
A little story...
-------------------

There's a little story behind Starmap and the sample galaxy that
I've included with this package which I thought I might share with
those of you who like stories. For the rest, you can stop reading
now. Nothing that I'm about to say will help you use this program.
Now, having said that... where should I begin?

The Hard vs Soft SF Discussion:
-------------------------------

I guess it all began in October of 1994 or thereabouts. I was
reading rec.games.frp.misc, and there was this discussion about
hard science fiction. I don't recall the general thrust of the
discussion. All I know is that I followed it as a lurker and got to
thinking that there's a real dichotomy in the field of science
fiction, or rather what we call science fiction. I mean, Star Trek
is considered to be science fiction. Ask any bookstore retailer.
There it is in the science fiction section, along with Star Wars
and Babylon 5 and stuff of that nature. But is it really science
fiction? I think what some folks in that discussion were contending
was that it's not really science fiction but rather space fantasy.
What distinguishes science fiction from space fantasy is that
science fiction could happen. It's plausible. It's not merely
plausible to the lay-person who doesn't know jack about science.
It's plausible to the expert who has some inkling of what's
possible and what isn't. Moreover, the science has makes sense in
that it is internally consistent with the background of the story.
The logical ramifications have to be carefully considered and
followed through to whatever strange and unwelcome conclusions they
lead.

Now, quite a few people did balk at statements such as this,
contending that our forbearers had no idea what sort of marvels
would become commonplace in the 20th century. Some even bandied
about Clarke's famous assertion... that any sufficiently advanced
technology would be indistinguishable from magic. But is this
really true? I recall one of my numerous ex-roommates saying that
he thought that most all the scientific disciplines had already
been discovered, that we may not have achieved mastery over the
subject matter that we call nature, but that we at least knew its
general outline. I don't think I really agree with this statement,
but I do know that if science fiction is to be comprehendible to a
modern day reader, one must assume a technological ceiling at some
point fairly soon in our future. What I mean is that a modern day
cops and robbers story would make no sense whatsoever to an ancient
Roman. You'd have to explain how phones work, and how cars work,
and how you have to push buttons on the phone and fill up the car's
gas tank. You'd have to explain how to flush the toilet, and how
the television works, and how to use the toaster oven. I mean, it
gets to be ridiculous. You'd have to explain virtually every damn
thing in the story. Could you imagine reading such a story, in
which every little detail must be explained, let along trying to
roleplay within such a setting?

My assertion, for whatever it's worth, is that the sheer alienness
of the setting would hamper the game. It would be next to
impossible for anyone to visualize, for instance, what "life" might
be like in a community that has achieved singularity by uploading
every individual's being/sentience into a giant mainframe.
Likewise, even assuming a less advanced technological framework,
envisioning all the probable repercussions of various advances
would make things really strange really fast.

For example, in Star Trek there are transporters, which are really
convenient for getting out of messy situations. But how many times
have these devices been conveniently circumvented or misused by
story writers? If a gamemaster were to try such tricks with as much
frequency as the television show, the players would be screaming
bloody murder. And since I'm picking on Star Trek, why not mention
those people in funny masks... oops... I mean the aliens. Or how
about all those planets, devoid of life, but the crew has no
problem breathing the atmosphere. And that's fine if you're just
watching the boob-tube, but the minute you find yourself at the
gaming table with your buddies the physicist, the astronomer, the
biologist, and the engineer... man, you better have your shit
together or you will get eaten alive.

So here's what I figured I'd do. I'd ask the newsgroup straight
out... which do you folks like better? Do you like soft, cinematic
space fantasy where everyone just suspends disbelief and rolls with
it, or do you like hard science fiction? Though I doubt their
sincerity, most people opted for the hard-SF approach, though not
everyone. Here are some excerpts from the discussion just to get
you thinking.

Eric Tolle wrote:

   The thing about playing softech is, you can always invent a
   new technobabble device to save the day. At least that's how
   Trek currently does it...

   I happen to think that the divisions are sort of arbitrary.
   It's more of a choice of the 'gonzotech' you allow in your
   campaign. Ferinstance, in one short story I read, there was no
   acceleration compensation, much of the tech was 'in our range',
   but the stardrive they used could put you across the universe in
   a blink of an eye (and it did, and they had to figure out how to
   get home). Alternatively, Clark in one of his stories had no FTL
   travel, but a drive that allowed massive accelerations.

   It all really goes on the assumptions you make, and the
   liberties you take with today's science. The real difference to
   me between hard-soft SF is mainly in the amount of 'gonzotech'
   and how fast and loose the creators play with the results.
   Having said that, I think category one (the hard science
   category) is the one I'd choose as closest to what I like.

Said by David Homerick:

   But what are the rules for inventing a technobabble device?

   Player: Wait a minute! Captain, what if we di-reverse the
     polarium compensators and de-isolate the thorium
     reverberators! That'll take care of the problem! 

   Gamemaster: Ok, roll against your technobabble skill. If you
      make it, you've had a brilliant idea that will save the
      universe.

   Player: <rattle rattle rattle> Uh... I failed.

   Gamemaster: The crew of the starship rolls around on the deck
      laughing at you. The Captain gives you a noogie.

Nick Janow said:

   My preference lies closer to Hard/LowTech, but include some form
   of fast interstellar travel. Without some form of FTL/Jump
   travel, characters--and the socioeconomic structure of
   humanity--are limited to the solar system. After all, traveling
   for 50 years, even in suspended animation, means that the GM has
   to create 50 years of new technological development and all the
   socioeconomic effects that result from them, and I don't think
   a GM will do that very often.  :)

   Having some sort of FTL or jump drive doesn't necessarily mean
   "soft" SF. As long as the system is difficult to prove
   impossible, it can be accepted as speculative fiction. It can
   also be designed so that it is neither cheap nor convenient for
   characters. An interstellar jump might be instantaneous, but the
   in-system travel required between the departure, arrival and
   jump points might take several weeks or months. A system like
   this allows lots of room for adventures, while not making travel
   trivially easy.

   "Soft" SF translates to "Science Fantasy", in which the players
   must not look too deeply into the scientific "reality" of the
   game universe. I personally have a lot of trouble _not_ digging
   into the scientific background.

Neelakantan Krishnaswami typed:

   Hard SF is fun to read and hard to play. There are almost no
   workable systems to handle reaction drive spacecraft design, and
   most of what does happen ends up with lotsa social holes. For
   example, you have a decent reaction drive; ie, it gives nice
   enough delta-v that you don't need to worry about Hohmann
   transfer orbits and that kind of stuff. At that point, you
   discover the drive implies cheap and small multi-GW power
   reactors, which dramatically transforms society. Evaluating
   vector integrals for a game session is a Bad Thing. Discovering
   that said integral is insoluble and resorting to numerical
   approximation is an Even Worse Thing. This is when I introduced
   reactionless drives. To prevent using a reactionless drive as an
   ultimate weapon, I had to introduce "force screens." To have
   lots of aliens (which were *aliens*) I had to have an FTL drive.
   Bam! The setting is soft SF.

