Some Links of Interest

Acknowledgements, References & other Extras 

The Orion’s Arm White Papers

Traversable Lorentzian Wormholes – by Adam Getchell

Wormholes and Causality - by Xaonon

The Sky on Alien Worlds - by Stephen Inniss

Space Habitat Illuminator with Non-Imaging Optics – by Bill Parkyn

The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains – by Anders Sandberg

A Vision - by Anders Sandberg

Orion’s Arm Downloads

Orion’s Arm Animation Clips

Orion’s Arm Music – Material created for, or would work with, the Orion’s Arm setting.

OA Fonts for PC

OA Fonts for MAC

 Academic Coronese Alphabet   Download the Truetype Font here

Additional Orion’s Arm Resources Found on the Web

Orion’s Arm Worldbuilding Discussion Group – This is the core group for the membership. The place where most of the discussions occur.

Café OA – The lighter side of the Orion’s Arm project. A place for writers and artists.

Orion’s Arm Celestia – A forum for discussions on the Celestia software package used for many of the illustrations found in OA.

Orions Arm 3D Models – Created for Celestia the freeware space simulator.

Orion's Arm Graphics - Bernd Helfert's Orion's Arm site, which includes all the graphics he has done for OA, including those not yet added to the main site. Graphics arranged according to topic.

Űropera zene nélkül Extrópiánusok XXI. - by Komlodi Ferenc - a Hungarian page that has given us a really nice write-up.

Orion's Arm Flikr Set A collection of images from Orion's Arm on Flikr 

Acknowledgements

Scientists, Futurists and Writers who have inspired the Orion's Arm Scenario

World Building

GLOSSARIES, DICTIONARIES, ENCYCLOPEDIAS, AND REFERENCES

Glossaries are a great way to get a quick overview of a particular topic, by setting out the jargon and definitions of most of the basic terms. Here is a very brief and incomplete, unsystematic listing, including some speculative pages along with the hard-nonfiction sites.

Astrophysics Glossary - Very useful definitions, also some neat animated gifs.

Creating Friendly AI - A very OA-relevant glossary pertaining to issues regarding the Singularity and the creation of Artificial Intelligence.

General Chemistry On-line Glossary - Very comprehensive - chemistry will always be important (in fact, nanotech will make it even more so).

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés

Memetic Lexicon – by Glenn Grant. Altered and expanded by David McFadzean 1995-1999. Much of this has been incorporated into the Orion's Arm setting.

The Computational Beauty of Nature – by Gary William Flake. The glossary from the book. Brief and very technical, but very pertinent to the early stages of AI.

 Hypertext Glossary of Computer Science related Acronyms and selected Terms

A Hypermedia Glossary of Genetic Terms - Prepared and presented by Birgid Schlindwein - in view of the importance of biotech and gengineering in the OA setting this is useful.

Nuclear Science Glossary - Useful definitions with animated gifs explaining each term.

SCIENCE

The Academic Archives – This site contains just about every paper published on physics, mathematics, nonlinear science and computer science.

Greg Egan Home Page – A good site for hard science tidbits by a modern master of the genre.

The Alternate View – by John G. Cramer; Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine.  Short (~2,000 word) essays about cutting-edge science. They are aimed at readers (and writers) of "hard" science fiction, as exemplified by the SF stories of Analog, but are about real science, usually physics or astronomy. These columns are published bimonthly in Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine. fiction. Although some of the material is dated, and some not viable, there is still a good deal of great science background material there – written in a form easily understood by a laymen.

PHYSICS AND MATH

John Baez home page – by John Baez, mathematical physicist and moderator of sci.physics. His site contains vast quantities of clearly written information for people who just want to learn a little about what the 'brains' start arguing about.

Mathworld - An encyclopedic coverage of mathematics, very much the OA-style obsessive completeness too! Very comprehensive, an invaluable resource.

HyperPhysics - Site dedicated to physics.

Antimatter Calculator – Just how much boom is there is antimatter? By Edward Muller.

