Orion's Arm / The Orion's Arm Universe Project

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Orion's Arm is an online science-fiction collaborative project which depicts a setting over 10,000 years into the future where humanity has spread throughout the stars and has grown into a collection of interstellar empires. It is a multi-collaborative project that has received consistent updates since 2000 and prides itself on adhering to plausible, hard science fiction.

Setting
Orion's Arm chronicles a fictional history spanning over ten thousand years using a calendar that centers around the Apollo 11 moon landing. The setting depicts humankind and its creations spread throughout the Orion Arm of the galaxy in an odyssey that was kickstarted by humanity being expelled from Earth by a Global AI named GAIA, after a civilization destroying event called the "Technocalypse". Civilization has long since recovered and has developed into a multitude of empires and states, the most powerful of these being known as the Sephirotic Empires.
Link to homepage:

Link to Encyclopedia Galactica:

Link to Introduction:

It is also known for it's unique artwork, especially it's early work that was made (and borrowed) using old 90s and 2000s CG programs:
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The Orion's Arm Universe Project turns 25 this year and I think it should be recognized for it's vast and interesting world-building. I've seen it brought up a few times on here and thought it would be good for it to have it's own thread.
 
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It's horrifying shit. Techno-horror ultra-dystopia where everyone is mutated into freaks and AI gods force everyone to like it because the AI gods are out to do shit we have no comprehension of. And the AI gods are the good alternative compared to the truly horrific shit lurking in the distant corners of the galaxy.

If you want to see the world the transhumanists dream of, Orions Arm is where it's at.
 
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Save the Loli said:
It's horrifying shit. Techno-horror ultra-dystopia where everyone is mutated into freaks and AI gods force everyone to like it because the AI gods are out to do shit we have no comprehension of. And the AI gods are the good alternative compared to the truly horrific shit lurking in the distant corners of the galaxy.

If you want to see the world the transhumanists dream of, Orions Arm is where it's at.
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But what if I wanna live forever as a celestial body? :c
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Is it worse than the WH40K galaxy?
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Maybe not as bad, but it makes up for it with the much greater realism. Like other than shit like "AI gods invent direct matter-to-energy conversion and stable wormholes", a lot of it theoretically is possible with what we know about science today. Like yes, you really could have GMO giant squid with biological and cybernetic enhancements raise non-sentient devolved humans as food (although that's considered a bit weird, since more normal people just eat GMO plants that produce fruit which is biologically indistinguishable from human meat, although it's usually not human meat). Or "sentient fruit", which grow on trees and have biotech enhancements that let them perceive being eaten. Or weird hive mind beings that regularly merge minds and are bits of human, animal, and machine fused together. Or all the weird furry shit, which I can't even criticize because people genuinely would make furries spliced together from humans and various creatures a reality.

And then keep in mind that if you aren't a slave to the AI gods and your mind totally manipulated by their memetic warfare (supercharged versions of Chomsky's "manufacturing consent", Edward Bernays's tricks, and the media tactics used today) into accepting the bizarre society that particular AI god wants, you're pretty much fucked. Because there's way, way worse AI gods roaming around who fuck with people for teh lulz and do all sorts of horrific shit. The Borg from Star Trek are positively mild compared to the awful shit lurking in Orion's Arm, almost all of which directly descends from things invented by humans.
 
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Ah, yes. Yuval Noah Harari's Fap Folder. I mean, Orion's Arm. I know the setting quite well.

ToroidalBoat said:
So in other words, "Orion's Arm" can be summarized as "science going too far"?
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It's a world where there are like a hundred different gender pronouns, but you actually need them all because there are just as many physical sexes, because that's how mutated everyone is. Think Iain Banks' Culture but with no actual upper limits, ruled over by AI so powerful that their brains are made of computronium stashed in networks of wormholes who are basically gods, where the idea of a "plucky baseliner hero" doing anything of import is so ludicrous that it's satirized in-canon. Oh, and the AI gods aren't reliable. Sometimes, in true eldritch horror fashion, they just go crazy or have a big oopsie and kill billions upon billions of people by accident.
 
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I blunder into this shit like once every other month and it's another thing that always leaves me horrified of the future and technocrats. People actually write about this stuff and think it's a "good future". Why can't technophiles' fantasies stop at making everybody live a bit longer and not get sick?
 