   Or is it? What gives a setting the "Hard" or "Soft" feeling is
   not the tech, but the reasoning behind it. If a lot of care and
   thought has gone into all the implications of the setting,
   regardless of the actual tech, then it has a "harder" feel than
   a badly-conceived setting which obeys the laws of physics.
   Compare Larry Niven's Known Space with most [not all] any
   cyberpunk novel that uses space. The c-punk setting almost
   always lacks thrusters and FTL and force fields, but it doesn't
   feel as "hard" as Known Space, which has thrusters and FTL and
   psi. Of course, then you compare Known Space to say, Poul
   Anderson's _Harvest of Stars_... (If I ever run another SFRPG,
   a lot of ideas will come from that novel.)

Erol K. Bayburt said:

   I prefer the "Soft/HiTech" style for gaming - but then I prefer
   "cinematic" genres and styles of play in general. But I also
   like internal consistency in this style - I'll cheerfully break
   the laws of physics, but not those of logic. 

   Also, I dislike "psi" and think it's overused. It isn't
   *necessary* to have psi in a Soft SF setting, IMHO, but it seems
   that everyone else thinks otherwise.  

Joerg Rhiemeier said:

   Things that I have problems with are humanoid aliens. If they
   really developed independently from us, they would be really
   alien. However, such aliens would be psychologically too alien
   to be playable. Thus, in my campaign, I have aliens (which are
   not like humans), but they are NPC only. If you want to have
   many different cultures to choose PCs from, it is a better idea
   to have humans on other worlds whose ancestors have been brought
   there by aliens, perhaps 50000 years ago. The reason why the
   aliens brought them there need not be known. In fact, it creates
   an atmosphere of mystery if it's unknown, and considering the
   alienness of the aliens, we probably won't comprehend their
   motivations anyway. I know that many others have done this (e.g.
   in the _Traveller_ universe), but it works better than those
   `humans-in-disguise' aliens a la Star Wars and Star Trek.

   If you don't want to confine yourself to one solar system, you
   of course need some kind of FTL travel. This is of course weird
   tech, and no-one can say if it's possible at all. But I want it
   to feel plausible. With Alcubierre's discovery, the warp drive
   has become an obvious choice. In my campaign, I try to reduce
   the amount of `weird science' to a minimum. Therefore, the warp
   drive (which is not only a FTL drive, but can also be used as a
   reactionless STL drive) is the only example of weird tech. No
   force shields, no lightsabers, no teleport booths. The problem
   of `acceleration dampening' doesn't exist with the warp drive,
   hence no need for a mysterious inertial dampening device.
   Everything else is more advanced versions of tech which is
   available or conceivable now.

   Hence, apart from the warp drive (which is still in the `weird
   tech' range because we yet don't know how to create a warp
   field), it is a hard SF campaign. But what I consider a Bad
   Thing is fiddling with complex physical equations (whether real
   or fictitious) during play. It's a role-playing game, not a
   numerical simulation.

The discussion continued along these lines for some time, then
eventually branched and morphed as internet discussions are wont to
do, and as I watched the proceedings, once more backed into lurker
mode, it dawned on me that while the discussion was useful insofar
as it would generate quite a few ideas, few hard and fast
conclusions would be reached. Another thing dawned on me as well,
and this was that I had a yearning to carry this through to the
next step. What I wanted to do, I slowly realized, was to create a
science-fiction RPG setting that reflected my own ideas about how
all these questions should be answered, and I wanted it to lean
toward the hard-SF part of the spectrum and yet still be fun. The
question was how to achieve both goals simultaneously.

Fermi's Paradox (i.e. Where are they?)
--------------------------------------

In order to create a hard science fiction universe, you have to
perform a balancing act. On the one hand, you want your creation to
fit in with what we know about our own universe and world, and you
want the logic of your creation to flow naturally. On the other
hand, you want it to be interesting and to incorporate some of the
staples of science fiction, such as spaceships, aliens, and all
that fun stuff. Well, the more I thought about this balancing act,
the more I realized that we've got a whopper of a problem right off
the bat. What problem, you ask? Fermi's Paradox: Where are the
extra-terrestrials?

Enrico Fermi, the nobel-prize winning physicist purportedly posed
this question at a social dinner many moons ago, captivating his
listeners with the perplexity of probabilities which argue that
extra-terrestrials ought to exist versus the apparently obvious
fact that they are nowhere to be found. For us modern-day
munchkins, this isn't so much of a problem. We can rationalize the
dilemma in any number of ways, the three most obvious being:

   (1) Extra-terrestrials don't exist, at least not in this
       galaxy. We are the one and only example of technological
       sentience anywhere in the Milky Way.

   (2) They do exist, but they can't visit us because of the
       imponderable difficulties of interstellar travel. And
       while they might be able to communicate with us, they've
       never seen any point in trying.

   (3) They do exist, and they have visited us, but they want
       to leave us alone for the time being and see how we do.
       If they do interact with our governments at all, it's
       behind the scenes, where they won't be noticed. As for
       us trying to tune in to their interstellar Internet,
       it's beyond hopelessness. They use real-time fractal
       compression and spread-spectrum communications and
       tachyon pulses and whatnot, so don't even bother.
       We're not in the same league, much less the same
       ballpark.

However, for the writer of a science fiction setting which is
"rigorously internally consistent" and yet has a high-speed,
cinematic, starwars/trekish, go-anywhere-and-quickly sort of
flavor, we find that none of these rationalizations hold up. #1
doesn't hold up for obvious reasons. After all, there are aliens in
Trek. #2 is weak. You mean we're the only ones to discover warp
drive? And #3... well, if this were true, then any voyage into the
unknown would stumble across some monstrously huge, tremendously
ancient, and extraordinarily advanced alien civilization.
Obviously, since humans dominate a huge section of space in Star
Trek as well as Star Wars, probably the single two most famous SF
settings to date, one would naturally suppose that this is not the
case.