E=MC2 – A calculator.

Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics

Explosion Calculator – Answering the age old question: How much energy does it take to destroy the solar system?

Values of Energy – A link to the Wikipedia.

RELATIVITY

Einstein's Special & General Relativity

C-ship: Relativistic ray traced images - Exploring flight near the speed of light! C-ship helps you understand Einstein's theory of Special Relativity intuitively through the medium of computer-synthesised images.

General Relativity – by Werner Benger, this site includes a simulation of gravitational distortion of light near a black hole. The bending of the light rays around a Black Hole makes normally invisible parts of the involved objects to come into view. Basic principles of gravitational lensing are demonstrated on ordinary objects and the meaning of the Einstein ring is explained. Note - these same principles would apply to a wormhole.

ASTRONOMY

Atlas of the Universe - A great series of star and galaxy maps.

As The Crow Flies - A java script calculator for determining the distance between two stars.

eSky: The Electronic Sky - Coverage of the galaxy and beyond. Includes selected Asteroids, Comets, Moons, Planets, Stars, Clusters, Nebulae, Constellations, Galaxies, and more.

The Internet Stellar Database - Detailed information on the stars within 75 light-years of earth, plus some of the more well-known stars farther away.

Stars – Each star is illustrated by links to photographs of their parent constellations, which are listed along with their stars arranged by Greek letter name. A new star is added each Friday.

Star Data Pages - The star data pages provide detailed information about all stars of the Bright Star Catalogue, about different types of variable stars and selected double stars.

Star Data Tables- by Worldbuilders. Easy to read tables with lots of good information.

3D starmaps - by Winchell Chung - maps in various formats.

Some good overviews of the galaxy, and a simple map of the local spiral arms

roughly corresponding to the Orion setting:

http://www.earth.uni.edu/astro/cosmos/part4.html

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/mw/milkyway.html

The local neighbourhood (likely where most of the old power centers still are in our current setting):

http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/snbhd.gif
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/snbhdclose.gif
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~johnl/MAA3091/key.gif
Interstellar Clouds - Birthplaces of Stars

The Interactive NGC Catalog Online

WEBDA - A Site Devoted to Stellar Open Clusters

SIMBAD Astronomical Database

Hipparcos

Earth Impact Calculator - Calculating the impact of an asteroid strike.

Gravity Simulator – Program designed to model the effects of gravity on bodies in a system.

Kepler Calculator – A site dedicated to Kepler’s formulas for calculating orbital paths.

Planetary Orbit Calculator- An online calculator for determining some of the characteristics of a planet around a star. Examples include orbital period, luminosity of star at the planet, etc.

Supernovas: Making Astronomical History- A good site on supernovas.

Hawking Radiation Calculator- by Xaonon. Calculates a variety of characteristics about your local black hole.

EXTRASOLAR PLANETS

"Extrasolar planets" means planets outside our own solar system. A number of gas giants, mostly in highly elliptical orbits or very close to the primary, have been discovered. These seem to indicate that the present theory of planet formation (which would imply mostly circular orbits and gas giants further out) is incorrect. Another possibility is that there are actually several types of solar systems - the Sol type one (our own solar system), the "irregular" one, and possibly others as well. It may also mean that the hot Jupiters and elliptic Jupiters so far discovered are rare in the general scheme of things, and their relatively frequent identification is more an artifact of current astronomy technology than anything else.

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia - Definitive listing on the subject

Known Planetary Systems - by Alexander J. Willman, table listing the known planetary systems around main sequence stars

Giant Planets Orbiting Faraway Stars by Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler, short but readable intro. This article was written several years ago but is still useful. Introduces the term "51 Pegasi--Type Planets" for large episolar planets

The Kepler Mission - A special purpose space mission in the NASA Headquarters Discovery Program for detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets, that is, rocky and Earth-size.

