a truly unified Earth government, living conditions are massively improved, and the Earth has a global baby boom as people again have something to live for and a world to bring up a family in. Tentative diplomatic agreements are made with the Spacers to be granted sovereignty where they are established and even trade (such as Earth produced materials/supplies in exchange for zero gravity manufactured stuff). Capitalism after all can hyper accelerate development, and even in space it has done so. They are always kept on a leash by Earth, but there is a sort of arms race cold war that develops.

As the terrestrial work week shortens to 30, then 20, and even 15 hours (meanwhile Spacer workers work 60-70 hrs/week in appalling conditions), most of humanity takes time to build a vibrant cultural scene and large swaths of the population, with universal access to education, start forming research cadres and Earth's technological progress supercharges. Post-scarcity on Earth is a realistic horizon now, with both fusion and solar power becoming mature and widespread. Life extension using regenerative biomedical science means a healthy quality of life until 100 or more. Sexuality and families become flexible and post-capitalist outside of some local respected cultural and religious norms. Gender becomes post-gender, and some experimentation with further biological modification becomes common.

While most cultures maintain their integrity, there is a new "Terran" culture that begins to form that unites humankind as comrades and children of Earth. True AI is developed and put in service of humanity as a whole, allowing central planning and automation in service to the People and further accelerating cultural and scientific development.

The Industrial Fabricator, a fully automated factory capable of micron scale precision, combines with highly distributed networks of local fabs, artisans, and craftspeople to produce a new economy of true abundance (lol fuck off ezra).

All of this possible because the worst of the worst bled the planet dry, and were forced off while the bulk of humanity spent generations planting trees, pushing back deserts, evacuating and housing the vulnerable, and rebuilding the husks the capitalists left behind. Often they did not even see significant results in their lifetimes, but did this knowing it would help their children and their comrade's children.

Earth, united and healed, returns to the Heavens

Soon the Earth government starts sending significant state assets into space. Research cadres, now with the state capacity of 21st century major nations, begin a flury of space exploration. Imperatives to secure the "wild west" of the last capitalists begins to drive manned expeditions and outposts. A research cadre maybe builds a Skyhook, space elevator, or magnetic accelerator to basically help assert it's authority over the Spacers and sovereignty over the Earth-Luna system. After all, the counter-revolutionaries (if there are any among them) cannot be allowed the high ground and dominance of the Solar System.

Meanwhile, the Spacers (divided into state-like oligarchic Corporate Blocs) entice bored young people of the large baby boom generation to offworld "adventure". Even in a developed socialist society, there will always be some enamored with being competitive and a promise of becoming a "king or queen", as well as reactionaries looking to escape or cultural/religious supremacists that see building an Orbital colony a way to escape the "godless commies". Counter-revolutionaries fail again and again, offering nothing to a content and purposeful global population, but mercifully are often simply exiled to Spacer colonies instead of being executed or imprisoned.

"Keep your capitalism and feudalism off our planet, you can go join your fellows up there. We'll even give you a free ride."

So basically the world socialist state slowly exerts it's influence against increasingly technologically backward Spacers, pushing them further into the frontier of the Solar system. A worker's revolt (supported by Earth) on the Mars colony establishes the Earth-Mars Collective. And the Spacers are pushed into the Outer System.

Advanced propulsion and power technologies are stolen by spies and Spacer AI systems, allowing them to scrape by. They remain backwards compared to Earth-Mars, but occasionally make their own breakthroughs often by just developing a novel but dangerous new method of using Earth tech. And of course, the elite of the Spacers live like kings of old, in orbital palaces. The vast majority are indentured servants, permanently indebted and highly policed and surveilled. Many of the wayward youth, betrayed, start seeds for militant unions and worker revolts. After all, they are typically educated and have connections back home.

And the Spacers need them. They always need fresh meat for the grinder.

So yeah this is just some basic background. Originally this was a project to fill my own timeline for Warhammer 40k's Age of Terra and Age of Technology and it can still be used by I might split it off into my own Kim Stanley Robinsonish semi-hard sci fi space opera. Like Expanse but more communist. With capitalism still there to add a dynamic setting and conflict (it's just too damn peaceful on Earth! everyone just hangs out at the theater and parks and wants for nothing!)