So the questions is, how do we rationalize this inconsistency?
There are, of course, a number of ways. Here are four of my
favorites:

   (1) The Isolated Star Web: In his book, _Antares Dawn_, Michael
       McCollum proposes a solution to Fermi's Paradox which I find
       particularly intriguing. It's a very good book, by the way,
       and except for a very constrained system for FTL-travel, he
       introduces none of the standard High-Tech gimmicks. The
       FTL-System works something like this:
          Space has more than three-dimensions, and it is crinkled
       up like a ball of paper which God is hurling into the holy
       trashcan (sorry, is my cynicism showing through again?).
       Anyway, each crinkle is composed to two points (foldpoints)
       and a fold between them (the hyperspace conduit, if you
       will). The points are naturally attracted to gravity wells
       (the bigger the well, the more of them). Hence, most stars
       generally have at least one foldpoint. Big stars have many.
       By going to a foldpoint, you can transition along the fold
       to the foldpoint to which it is linked. This may be a
       journey of a hundred light years or more, and it all
       transpires in an instant.
          To make things even more confusing, to get to a system
       which is just a few light years away, you may have to jump
       to a system a hundred light years distant and then traverse
       to a new fold point in that same system and jump over to
       where you want to go (i.e., traversing 200 light years to go
       five light years... beats hoofin' it at sublight). This is
       actually a somewhat common situation in the novel, as most
       folds extend from coreward to rimward, perpendicular to the
       galactic rim and the direction of spin.
          The trick in McCollum's scheme is that any given
       starsystem may not necessarily be connected to the rest of
       the galaxy. In fact, an entire network of stars may be
       isolated. In the story, Earth was apparently inside such a
       network for most if not all of our race's written history.
       This network contained only a few dozen starsystems and no
       alien presence, and it was stable for thousands of years.
       However, at some point after interstellar travel was
       achieved, the network was modified by one of its key stars
       (Antares) going nova, and hence, an alien presence was
       introduced from another network. Hence, in _Antares Dawn_
       McCollum was able to introduce a solution to Fermi's Paradox
       whereby you have a teaming galaxy, yet the human race is
       still protected during its infancy and has a chance to
       explore during the early years of space travel.
          Of course, our race was very lucky in the novel. If
       Antares went nova a measly thousand years earlier, we'd have
       interstellar aliens vs. the Dark Ages. The well-timed
       isolation from the larger galactic foldspace network was a
       generous blessing, indeed. However, such luck isn't
       out-of-hand. It's possible to believe this could happen to
       a good number of races depending on how many isolated
       worlds/networks exist. And given a fairly close technology
       ceiling, say within the next thousand years or so, the races
       could be put on a more equal footing once things get
       rearranged by incidents of nova or other major astronomical
       events.

Bertil Jonell, one of the more renowned denizens of the Traveller
Mailing List, provided some other possible solutions to Fermi's
Paradox. I've taken two of these and perverted them slightly.

   (2) Berzerkers: Some ancient space-faring civilization, the
       first boys on the block, in fact, decided to send out
       a huge armada of Berzerker robots. These robots were
       capable of self-replication through some fixed number
       of iterations. They were also loaded with all manner
       of nuclear armaments. When they'd detect the first
       signs of a possible competitive civilization, usually
       though reception of radio broadcasts and whatnot, they'd
       mosey on over and drop a few bombs. End of problem.
       Well, due to some error in the programming, the
       berzerkers in this section of the galaxy just sort of
       stopped functioning for some reason (who knows, maybe
       they became self-aware and developed moral qualms),
       so all of a sudden, we get lots of races popping their
       heads up at roughly the same time, and we Humans just
       so happen to be in this wave. Stumbling across one of
       these high-tech berzerker relics could be a major event
       of the campaign.

   (3) Battlefield Earth: Warring/Scheming High-Tech powers fight
       their battles indirectly, through puppet societies and
       various low-end civilizations. Earth (or the "Terran
       Republic") becomes entangled in this conflict. We are
       supported by one power and embroiled in a war with other
       races which are supported by other powers. It may even be
       the case that Humanity was "uplifted" for this very
       purpose. In an odd sort of way, the situation is
       reminiscent of that of Gods settling their petty disputes
       though the races which they created and which they
       control.

Richard Baker suggested another idea which I'll touch on briefly.

   (4) The NanoVirus: Way back when the first two civilizations
       had their great war, some whacko conceived and released a
       nanite (a microscopic machine) capable of infiltrating a
       lifeform of fairly broad parameters, replicating and
       surreptitiously spreading through the lifeform's species,
       and after a given delay, killing all the lifeforms with
       which it has come into contact. Hence, not only did it
       destroy the first war's winner, but as other civilizations
       came to inspect the ruins of that war, it infiltrated and
       destroyed their civilizations as well. The downside of
       this idea is that it is only a matter of time before it
       comes after us. "Spock, look at this. These ancient
       records say that the Argoans were destroyed just like all
       those other civilizations.... by a little mach.... ack!"

While Geoffrey Grabowski felt this idea smacked of political
statement, my only qualm with it is that it doesn't leave enough
room for *lots* of aliens co-mingling in a vast interstellar
community. Nor does it provide much hope for humanity's survival.
Nonetheless, if by some fluke an inoculation could be found,
perhaps with the players as a centerpiece to this outcome, it would
certainly provide an amenable solution to the paradox.


Making a Few Decisions
----------------------

As it happened, I didn't choose any of the four solutions to
Fermi's Paradox presented above. It's not that I didn't like them,
per se. They just didn't fit with my personal prejudices. Let me
start by talking a little bit about what I was shooting for and
why. You see, the only future-genre games that I'd refereed up to
this point in time had been Star Trek and Traveller, and I didn't
consider myself very competent at either. My best campaigns had
always been the low-tech fantasy variety, AD&D in particular. I
wondered for some time what made me better at running these sorts
of campaigns when I apparently had such an interest in science
fiction? Here's where we get into the nuts and bolts of how gaming
works.

Players, in my limited experience, like two things about
roleplaying, aside from the impromptu acting, social camaraderie,
and getting to kill things (or, alternatively, blow things up).
What really hooks them in is character development and plot
development. By character development, what I really mean is the
personal power (i.e. skills and experience) advancement. By plot
development, what I really mean is the way the player, though his
or her character, exerts his or her own wants and motivations into
the setting, affecting other player characters and non-player
characters.

This may sound just a tad cynical, but I'm a long-time believer
that roleplaying is basically, at its heart, an adolescent power
fantasy. Novels, for the most part, have the same quality. You are
introduced to a character, you identify with the character, and the
character goes on to do great things, and you get a vicarious
thrill out of reading about it. There's nothing wrong with this.
People need escape from the daily hum-drum, and novels provide
this. Roleplaying, as you probably know, had the potential to
provide this at a much more intense level because of its
interactive nature. It satisfies the very human need we all have to
make a difference in the world, even if that world is just a
fantasy one. This is the reason that people get sucked into novels,
and it's the same reason people get sucked into roleplaying...
because they need this outlet. Now some folks take it to extremes.
Judging from the amount of time I spent on this program, I'm
probably one of them, but the point here, which I've really been
prancing around, is that the player must feel his or her influence
over the plot. Sans that influence, players feel railroaded, and
their interest drops like a rock.