Free-Floating Planets Confirmed - jupiter and supra-jupiter sized planets not part of any solar system have been discovered in the Orion nebula

NTT Observations Indicate that Brown Dwarfs Form Like Stars

Habitable Moons – by Andrew J. LePage. What does it take for a moon to support life? Life and biospheres need not be confined to Earth-type planets around a central F/G/K class star.

Born Again Planets

BIOLOGY AND XENOBIOLOGY

Biology, Paleontology, and the History and Evolution of Life

Unless you understand life on Earth, how can you envisage which way life and evolution will go, both on alien worlds and in terragen biospheres?

Tree of Life - The diversity and relationships of life on Earth, according to modern cladistic analysis. This detailed site is unfortunately still incomplete.

University of California Museum of Paleontology - Very good site on Earth History and the diversity of life, including prehistoric life. Also a good introduction to evolution, the geological time scale, and cladistic analysis (phylogenetics).

Palaeos - Comprehensive site on Earth History and the history of life, still under construction and incomplete in parts. M. Alan Kazlev (co-founder of Orion's Arm) is the co-author.

Laws of Developmental Growth (Excerpt from Gilbert, S. F. 1991. Developmental Biology. Third Edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland. Pp. 718-727.)
full of useful information on the growth of organisms.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis

Just how common are Earth-like extra-solar planets and developed extraterrestrial life anyway? Here at OA we have assumed a halfway position - more optimistic than the REH, but more pessimistic then pop SF scenarios.

John Cramer's entry on the Rare Earth Hypothesis

Crucible of Life - The Cambrian Explosion and the REH - adopts the stance that life on Earth is unique (pro-REH).

Psychology and Xenopsychology

Xenopsychology - Dr. Robert A. Freitas Jr. (from Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Vol. 104, April 1983, pp 41-53) - This paper is the first known published reference to the "Sentience Quotient" invented by Robert A. Freitas Jr.

SOCIAL SCIENCES AND MEMETICS

Reason Magazine - Libertarian and free marketeering webzine useful for the modelling similar cultures like the NoCoZo in Orion’s Arm, but also for the articles by Ronald Baily on emergent science and engineering fields.

Economics

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - The origin of free enterprise, extrapolatable up through the NoCoZo.

The Work of F.A Hayek - Frederik Hayek, former socialist who became one of the leading capitalist economists after actually studying the field; excellent for understanding the behavior of the Orion’s Arm NoCoZo rather than the usual predatory capitalist light its painted in.

Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Memetics

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy - Covers the history of philosophy in great detail, one of the core underpinnings of memetics and science in general.

MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences – An exhaustive site covering the cognitive processes of the brain. A must read.

Human Universals –A list of characteristics considered humanly universal  by Donald E. Brown.

SINGULARITY, TRANSHUMANISM AND TOPOSOPHICS

Anders Transhumanist Resources – Web site by Anders Sandberg, co-founder of Orion’s Arm.

Singularity and Toposophy

The Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge - here is the plain ascii  edition of the seminal 1993 article.

"Flatland - a Romance in Many Dimensions" by 'A Square' (aka E. A. Abbott) - Instead of dimensions, consider S-levels. This is a wonderful allegory for a transcendent being (S>1) going to visit S<1's, then animals, then up to the S>2 perception space.

Singularity Watch - Understanding Accelerating Change - very good site on the Singularity by John Smart. In contrast to the extended time-line in Orion's Arm, the author assumes a very rapid singularity (or series of singularities leading to an ultimate consummation in abstract places.

KurzweilAI.net - Encyclopedic coverage of topics relating to the singularity, artificial intelligence, posthumanism, nanotechnology, and more.

Transhumanism and Extropism

Constitution of the World Transhumanist Association

TransCentral – A Yahoo discussion group for transhumanists in the Midwest United States.

The Transhumanist FAQ – by Nick Bostrom. If you want to learn about transhumanism - the paradigm by which OA uses as its launch pad - this is the page to go to!

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies - This is a techno-progressive think tank which seeks to contribute to the understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and societies by promoting and publicizing the work of thinkers who examine the social implications of scientific and technological advance. The IEET also seeks to help shape public policies that distribute the benefits and reduce the risks of technological advancement.

