obvious noob questions from a writer

[TheodoreBonn]

I'm my iPad ATM so limited typing.

I think we could probably make this work, and let you continue playing in the Hyades, while remaining in canon. Biggest challenges I see are:

A) people from something near our time playing a role. OA has cryogenics and other stasis tech being developed, but not until the early 24th century CE. People from that period might be too strange to make proper 'windows', even if presented as slum dwellers living in the most primitive conditions (meaning like average people live now - which ought to blow a fuse or two in your readers mind). Or maybe that could be workable (thoughts?). I wasn't able to find a date for when revivable cryogenics were developed, just vitrification. I'm not one of our history experts, so we need input from them. If they were frozen early enough, they might greatly predate even the first starships and were just loaded on an Ark w/o being woken up. There are some other...stranger options as well.

B) the early AIs in the Taurus Nexus. This is mainly just a matter of scheduling so that the ship doesn't get there until they've vanished. Just need to run the numbers.

C) the limited lifetime of the TN civ that comes after the first one. Still it's at its height for something like a thousand years and there are still people there up to the OA present. Is that enough room to play in?

D) the wormholes left by the first TN civ. I suspect they will be more of a feature than a bug for you, but obviously I don't know all the details of your story ATM.

Overall, and at first blush, I think this can be made to work. Need to get input from other members and buy in from the other senior members, but can float that easily enough.

My 2c worth,

Todd

No...after re-reading some of your material (including the stuff about the Great Expulsion)...the Hyades squares shockingly perfectly with what I've envisioned. In my stories, the Hyades worlds were already filled with leftover structures and remnant artifacts from an extinct civilization (I had them as alien, but a vanished Terran-descended super-ai civ works even better). And I already had relic megastructures in my own Hyades as well...as well as a network of stargates (but again, wormholes work just fine) that linked the primary worlds of the Cluster. High civ was flourishing on the networked worlds, but the unlinked worlds (which I called the Outlands or Outworlds), were still very much wild and woolly, and there was very much an Oklahoma-style land-rush going on as different - often competing - civs attempted to grab as much real estate as they could.

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy. Doctors in this day and age are already doing surgeries where they lower body temps and even withdraw all blood from patients, and it's a short step between that and filling up frozen human bodies with handy preservative gels and keeping them in a frozen state for indefinite periods. They'll certainly be doing this well before 2100! And as this tech gets going, it's not going to take the wealthy long to realize they can at least have a go at immortality by cryo-freezing their bodies when they die. Which means that in theory people born as late as 1970 or even 1960 will have an honest chance of winding up in a freezer...to be revived again in some far future. As the tech gets cheaper...it's also not hard to imagine that overpopulated nations might not look to cryo tech as a solution for relieving population pressure, or as a much more cost-effective way of detaining criminals without having to feed and house them.

It's going to be big business. Death has always been a big business. Mortuaries have always been profitable, and will likely always be a growth industry.

At a thought...could these mass freezers be incorporated somehow into the canon...and maybe tied into the Expulsion? Might make sense for GAIA - or whatever caretaker AI came to be responsible for these mass frozen graveyards - to launch them at the Hyades, too...lots of worlds, lots of chances, as opposed to just spewing the frozen deaders out in random directions and hoping some of them stick wherever they wind up. (This also allows the fundamental OA tenet that 90% of human history has been lost or corrupted over time to remain - the Taurus Nexus was ultimately swept aside by more advanced civs, yes? If that's where the bulk of the frozen modern-day folk wound up, that tenet isn't altered...especially since the frozen dead could easily remain frozen - and thus not having any impact post-2100 in the OA 'verse - at least until such point as they were revived in the Hyades.)

From a writing standpoint, this certainly offers a way to give characters from the modern day (with all their modern cultural references!) a vehicle into the Orion's Arm universe...which is, IMHO, an absolutely invaluable tool for making a universe more accessible to the masses.

As an aside...I truly appreciate you (and Steve) taking the time to even have this conversation. Humbled by it...honestly.