The problem in most futuristic campaigns is that you've got this
huge society around the player-characters, a bunch of computers,
and everybody is keeping track of everybody else. You've got
bureaucracy like you wouldn't believe. I remember reading one
Traveller adventure, and it was all about fighting the bureaucracy.
You go from one office to another, and the players have to talk to
bureaucrats just like they do in real life, and I'm thinking to
myself, was the writer of this adventure trying to make a statement
or something, or is this really supposed to be fun, because if it's
supposed to be fun, I'm not getting it. On the flipside, in my AD&D
campaigns, what typically occurs is that the players progress in
power so quickly that they can, before too long, pretty much ignore
the bureaucracy, which, in a fantasy-medieval setting, isn't all
that severe to begin with.

Let me restate this another way. In AD&D, a sufficiently high level
character can, reasonably I think, plan the overthrow of a
government. They can go around and recruit allies, or they can just
sneak into the royal palace and do a little late-night
backstabbing. Try doing this, convincingly, in an SF-RPG,
particularly a hard SF one. You might be able to shoot the
president, but in all likelihood it'll be the last thing you ever
do. In SF-RPGs, it doesn't matter how tough you are or how many
skills you have, you are not going to realistically overthrow any
governments. The level of influence you have over the plot is,
generally speaking, less than in a fantasy campaign. True, you
could be playing a naval admiral or powerful politician or noble,
but that has its own set of problems. When I'm taking about a
player-character, I'm really taking about the rogue... the guy who
goes where he likes without the big entourage.

Now, you say, what about Luke Skywalker fighting for the fate of
the galaxy? My response is that that's science-fantasy, not
science-fiction. The only way you can have a science fiction
campaign and yet still preserve the individual player-character's
power over the plot, is that you have to do two things. First, you
have to kill off the bureaucracy, at least down to the level that
you find it in a traditional AD&D campaign. Second, you have to de-
emphasize technology, because technology is the ultimate trump
card, and whatever government exists is likely to have the most and
best of what's available.

Why does Star Wars work? Have you ever asked yourself that simple
question? I have an opinion, of course... and right now there's not
much you can do to stop me from sharing it with you, so here it is.
Star Wars works because lightsabers are cool. It works because they
deflect blasters. Do you realize just how ludicrous this is? You've
got a pellet of plasma, okay? And it's flying at you at God only
knows how fast. You remember Wonder Woman... how she could deflect
bullets with her wrist bands? Try that in real life and see how far
you get. Star Wars works because the individual jedi knight can go
up against some serious odds and win. Technology has no effect on
this guy. What I want to know is why weren't the stormtroopers
using Uzis?

So if we're playing by the rules of science fiction, we have to de-
emphasize the technology. This also has the positive effect that it
makes the whole campaign background more understandable to us lowly
20th century (soon to be 21st century) folks. It also ties in
nicely with the elimination of the bureaucracy. So what am I
talking about here? A post-nuclear campaign? In space? Somehow that
just doesn't mesh. You nuke the earth, and your whole infra-
structure will be decimated. Good luck to any spaceships that we
might have put up there. Hope they don't need to get serviced any
time soon. Maybe there are colonies that could pitch in? But what
about aliens? I said at the beginning of this that I wanted to
include aliens. If I'm going to have aliens, I definitely have to
de-emphasize the technology. I mean, how are the players supposed
to have any effect upon the plot if there are all these super-tech
aliens wandering around? So I'm going to have low-tech aliens. How
do I explain that?

My first real decision, with respect to the campaign setting, was
that there absolutely had to be a technology ceiling. I don't mean
some arbitrary one caused by lack of time to invent new stuff, but
one that was grounded in the very nature of nature. How does this
work? Well, I'm reminded again of that one roommate I had some
years back who I mentioned earlier in this essay. We were
discussing the fast pace of scientific advancement during this
century, and he said something that I just found ludicrous at the
time. He said that he felt that all the basic areas of knowledge
had already been discovered, that there would be no new sciences.
Well, I'm immediately thinking about nano-technology and grand
unification and antigravity and stuff like that. But what if, for
example, antigravity just isn't in the cards? I mean, it's not
inconceivable, is it? What if, for example, hyperspace just... just
isn't possible absent access to some very unlikely materials...
stuff like negative energy and... you know... stuff that we can
theorize about but which we just can't create.

Well, that, I suppose, would be called a "technology ceiling".
Every alien race, no matter how advanced, is bound by the same laws
of nature. If antigravity is impossible for us, it'll be impossible
for those weird folks a couple parsecs down the block. Now, I know
that people put down the moonshot as impossible... until it
happened. There was a high government official, back around 1900,
who speculated that the U.S. might as well close the patent office
as everything that could be invented already had been invented.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can laugh at such
statements and take caution not to make similar ones. But remember,
this is just a game setting we're devising. I'm not saying that all
scientific progress will immediately cease. All I'm saying is that,
for purposes of the game setting, the technology ceiling is
critical, and so long as it's plausible, it's fair game.

When I finally settled on this decision, I had to return to Fermi's
Paradox and begin thinking of a solution that would tie-in nicely
with the technology ceiling. I liked McCollum's "Isolated Star Web"
idea, but finally rejected it as too restrictive on space travel.
Bertil's "Berzerkers" and Richard's "Nanovirus" were both good
ideas, but I felt it was too unlikely that humans would be the sole
race to overcome these obstacles. I didn't want to place us in the
center of the universe, as the superior race and all that. The feel
that I was looking for was that humans really weren't all that
important. I began musing about a name for the game/setting. "Minor
Race" was an candidate, taken from Traveller's terminology. Too
travelleresque, though... and it didn't pique the imagination.
Finally there was Bertil's "Battlefield Earth" idea. Aliens fight
their wars through us. I liked it, except for one thing. It assumed
that the aliens were high-tech. What about low-tech aliens fighting
their wars through us? Which opened up another question. Why would
they want to? Somehow the history of humanity should tie-in with
the history of these aliens, such that this war would be a natural
outcome rather than a contrived affair. So I needed some
interstellar politics. How many aliens are we talking about, I
wondered... and more importantly, why would they be fighting... and
even more importantly, why would this fighting involve us? I
figured that perhaps I ought to take each of these questions one at
a time.