World Transhumanist Association - An international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and umbrella organization for transhumanist groups and individuals, with many useful resources.

Extropy Institute – This site is in the midst of becoming the "Library of Transhumanism, Extropy and the Future."

COMPUTERS, ROBOTS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk. Creating Friendly AI 1.0

Flare - The A.I. programming language Flare.

Bayes' Theorem - Potential mathematical underpinnings of AI judgement.

3 Laws Unsafe - includes articles by several authors, weekly poll questions, a blog for announcements and commentary related to the Three Laws, a free newsletter subscription, and a reading list with books on relevant topics such as the future of AI, accelerating change, cognitive science and nanotechnology.

Robot - mere machine to transcendent mind - Hans Moravec - on-line extracts of his book and illustrations, worth checking out.

Modular Robots – A variety of demonstrations.

Polypod – Demonstration video of a modular robot.

Hugo de Garis – We don't believe there will be an artilect war (in the context defined by Prof. de Garis), or even a "cosmist-terran" dichotomy. Although such a scenario is too simplistic for OA, everything else Prof. de Garis has to say is pretty interesting.

Why Robots Won't Rule the World – A very good paper for seeing the other side of the argument.

Holographic Memory – How holographic memory will work. From the pages of “How Stuff Works”.

Fundamental Physical Limits on Computation – by Warren D. Smith.

NANOTECH

Eric Drexler’s Home Page – A variety of resources by Eric Drexler

Drexler's Engines of Creation - The vision of nanotech, with moderate maths, backing many of OA's nanotech (and, indirectly pico- and smaller) technologies.

The Foresight Institute - Foresight Nanotech Institute’s mission is to ensure the beneficial implementation of nanotechnology.

http://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/index.html - Unbounding the future.

http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/ - Good paper on the medical aspects of nanotechnology.

http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Gallery/

Robert Bradbury's Home Page - Robert Bradbury; Polymath, Extropian and Foresight senior associate, his site has information ranging from how long it would take to build an aircraft carrier with general assemblers to how long it would take to take the solar system apart and build a really big computer.

      Matrioshka Brain Homepage

Bushbots – by Hans Moravec. Includes some drawings and pictures of rough models.

Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life - by Richard A.L. Jones. This book, intended for the general reader, explains why things behave differently at the nanoscale to the way they behave at familiar human scales, and why this means that nanotechnology may be more like biology than conventional engineering.

Institute of Atomic Scale Engineering – Featuring the inventions of Forrest Bishop.

Institute for Molecular Manufacturing - The Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) conducts and funds nanotechnology research as a complement to its sister organization, the Foresight Institute, which serves an important educational role for nanotechnology.

Center for Responsible Nanotechhology – A group dedicated to evaluating the benefits and risks of nanotechnology.

Nano-Factory – A product catalog, of sorts.

Nanomedicine- by Robert A. Freitas

      Volume I – Free online

Volume II – Free online

Nanotechnology – A paper by Faye Scott and Richard A.L Jones

EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION OF SPACE

General Space Exploration

Centauri Dreams - very good science and space exploration blog. "Centauri Dreams is a review of research issues in deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities."

21st Century Space Routes – by NASA.

The Moon Miner – by Dave Dietzler. There is a lot of great information available here, including an exceptional description of a beamrider network.

Spacecraft

Project Rho -Atomic Rocket – Excellent site with extensive information on designing realistic spacecraft.

Antimatter Space Propulsion at Penn State University (LEPS) - using amat and today's technology to send a small unmanned probe to the outer solar system

Orbiter - A Free Space Flight Simulator.

Space Propulsion Systems - by Forrest Bishop (from the Foresight Institute).

Next Exit 0.5 Million Kilometers - A vast network of winding tunnels in space that connects the sun, the planets, their moons, and a host of other destinations as well. Pertains especially to early (Interplanetary Age) timeline, but has implications for the setting as a whole

Solar Sails - This website contains information on solar sailing, an old idea but a new technology for moving around and doing things in space.