The Open Sign Language Animation Project (OSLAP, Esperanto: Aperta Signolingva Animacia Projekto, abbrev. ASLAP; Japanese: {自由手話|じゆうしゅわ}アニメプロジェクト, romanized Jiyū Shuwa Anime Purojekuto) is an official partnership between the Japanese state-owned animation studio Musashino Animation and Locotian public broadcaster PDS (formerly PBS), to create publicly-available Blender files and other free animation assets based on popular anime films and TV series, for the purposes of creating sign language versions of these anime. OSLAP pioneered the techniques of slubbing ("sign language dubbing"); these techniques have since the beginning of OSLAP been used by other groups to create sign language versions of other films and series, both animated and live-action.

The Open Sign Language Animation Project was first announced on March 1, 2061, and was initiated by PDS for the purposes of creating programming in Hand Talk, a sign language which was designated as Locoti's primary national language the previous year. PDS had prior to OSLAP only dubbed films and series into Esperanto — Locoti's second national language — with only a Hand Talk interpreter in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. The idea of completely remaking films and TV series in sign languages, rather than simply showing an interpreter on screen, came about from a belief that sign language remakes would be more immersive, legible and accurate, more effective as language learning resources, and would increase the prestige and public awareness of Hand Talk and other sign languages. The decision to remake classic anime specifically was primarily motivated by practical concerns.

Most of the anime remade by OSLAP are critically-acclaimed or extremely and enduringly popular across all age demographics and genders, particularly films and series created 50+ years ago. OSLAP slubs are released together as "golden collections"; as of 2080, these are the Studio Ghibli Golden Collection, the Animated Auteurs' Golden Collection, the Rumiko Takahashi Golden Collection, the World Masterpiece Theater Golden Collection, the Kyoto Animation Golden Collection, and the Magical Girl Golden Collection.

Although OSLAP follows the Coordinating Body's Sustainable Computing Guidelines, the project's use of motion capture technology, machine learning technology, and other technologies which increase the water footprint, electricity consumption and render times for the animations, have raised sustainability concerns among some critics. At the same time, although OSLAP has been praised as a mainstay of a new "golden age" of Deaf representation and sign language in popular media, the project has also been criticized for not involving the Deaf community enough in the animation process.

Process

Each slub begins with a planning stage. In this stage, which commonly employs crowdsourcing, anime are checked for considerations unique to that film or series, and the individual scenes are checked for the following^[non-exhaustive list]:

• mid-sentence cuts
• close-ups
• props or walls obscuring a character's hands or face
• narrators or other disembodied voices
• characters speaking out of frame
• characters with their backs turned to the camera or each other
• characters being spoken to while their eyes are closed
• scenes in low lighting or cramped spaces
• characters moving quickly or chaotically while speaking
• characters thinking
• characters speaking with both hands full
• characters wearing mittens
• deformation of a character's face or hands
• characters attempting to get each other's attention
• important sound effects whose sources are out-of-frame or not visible to the characters

The findings from this process are compiled into a report on whether the anime is considered to be "viable" for slubbing, and if so, what challenges must be overcome and which changes must be made. This report informs the script and storyboard, which are generally created by Deaf people or CODAs. Hearing characters in slubbed anime are often rewritten to be Deaf.

OSLAP slubs will generally reuse as much as they can from the original spoken-language version of the anime, including sound effects and music, background art, special effects, other animation and assets, and parts of the script and storyboard which can remain unmodified. A few other tropes are commonly employed to minimize differences between the spoken and sign language versions of an anime, such as presenting a disembodied narrator as a person in front of a projection screen; presenting a character's thoughts using a shoulder angel or a "team in the brain"; or using a "bubble in the corner" to depict a character or sound off screen without needing to change the camera angle. Talking animals are often rewritten to communicate telepathically.

The characters themselves will use 3D models, often fan-made, with an array of shaders and other effects to make them appear two-dimensional and as close to the original art style and frame rate as possible. These effects constitute the bulk of machine learning technology use in OSLAP slubs, although machine learning may also see limited use in background art, storyboarding, and other stages of the animation process. Amateur slubbers using OSLAP's files may disable some or all of these effects to reduce render times.

Most character animation is not done by Musashino Animation itself, and is instead done by PDS' in-house slubbing studio — or by other professional or amateur slubbing studios around the world — using motion capture technology.

Note: said society is preindustrial and has ample access to flowing water, but not fossil fuels or radioactive deposits. It also has access to mountain hot springs, which I thought could also be used as "batteries" during times when streams freeze. This last point is what set him off.

He also really hates wind turbines.