The Drake Equation
------------------

SETI, as many of you are aware, is an acronym standing for the
"Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence". One astronomer who was
interested in the question of extraterrestrial intelligence was
named Frank Drake, and, as it so happens, he liked to muse about
the probability of intelligence life in the galaxy. His equation,
known as the "Drake Equation", is a study in such probabilities.
Its result, if computed correctly, is the number of technically
advanced alien races currently inhabiting the galaxy. A skimmed
down version goes something like this:

          N = A * B * C * D * E * F

Where N = # of races
      A = # of star systems in whatever area is under scrutiny
      B = % of A which have worlds which are suitable for life
      C = % of B where life actually comes into existence
      D = % of C where life attains "intelligence"
      E = % of D which develops a technical civilization
      F = % of E where civilization attains stability

A) The number of star systems under scrutiny is a relatively simple
measure to take. You simply count them. At the time I was mulling
this over, however, I had no idea what size area I was dealing
with. Certainly not a galactic-sized one. I was thinking more of a
"local area" type of thing. I don't know. Let's say 10000 star
systems. Oh, heck... let's splurge and say 100000.

B) How many are going to have worlds that are suitable for life.
Well, this is really an open question. I, of course, had to make
some decisions no matter how uneducated they might be. I started my
train of logic on the assumption that every star system, no matter
how many planets there are, probably only has one biozone, a band
around the sun where water can be in liquid form. Why water? It's
a good solvent, and I'm a biased earthling. That means that, in all
probability, you're only going to get one planet per star system
which is inside this biozone. The zone could easily be wasted on a
planet that it too small or too big. The zone might not even be
occupied.
   Then there's the problem of red dwarf stars. The zone would have
to be so close to the star that the planet would be tidally locked,
one side always in daylight, the other side always in night. What
are the chances that advanced life, along with a technological
civilization, would develop on such a world? I didn't really know,
but my gut instinct told me to throw out all the red dwarf stars
immediately (and there are more red dwarfs out there than all the
other stars put together). Then you've got the white dwarfs that
have to go. Then there are the brown dwarfs which, if we're
including them as stars, have to be considered, and they are both
bound to be major classes. It was a back of the envelope
calculation, but when all was said and done, I figured that only
about one-third of the stars out there would have a usable biozone.
Put another way, you wouldn't even be capable of terraforming a
naturally sustaining ecosystem in that other two-thirds.
   That done, I still had the question, for the usable one-third,
how likely it would be to have a world which is suitable for life
inside the biozone? Well, there are many different types of worlds
out there. Even assuming the world is terrestrial, who's to say it
won't pull a greenhouse on us? Or do whatever Mars did? I figured,
again, back of the envelope, that we were looking at about 15%. It
was a just a guess, but a guess that had to be made. Well, one-
third of 15% is 5%, so B=0.05

C) How many of the remainder would produce life? That's another
hard question. But I was in a generous mood. Let's say 80%. C=0.8

D) Intelligence. Hmm... how do you define intelligence? Let's say
language... heck, let's say a sophisticated language, more than
simple grunts and howls, and I'm not talking about the bee's dance
either, which it totally based in genetics. I'm talking about a
sophisticated, learned language. As I thought about it, I realized
that I had no basis for forming an answer to this question. Earth
had been around, with life, for millions of years. Perhaps some of
the dinosaurs had developed a spoken tongue. We would never know.
But the fact is, if it was an easy development, then we ought to
see it in other species in the present day, and the fact is we just
don't see it. We can train dogs and dolphins and even teach other
primates a few words, but none of this developed spontaneously
outside of human intervention.
   Why don't dogs talk to each other the way we talk among
ourselves? The more I thought about it, the more I began to respect
the attributes that learned, sophisticated language signifies.
First, it signifies learned behavior. That's important, but hardly
unique. Kittens learn to kill mice from their mothers. Second, it
signifies cooperation over competition. This is important, because
if you don't have the inclination to cooperate, what's the point of
talking? However, cooperation, all by itself, is not unique to
humanity. Ants and bees have societies that are entirely based on
cooperation. It is firmed ingrained within these species at the
genetic level. But where do we have a species that is both
cooperative but which also brings home the bacon by virtue of its
learned behavior rather than simply by instinct? Cats may actually
be a good candidate. They're pack hunters (not always but quite
often). Their growls convey a variety of different messages.
Perhaps, left alone for a few million years, they might come up
with language and a set of vocal cords all on their own. I don't
know. The fact is, that haven't done it yet. Why not?
   I had to stop ruminating and slap a value on this, so I said
10%. It was a snap judgement, and probably wrong, but there you
have it. D=0.1

E) Technical civilization. Well, this one is a bit more
interesting. One only language using species on this planet, and we
got to developing a technical civilization in almost no time. But
we also had a little help. For example, we've got thumbs that
enable us to pick things up. We've also got oil underneath the
ground that you can use to power your technical civilization. I'm
reminded of an economist by the name of Malthus back in the 1800s.
He came up with this notion that as population expands
exponentially, and resources don't expand quite so quickly, that
population will soon swamp the available resources. The end-result
is famine, war, pestilence and all that good stuff. His prediction
was that it was a mathematical certainly that our world would be
doomed and that our descendants (or rather that his descendants)
would be relegated to a barely-living hell within a relatively
short expanse of time (he figured that we'd be feeling the effect
by the 1900s).
   Well, what Malthus didn't and couldn't foresee is that we'd
strike oil, and that this huge machine-oriented technology would be
invented which would turn the farmer into a veritable superman who
could feed hundreds, even thousands of souls, all by the labor of
some metal and gasoline. Malthus was never wrong. His prognos-
tication was merely tabled for a century or so, enough time for us
to potentially get our act together as a world community and take
note of the problems that we face. But how many civilizations out
there are likely to have oil, because without it, we would have
never have gotten this far. There are some other things that also
helped us, of course. Mechanization was a function of our ability
to design, create, and use tools. It was also necessary for us to
have a fair concept of math. An intelligent, language-using species
without these abilities is as doomed by the Malthusian dilemma as
if it didn't have any oil. How many would have both the innate
abilities as well as the resources at their disposal? Obviously, I
have no basis for making a determination as to this figure, but I
guessed about 50% (didn't even use the back of an envelope this
time). It's just a guess, and I apologize if you find it offbase,
but for the time being E=0.5