Relativistic Starship – A tool for calculating the effects of relativistic travel.

Space Settlements

Space Settlements: A Design Study - This link goes to the html conversion of a 1975 study commissioned by NASA on O'Neill-style colonies.

Space Settlements- A study by Gerard O’Neill.

Dyson Sphere FAQ  - by Anders Sandberg

Megastructures – A site dedicated to… megastructures.

Modular Habitats – A good page on habitat design geometries.

Orbital Green Houses

  Space Warfare

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies.shtml

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies2.shtml

http://denbeste.nu/cd_Articles/navalnotes.shtml

How to Build A Laser Death Ray – by Luke Campbell

 Starflight

Starflight without Warp Drive - Forget SF's magical warp drives. Can today's science give us the stars for real? Conducted by Geoffrey A. Landis, participants: David Brin, Robert L. Forward, and Jonathan Vos Post (14 May 1995).

Dave Dietzler's starship pages - real hard science ideas of how to colonise the galaxy.

INTERSTELLAR Conference - Hydrogen Ice Spacecraft for Robotic Interstellar Flight by Jonathan Vos Post.

Hard Science Fiction Tools - especially (for flight time from one star to another).

Gunbuster - Interesting segment from the anime series Gunbuster on relativity and light speed.

Terraforming

The Terraforming Information Pages - by Martyn Fogg, an author who has published numerous technical articles and at least one book on the subject of Terraforming. 

Terraforming – A site that attempts to explain the difference between terraforming and caeliforming.

WORMHOLES

 
 Spacetime Engineering - One possibility with warp drive and wormholes is that it enables time travel to some extent (it is hard to avoid with FTL, and you might need some restrictions on how wormhole networks work in fact due to this.

Dreaming Distant Voyages - summary of a proposal for a viable traversible wormhole by Sergei Krasnikov. originally appeared in the New Scientist.

Traversable Wormholes: Some Implications – by Michael Clive Price. This paper is not in alignment with OAUP Canon.

Krasnikov's original paper - Even if Krasnikov's wormhole turns out not to be viable, if normal sub-singularity Homo sapiens can come up with so many plausible proposals for a traversible wormhole, then the hyperturing AI gods are going to have a lot more.

Matt Visser's personalized homepage

      Two additional articles by Matt Visser:

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9303023

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9202090

MISCELLANEOUS

The ITSF Project - The European Space Agency (ESA) requested the Maison d'Ailleurs and the OURS Foundation to conduct a study on technologies and concepts found in Science Fiction, in order to obtain imaginative and innovative ideas potentially viable for long-term development by the European space sector.

Paul Birch's Home Page – A site with papers on everything from economics to megastructures.

General Futurism

Visions of Utopia and Dystopia Program - an initiative of the The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Prometheus Links Directory – A nice collection of assorted futurist links. Includes French and English-language sites.

General Timelines

An Illustrated Speculative Timeline of Technology and Social Change for the Next One Thousand Years - Some very useful info here, especially material for the Information and Interplanetary age. Has a very rapid technological curve.

Chronicle of the Future - Well presented headline-style British site, giving year by year coverage of the first half of the 21st century. As always with near-future prophecy, the recent past overtakes the future - "In This Decade 2040-2049: King William's early retirement clears the way for Diana to be proclaimed Queen of England". And the discovery of extraterrestrial civilization in this site's scenario differs from the OA perspective of aliens. But apart from such minor quibbles, this is a great site, with lots of interesting material, very pertinent to the information age of OA. Don't forget to check out Phoebe's Diary.

 Future History – by David Cary. Mainly nanotech, transhumanist, and singularity themes. The timeline quotes are fun! - year of predication and year it is supposed to happen).