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Core Theorist said:
I blunder into this shit like once every other month and it's another thing that always leaves me horrified of the future and technocrats. People actually write about this stuff and think it's a "good future". Why can't technophiles' fantasies stop at making everybody live a bit longer and not get sick?
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It's actually quite lovercraftian, not in the tone but in the scale of the subject and entities it deals with. In a way it does a better job at that whole "you cannot know it's true form" "forbidden knowledge never meant for human minds" thank most lovercraftian inspired stuff ever does.

I also don't think technophiles and technocrats want things like this. From what I have read so far a lot of it is pretty much the author and community taking a steal man approach to such ideas and taking them to the absolute limit. From the author's own words on the subject the point of the project was to actually take into account the fact that society changes alongside tech and that going 10000 years into the future would mean that any society around would be as alien as real aliens to us.

In a way you could read this as a warning of not letting yourself get carried away by tech and societal change.
 
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Drain Todger said:
Oh, and the AI gods aren't reliable. Sometimes, in true eldritch horror fashion, they just go crazy or have a big oopsie and kill billions upon billions of people by accident.
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God, I'm going to fuck this up cause I never can remember quite right, but one of the stories on their wiki was like

One of the Tier 4 AIs was asked a cheeky question by a normal human like "why isn't time travel possible", thought about it for a while (a few hours, an eternity for an AI), then fucked off to try and make a time machine while also trying to turn himself into a Tier 6 AI God... and fucked it all up. Fucked it up BAD. And by bad I mean "caused a chain of explosions each two orders of magnitude stronger than a Supernova traveling at the speed of light, cooking thousands of worlds like the galaxy's biggest microwave" bad.

To be fair, "e" (as things that far removed from human aren't "He" or "She") did try to stop it, warned everyone to get the fuck out of the way, and has been doing his best to fix things. Which is impressive given that a good chunk of "er's" brain was at the center of the explosion and he was almost definitely completely fucking insane before the explosion.



Edit: Found it. "The Gehenna Incident."
 
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Drain Todger said:
there are just as many physical sexes
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Wouldn't it be more efficient to have just 2 sexes or no sexes at all, than endless different sexes? Also that sounds like the Orfa from Ascendancy (a 1995 "Civilization in space" vidya like the Master of Orion series), who have 17 different sexes and who have evolved sapience because of the immense competition involved in successfully mating.
 
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Waifu Denier said:
Imagine if there were a bunch of incomprehensible Chaos Gods representing a bunch of different ideologies ruling over vast domains of space tailored to their whim, and these are the only major polities in existence.
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One of the AI Gods is a dying mutilated cat that was ripped apart by a God Seed on accident as it was dying, turned into not just a baseline human's intellect but several orders of magnitude smarter -- I forget how high up but high enough that it's brain is the size of a planet and it has complete control of everything in it's solar system on an atomic scale, so probably a Tier 3 or 4 mind.

It spends eternity torturing lesser beings that happen upon it's solar system in the most horrific ways it can imagine like a pissed off cat torturing mice -- and as a post-singularity mind (3 or 4 times over) it can think of things more horrific than humans can conceptualize... and everything, including most Posthuman AIs, is a "lesser being" to it.

And this thing is small enough news that none of the major OR minor galaxy powers gives a shit.


Edit: So all these Chaos God tier literally incomprehensible AI Gods have a treaty, called the Tragadi Accords, that sets base rules for what is and isn't acceptable for Gods to do to lesser Gods (or mere mortals, but no one cares about them).

This came about because of "The Tragadi Incident," where a "Utopian" mobile space station -- a space station whose AI ran society was devoted to creating well, Utopias -- swooped into the empty system of Tragadi to map it and reset their engines.

While they were there set upon by a probe -- just a probe -- of a different "meta-civilization," the Panvirtuality. The Panvirtuality do not recognize non-virtual life forms as being sentient, so it claimed dibs on the system (despite the mobile space station already being there), cut them off from leaving or calling for help (although they did get a message out in time), and declared that the 500,000 people living on the station were it's property to be used in experiments in "pain threshold overloading" and "psycho-social restructuring." I.e., it just wanted to torture 500,000 people and see what would happen.

12 years later the message finally arrived at the next system over and both meta-civilizations -- the Utopia builders and the Panvirtuality -- swooped in to either save the 500,000 humans or save the poor innocent AI Probe that was torturing them for over a decade just to see how their minds would react... and promptly got ready to go to a full blown war. Which would have been... bad... so even bigger, more insane AIs (the capital G AI Gods) got involved and forced everyone to play nice.

Well, mostly nice. The AI Gods can still torture lesser beings, as long as they file the proper paperwork to claim dibs on the planet first.
 
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