F) Finally we come to the question of stability, and I'm not just
talking about nuclear holocaust here. There are so many ways we can
be done it, it's not even funny. Candidate #1, I think, has got to
be oil. It's a two-edged sword when you think about it. It pumps
energy into the economy, turning the average farmer into a super-
farmer, but at the same time it pumps all this carbon into the
biosphere. That's not such a good thing, as the planet is bound to
warm up. If it warms up too much, then you get into some seriously
hot water, no pun intended. As most planetary ecologists can tell
you, the magic number is 80.6. That's the temperature in fahrenheit
degrees that you've got to watch out for (27 degrees celsius for
those of you who could use a translation). If the oceans reach it,
it's doomsday. What will happen is that water evaporation will
increase dramatically. Water vapor happens to be a greenhouse gas.
The result, which is mathematically inescapable, is a runaway
greenhouse effect.
   It's surprising to me how many people have heard about the
proposed heat-death of the world and how few actually believe it
could happen. Reminds me of all those people aboard the Titanic.
The ship is sinking and they're busy cracking jokes and drinking
champaign. The ship can't sink. The world can't end. Actually, yes,
it can. Venus is an interesting case study with which we might take
note. It's always raining on Venus. Always. And yet not a drop
touches the surface. It boils midway down, turning into a puff of
steam, then rises, falls, rises, falls... the surface of the planet
as bone dry as hell itself. If we reach 80.5 fahrenheit, that is
exactly what will happen to the Earth. We've pushed the global
temperature up a few notches. That much is pretty well agreed. And
there are some horrendously difficult things we could do to suck
carbon back out of the biosphere in mass quantity in an effort to
compensate for the damage we've done. The big fear is that it may
already be too late, that the damage, like the breech of the
Titanic's hull, may be irreversible.
   Now, personally, I don't know for absolute fact that this is the
case, so I wouldn't encourage anyone to soil their undies just yet,
but it seems likely that oil may be nature's big catch-22. If you
don't have it, you end up with a that barely-living hell that
Malthus had envisioned back in the 1800s, and if you do have it,
then you end up with an actual hell on earth like nothing that
Parson Malthus had ever envisioned outside of Bible-study. That
would be a cruel trick, I think, but not one entirely outside the
realm of possibility.
   Supposing it's the case, and logic would seem to indicate that
it is, then what are the odds of avoiding this dilemma? Well,
you've got about a century or so between the onset of massive
industrialization and the "oh-shit" phase that we seem to be
hitting right about now. That's one-hundred years to get your
affairs in order. Let's see... things that would help you through
it are a unified world government as well as a willingness for the
leadership to force people to stop having so many children. That
requires a massive shift in the way people think about what it
means to be human. No more big families. Contraception is now a
must. There can only be one government, because if you get
distracted by warfare, you're pretty screwed. Remember, ever year
counts. If the planet doesn't get its act together immediately, it
just won't make it.
   The more I think about it, the more I think that this just isn't
something that will routinely happen. Even assuming that people
recognize the dangers of their situation and have ample warning,
there's still this huge Titanic-syndrome ("it can't happen here")
to overcome. The combined inertia of disbelief and tradition is
just overwhelming, even to a supposedly intelligence species. I
don't know... I have to figure that only about 10% of the races
will make it. Well, I'll be generous and say 20%. That's really
pushing it, but we may be more warlike than your average alien
race, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. F=0.2

Okay, we're ready to do our final calculation.

          N = A * B * C * D * E * F
          N = 100000 * 0.05 * 0.8 * 0.1 * 0.5 * 0.2 = 40

          100000 Star Systems
            5000 which have a planet that is suitable for life
            4000 in which life actually comes into existence
             400 in which intelligence life evolves
             200 in which technical civilization comes into being
              40 which achieve stability

Now we have just created for ourselves another question. What
happens to those 200 species which met with the fate envisioned by
Malthus and to those 160 others which couldn't achieve stability by
the official greenhouse deadline? That's the big question, isn't
it? Would the forty aliens who "made it" just let nature take its
course with the others? Let them starve, let them burn, let them
rot in that hell of their own making? Remember, these are aliens
which had the "cooperative" attribute associate with learned
language which was our proxy for intelligence. I don't think they'd
be that crass. In the first place, it would be a hell of a waste in
a universe where only 5% of the star systems have a planet capable
of bearing life without significant terraforming. Secondly, it
would be immoral to stand by and do nothing, and any species which
has developed language and which has the spirit of cooperation that
such a development entails would certainly view the position "let
them rot" as immoral.

So what would they do? What I imagine they might do is welcome the
new idiot-race to their interstellar club, given a few provisions
of membership... i.e., if you want our help, you have to play by
our rules. Granted, given the circumstances this basically amounts
to extortion, however, if their terms are reasonable, it's really
not all that unconscionable. I imagine that the races that had
everything except the oil would be treated the best. The ones that
nuked themselves would be treated like pond scum. Those that simply
mismanaged their environment would be placed somewhere in between.
Maybe they'd lose their homeworld to alien colonization. Perhaps it
would depend on which alien race was appointed as their supervisor.

Politics on the Grand Stage
---------------------------

As I continued along this chain of thought, I realized that the
solution to Fermi's Paradox was built right into the model. Where
are the extra-terrestrials? They're watching, but they're waiting
for us ripen... to become ready for contact. You mean we aren't
ready yet? In order to answer this question, I had to imagine what
it would take in order to dig the planet out from under its
greenhouse entanglement.

This is the problem. You've got a lot of carbon oxides in the
biosphere, and principally in the atmosphere where they act as a
nice warm blanket pushing us ever closer to that dangerous 80.6
degrees fahrenheit. In order to solve the problem, you have to get
rid of that carbon. How do you do that? Well, given sufficiently
advanced technology, I can see how you could take a crack at it.
Note, I'm not talking about gonzotech. This is stuff that is
doable. It just takes time and resources, not to mention a little
tongue in cheek. So here's what you do. You get yourself a whole
bunch of these really huge fusion-powered dirt movers. These things
are miles across. I mean, they make supertankers look puny. You'd
need to make them out of special materials so they could keep their
structural integrity, so it's not something that we can build with
our present technology no matter how much money we pour into it,
for to the aliens this sort of stuff is a chinch. Anyway, what
these dirt movers do is (big surprise) move lots of dirt. They
build mountains. Why do you want mountains? You want mountains
because you have to increase the precipitation... the rainfall. And
you want rain because that's what drives carbon oxides out of the
atmosphere. Okay, the rain is a weak acid, it dissolves the
mountains as it comes down, the carbon gets moved into the form of
various carbonate mineral deposits, and the rivers act as a
conveyor belt taking the carbon into the ocean.

That was stage one. Stage two is a little more complicated. In the
ocean you have to have a lot of organisms, probably genetically
engineered, which glom on to these dissolved carbonate minerals
like nobody's business and create a solid material from it, kind of
like a shellfish does, except that these suckers operate way out
from the coastline. They are not confined to a thin strip of
shallow water. Now once this material is solidified, you've got a
pellet high in carbon content. They release the pellet, letting it
sink to the bottom of the ocean and effectively removing it from
the biosphere. Of course, you'd need millions of these organisms to
have a sufficient impact.

Now, imagine that bright and early tomorrow morning, a flying
saucer comes down, lands outside the white house (or outside the
kremlin, I could care less who has the honor), the alien comes out
of the saucer, for some strange reason it can speak our language
(well, according to the premise, they've been observing us for how
long?). And, drumroll please... it says that they're gonna drop a
million dirt movers onto our soil and a million carbon pellet-
making squids into our oceans, that its for our own good so we'd
better just suck it up and be agreeable.