Chronology of Jerry Pournelle's Future History - Timeline of the CoDominium and the Empire of Man - compiled by Larry King. Jerry Pournelle is a well-known science fiction author, and this richly detailed but rather conventional space operatic timeline doesn't have a singularity, or AIs, or anything at all very interesting (although there is the standard FTL, empire of man, etc). Still useful as a "baseline" to compare more radical transhuman timelines and SF milieus against, and the future-political details are always fun. Nice names for the new worlds in the star map as well - Xanadu, Tanith, New Chicago, and Maxroy's Purchase being examples. This site also serves as an example why we should not try to predict the near future.

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and High Justice – by Larry King.

Chronology – A timeline that includes Orion’s Arm among others.

Enigma - Future History - In 1990 Enigma created its own "future history", attempting to create a plausible, or at least entertaining, description of the events over the next 130 years of Earth's history. Not OA applicable but still interesting.

After Earth - another future history timeline, again not really OA applicable.

A Brief History of the Universe – From the Big Bang until 10e23 years from now.

General Science Fiction Websites

HardSF.net - Hard Science Fiction Culture - a new site that aims to explore the Science behind the varied works of Hard Science Fiction. Currently features original hard sf stories, an active forum, a comprehensive list of hard sf authors, and a science and technology news section. It is intended soon to also feature a primer list of important hard sf works and in-depth articles on the sciences behind specific hard sf titles.

hardsf.org - Site primarily dealing with hard SF and the science issues related to it.

Starship Dimensions – A site dedicated to the sizing up of aliens, robots, characters and of course starships from a wide variety of sources.

Sci-Fi Com Large site on all aspects of SF, including TV, film, new books, classics, anime, cool sites, and more. has a lively letters section although mostly discussing TV and film. Weekly newsletter is worth subscribing too, especially to stay in touch with popular developments.

Quasardragon - Blog dedicated to scifi and fantasy.

.

Science-Fiction (et genres apparents) - Annotated review of sites of various authors (in French) , includes OA

Forward, into the past - by Spider Robinson. A perceptive essay that sums up what is wrong with popular science fiction today.

Technovelgy - Inventions from Science Fiction Books and Movies - Inventions and ideas (over 650 currently available on-site) of science fiction writers, listed alphabetically or according to date (timeline), category, etc. Also has new inventions in the news section. Each invention is accompanied by a short summary and a relevant quote from the book in which it appears, and the name of the author so you can look up other terms by the same writer. A very useful resource.

Space Operas and Similar Projects

The Orion's Arm Universe Project is not the first attempt at an encyclopedic hard-science future-epic science fiction, and it doesn't look to be the last either! Here are some of our sister sites, which present a similar grand vision of futurism and worldbuilding. These include predecessors to Orion's Arm, parallel projects, and independent projects that draw on Orion's Arm as one of their sources of inspiration.

Big Ideas, Grand Vision - A hard science fiction setting written by Anders Sandberg (author of a great Transhumanist site, as well as a large part of Orion's Arm) in 1999 as a role-playing game. A very detailed attempt at world creation, set in the early interstellar age, with about a dozen different colonized planets described. These isolated human colonies, separated by many light-years, have each developed along distinct cultural and technological directions, and are only now being brought together, resulting in numerous clashes of culture and philosophy. A very innovative and visionary setting, which has contributed a lot to many of the basic themes of Orion's Arm, although differing in a number of important points as regards setting. Much of this material has been and is being adopted and adapted to Orion's Arm.

Ad Astra - by Richard Baker and David Dye. Ad Astra is a role-playing game with hard science-fiction setting. A lot of this material has been adopted (with the kind permission of the authors) into Orion's Arm. Unfortunately this site is incomplete and no longer under construction.

The Hamilton Encyclopaedia of Exopaleontology - Historical Atlas - Aaron Hamilton's definitive listing of past sapient races - this material has been incorporated into Orion's Arm.

Transhuman Space – Using the GURPs role-playing system, should also be mentioned as the first adaptation of a transhumanist setting for an role-playing game.