Could you imagine the uproar? In the first place, most scientists,
although they recognize the potential danger, doubt that the danger
is as serious as what this premise proposes. Until the danger is
recognized (assuming it even exists), we just aren't ready for
contact. I don't know what they'd use as a tripping mechanism, but
it is apparent that if they want cooperative subjects, they have to
wait until we realize the full peril in which we've placed
ourselves and our planet. All fun aside, would the dirt-moving idea
actually do the trick and solve our problem? Personally, I doubt
it. Erosion/Carbon-leeching takes millions of years. We don't have
millions of years. In short, I have no idea how they'd fix the fix
that we've gotten ourselves into, but no doubt the solution would
be something pretty extraordinary, something that we wouldn't want
done if it wasn't absolutely necessary. Incidentally, one solution
that we could attempt right now can be found in "The Millennial
Project" by Marshall Savage (1992).

Now keep in mind, dear reader, I'm not advocating that this is the
actual state of affairs in real life. This is just a fictional
setting. I'm making fictional predictions about a future that will
come about one way or the other. My rational behind these
predictions has its roots in fact, but the thrust of my argument is
fueled by a desire to create an interesting fictional setting in
which there is conflict and uproar and in which the fate of
humanity and the very Earth itself hangs in the balance. This is
the stuff that makes stories, so bear with me as I continue down
this path.

The aliens have saved lots of other races. For every alien race
that has made it on its own, there are perhaps nine or ten others
who need a helping hand. We are but one of those nine or ten
others. There is nothing special about us save for our own
uniqueness as a species. We are not the smartest, nor the swiftest,
nor even necessarily the most warlike (although we probably fall
toward that end of the spectrum). True, we created "the bomb"
before supersonic flight, and that seems a bit incongruous, but no
moreso than fighting a horrendous war in the middle of this century
to defeat a genocidal madman, only to allow other genocidal
conflicts to continue during this very decade complete with death
camps and rape camps and you name it, we've got it.

I may be getting off the path here, but around the time I was
coming up with this fictional setting, the situation in Bosnia was
becoming quite a topic in the media. This war between the Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims had been going on for... well, for a long time,
and the entire world community had just sort of turned its back
like Bosnia was this crazy aunt you keep locked up in the closet.
To be honest with you, I didn't think the United States had any
business getting involved. It was a European problem. The Europeans
should have dealt with it. But the thing is, they weren't dealing
with it. And it's kind of hard to just stand by and do nothing.
Well, the whole situation got me to thinking that if that could
happen here, why couldn't something remotely similar happen in
space between aliens involving us as an emerging presence?

I mean, aliens have to have wars too, right? This isn't a strictly
human phenomenon. Anytime you have scarce resources, you have
people who want those resources, some who are willing to fight for
them. Earth is a naturally occurring garden world. Do you know how
rare that is? What did we say in the previous section? Something
like 5% of the starsystems have a planet which has the potential to
support life. Earth already supports life and a lot of it. It's a
jewel among the stars.

So we screw-up. We don't take care of our house. The aliens aren't
going to just let it turn into a greenhouse. They're going to leap
in and take control. That's built into the premise. But which alien
race gets custody? That's the big question. How does this sort of
thing get decided in the absence of war? Or do they fling plasma at
each other every time a new garden world comes up for grabs?

I imagined that there must be some form of interstellar government,
an alliance where each member agrees to abide by its edicts in
return for the privileges of membership. Think of it as a
interstellar United Nations. How did it come into being? Probably
a war. Our own United Nations didn't come into being until after
World War II. Without that war, it probably would never have come
about at all. So what we have is an interstellar alliance formed by
the political aftermath of some great war.

You know what? That sounds an awful lot like bureaucracy, and I
distinctly remember saying that bureaucracy was bad, that it would
lead to a campaign where the players would have no power over the
plot. How do you reduce the power of bureaucracy? Well, it can be
a weak alliance, an alliance which is punctuated every now and then
by isolated outbreaks of violence. How do you keep violence
isolated? Rome was a big bureaucracy, but the difficulty of moving
quickly from one end to the other, the sheer impossibility of
communicating over the vast distance in a timely manner meant that
individual generals could rebel against the emperor and get away
with it. But in a universe with hyperdrives, there is none of this
tyranny of distance. Perhaps, then, there should be no hyperdrive.

I kept returning to this question over and over again and for
awhile considered naming the game "Sublight". Nah... too trekish.
It needed something different. Something that would make a
statement about the condition of humanity within the setting.
Nonetheless, restricting spaceships to the speed of light did make
a certain amount of sense. Wars would be fought over a much longer
timescale. They would take decades, perhaps even centuries to
resolve. Why is this good? Because it would slow down the political
mechanism to such a sluggish pace that the grand view of
interstellar history wouldn't have to be a blur. I mean, look at
our own planet? How many wars and changes of government have we had
in the past 1000 years? More than you or I can count. What about
the aliens? If it takes fifty years just to move your fleet of
warships from point A to point B, then the war will probably take
a few hundred years. You might have one war every millennium, if
that often. It would be so difficult and time-consuming to wage war
that few would go to the trouble, and yet at the same time, the
coalition government would take so long to make and enforce any
decisions that their level of influence would be somewhat pathetic,
even in comparison to our own United Nations which most folks still
regard as something of a joke. A renegade nation could do things
and get away with it for an awful long time. Adventuring
possibilities, my friends... and the more of these, the more
interesting the campaign.

There are, of course, numerous problems with the lightspeed
restriction. The first is that it makes things more difficult for
both the players and referee. I mean, you can spend all this time
introducing some non-player characters. Then the players have to
leave the starsystem. By the time they return, those people are in
all likelihood going to be dead of old age. Joerg Rhiemeier
recognized this problem in the Hard vs Soft SF discussion when he
wrote, "If you don't want to confine yourself to one solar system,
you of course need some kind of FTL travel." This position,
however, was by no means unanimous.

John H Kim wrote:

   If you want adventures which span many star systems, you just
   need characters whose lives run slower than current humans.
      <snip>
      One alternative is to role-play people in 'Brigadoon'
   societies. Dedicated to exploring the stars, they live one day
   per year or some such - timed in phase (taking relativity into
   account, of course). Between these days they go into cold sleep:
   either built into their bodies or in capsules.  
      'Brigadoon' sleepers might be awakened to battle stations at
   critical moments (i.e. the computer detects another ship
   approaching). Or the PCs might live special lives, staying awake
   longer to track down insurgents or other criminals who seek to
   gain advantage by acting while others sleep. Thus their lives
   would have many "long nights" where they must stay up until they
   are sure that all is well.  