More recent projects

 Just as we openly admit to being influenced by the many interests, and associations, of our members, so to have we influenced others…

The ArcBuilder Universe - by John M. Dollan. It's a new time for the human race, a time when our technology has begun to catch up with our ambitions. Mankind has reached his hand out to the stars, and inward to his own being. We have united our own Solar System, and established interstellar commonwealths, empires, and federations. And through it all we have the Arcways, ancient devices left on a hundred worlds which allow instantaneous communication between the stars, forming the framework which supports civilization. Yet we are trespassers to the Arcways, using them without truly understanding them, and the only thing more frightening than the prospect of the return of the Arcbuilders is the return of those who drove the Builders away uncounted ages ago.

Red Galaxy - by Trent Shipley. The Red Galaxy project was started to host the Founder's canon. The Founder's canon was inspired in large part by the Orion's Arm Project, but differs by having a more "Luddite" canon (no wormholes, no reactionless drive, etc) and set further in the future. Offers the option of hosting further canons, which are free to share intellectual content.

--

The Garden Universe  - The Garden Universe is a science fiction project established  by Matthew C. Johnson  Imagine a universe three times older than Sol, a universe rich in the history of galaxies, stars, planets, life and civilizations big and small.  Imagine a universe so vast that no known race has ever explored more than the meanest fraction of it, a universe where countless generations of sophont races have spread out and left their own mark upon it, the sum of which has made it that almost no star system has been wholly unaffected.  This is The Garden Universe.

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The Mars and Outer Planets Trading Post  A fictional company set in the Solar System of the future; a detailed look at how commerce in the outer system might look in a few centuries time.

Space Operas

K'ai, Death of Dreams – Richard deCosta's 3d sci-fi opera, The trailer is available on the production website. The opera is being produced entirely using computer graphics. This is a completely original space opera, as in space opera (in the original sense of epic opera, e.g. Wagner), CGI alternative-media production; a very worthy project!

Sinai - Like Orion’s Arm, a huge collaborative worldbuilding and writing (including story arc) project, they even have an encyclopaedia. The setting is very different to the one found in Orion’s Arm, being fantasy or sci fi fantasy. Even so, this is a very spectacular project, in terms of sheer size.

TV SHOW #1: Science-Fiction Series. - Richard Whettestone shares all the same criticisms we have about badly written, and ridiculously clichéd current pop sci fi, and is hoping to make a decent sci fi TV series. While this material is not OA-compatible or even properly hard SF, this is certainly a very admirable effort.

Zaon – A slick-looking RPG wargaming/Space Opera project by Justin Winters, based on the standard "sci fi entertainment" (movie and TV) type of universe. Beautiful maps, graphics and models.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Asimov may have sown the memetic seed for the Encyclopedia Galactica, with tantalising quotations scattered through his Foundation series of books he does not own it, and a number of versions of the great Encyclopedia have been referenced or appeared both in print and on the web.

Encyclopedia Galactica - mirror - A very impressive compilation of topics from Asimov's Foundation series milieu. Includes galactography, characters, psychohistory, robotics, sociology, space travel, timeline, and chimerical. Site last updated 1999.

Encyclopedia Galactica Project - A complete listing of all of Asimov's quotations to the great Encyclopaedia. Only a page in length, but of historical value - this is how the "Encyclopaedia Galactica" began!

Alliance for Progress Encyclopedia - Based on David Brin's Uplift series - a small and local version of the great Library of the Galactics. A superb effort by Trent Shipley and Matt Lundstrom.

The Collins Encyclopedia Galactica - For a series of Amiga games by The World Foundry - topics include astrophysics, transport, exobiology, history, weapons, megacorporations, and general info. This site does not seem to have been revised since 27th March 1999.

Encyclopedia Galactica: Background Information for the Voyagers Campaign - by Bill White - a page of standard space opera definitions. Last updated May 11, 1997

The Unofficial GZG Encyclopedia Galactica - A collection of links and fan written information based on the Future History postulated by Jon Tuffley, and used in his games Full Thrust, Stargrunt II, and Dirtside II.

Encyclopedia Galactica - Furscape - an original telnet-based roleplaying/worldbuilding scenario based around splices (here called "furries").