James Nicoll replied:

   A scenario I want to run has cold sleep as part of the
   background: CS is common, safe and cheap. Travel is slow, so the
   vast majority of travelers travel as cold-cuts. The CS units are
   self-contained and contain one person. For reasons I won't go
   into, civilian passenger get transferred from one ship to the
   next in each system. The PCs are lost-luggage, several centuries
   out of their era, with skills peculiar to their time and not
   otherwise available to the kind folk who finally awaken them.

Lots of interesting ideas emerged out of that discussion, but this
idea of cold sleep coupled with relativity sort of sunk its teeth
into me. As long as the NPCs which the referee introduces are also
spacers, there is a chance that the players will interact with them
time and again, although each occasion may be separated by
centuries of game time. There is also the possibility of anagathics
to consider. We are already making strides in the direction of
finding out the cause of aging. Perhaps the death of natural death
isn't so far away. It's funny to me how Star Trek and Star Wars
both presume antigravity and hyperspace/warp, yet neither one of
them makes any mention of non-aging methods. It is as though there
is a technological ceiling protecting the tyranny of death which
doesn't protect the tyranny of distance. Yet, it would make so much
more sense given our present understanding for the reverse to be
the actual situation.

This presumption adds yet another facet to the setting. Humans
suddenly are unique in one respect: none of us ever expected to
live forever. We'll learn soon enough that the aliens have this
technology. Perhaps they'll use it as a bartering chip with certain
key individuals whom they hope to influence. Perhaps they don't
want to give it to the general population because they have some
use for us which requires our fearlessness. Just some ideas I'm
tossing into the air. The quest for this longevity technology could
be yet another adventure hook.

But in order to adequately confront such topics, we have to figure
out for ourselves who the aliens are, what they want, and what
motivates them. There are some folks who feel that because aliens
must necessarily evolve on worlds completely separate from our own,
both their minds and bodies must be incomprehensible to us. I
disagree with this. My presumptions may be terra/humanocentric, but
my general feeling is that they'd have an awful lot in common with
us, more in common with us than say the average household pet.

Their bodies at the cellular scale would probably be a lot
different, but certain structures would prove useful... eyes, ears,
hands. They need sensory organs, manipulative appendages, so on and
so forth. They need a nervous system along with a circulatory
system. They are not simply going to be blobs. They would have
likely evolved some means by which to move around their immediate
environment. As for their form of intelligence, why should it
necessarily be incomprehensible? Dogs are aliens for all intents
and purposes, but I perfectly understand a dog. A dog likes to curl
up in front of the fireplace, eat a bowl of food, and hump the
nearest leg with wild abandon. Shelter, food, and sex. These are
common motivators for nearly every creature on the planet, human
beings included. Why should we presume that aliens are any
different? Some of them may be different, but most, I imagine,
would fit right in with what we have come to understand and accept
about our own selves.

Having said this, I don't mean to say that aliens need to behave
exactly as we do. Some of the things we do and the beliefs we hold
are idiosyncratic to our culture. Aliens will come from a different
culture, but it will be a culture that has been long-exposed to
science and technology, and it will share a common interstellar
history with the coalition as a whole. Where there are differences,
they will be known and documented by all sides. Humans, being the
newest race on the scene, will have a lot of learning to do.
Players may not have access to the "Encyclopedia Galactica" which
tells about each of the various races, and they may have to fumble
their way around. This would actually be the preferred situation.
Otherwise there is no sense of discovery and achievement as new
races are contacted and relationships are established.

So let us take stock of the situation. We've got aliens who are
much like ourselves in mentality, each with a unique culture yet
each sharing the common thread of interstellar history. They
compete for power within the confines of a relatively weak post-war
alliance. The coalition government is headquartered far away and
occasionally makes edicts which are seldom paid serious heed.
Communication is conducted at lightspeed. Travel is conducted at
something less than light speed, but approaching it. Most alien
beings expect to live forever due to advances in medical science.
The aliens are divided into major races (those who attained
stability on their own), and minor races (who needed help in one
form or another). Perhaps a better term is "full member" races and
"associate member" races. I wrote up a brief "policy statement
toward new races" sometime in September of 1995, which, with only
minor revisions, I'm including below:

   (1) If they seem capable of peaceful coexistence, then they
       are offered membership in the Coalition. If they refuse,
       they are prohibited from leaving the confines or their own
       star system, but they are guaranteed that their own space
       won't be violated by unwelcome trespassers. Alternately,
       they may request the guardianship of a coalition member,
       which means that they are subject to the laws of that member
       and are, hence, indirectly, a member of the coalition,
       through the auspices of their guardian who is responsible
       for their conduct.

   (2) If they don't seem capable of peaceful coexistence, then
       they may be exterminated for the common good or turned over
       to another race for obligatory guardianship. Generally,
       their star system is incorporated into the territory of a
       nearby race, and that race disposes of the newcomer as they
       see fit. Any child race which mismanages its own world such
       that its civilization begins collapsing into ruins before it
       attaining stability automatically falls into this category.

A few questions arise. First, does a child race have any rights?
May they be exterminated without trial, for example? Thinking back
to Bosnia, my guess is that if we are to draw a parallel, it is
that the coalition government would hesitate to get involved under
any circumstances. What really saved Bosnia, in this day and age,
is instantaneous communication. With television and print media
traveling as fast as it does, you can muster political will in a
relatively short time. However, if it took us decades to get
reports about what was going on, we'd throw up our hands and say
that there was nothing we could do about it. In fact, it would
already be too late to rectify the situation. Only punishment could
be effected, and with a weak alliance, I doubt even that much would
take place. In short, child races have only those rights which
their more advanced neighbors feel like giving them. On paper, they
may well have the right to exist. In actual fact, they have
nothing.

Now every child race which has been "born" since the founding of
the coalition has gone through this period of fear and uncertainty.
Humans are simply the newest on the scene. We will have
sympathizers. But most, I imagine, won't want to get involved with
whatever plight we are currently undergoing. The nearest major race
will be either our benefactor or our slave master. I began to
wonder what would happen if we were on the border between two such
major races, and that's when I got the idea for the Hafaru and the
Ikkadju, two races that end up vying for control of Earth. At the
time I was still learning toward faster-than-light spacetravel, in
part because it served as a nice dividing point between a race's
childhood and adolescence. I'm still not entirely sure opting for
slower-than-light travel is the right decision, although it
certainly seems to lend itself to a harder brand of science
fiction.

Anyway, I'm been talking for long enough. I just wanted to give you
an idea of where this program and the "Ragamuffin" galaxy had
gotten its start. Comments welcome, and if you'd like to contribute
to further development of this background, send me some email...

jimv@empirenet.com

