Documenting A Bit Of The Recent Diaspora Worldbuilding Thought Process Here Since I Feel I Should Share

documenting a bit of the recent Diaspora worldbuilding thought process here since I feel I should share more of that. y'know, since "it's my [blog] and I get to [post] the [content]"

So it turns out having an ancient and very advanced (and currently extinct) alien civilization in the immediate vicinity of the solar system ten thousand years ago is a bit of a pain in the ass to implement just right if you don't want humanity to figure out they existed until a few centuries down the line. I managed to whittle down the problem of their inevitable presence in our system to just a ruined observation post on one of the minor inner moons of Uranus, which doesn't get properly discovered until mid-22nd-century, but even so the paradigm shift it presents needs more mitigation. ANYWAY, that's not what this post is about.

Specific problem du jour: Alpha Centauri. It was one of the central hubs of skgri civilization; it's absolutely saturated with arcologies, cities, megastructure habitats... even two whole terraformed moons. The entire damn star system is the most prominent relict of skgri civilization this side of Barnard (their home sun), and it's right goddamn next door to humanity. Admittedly, the artifacts and such have been mostly ruined from the large-scale interstellar war and then eight thousand years of intervening time... but there's still so much skgri stuff everywhere in the system that it would be pretty easy to translate their language, interpret their culture, and reverse engineer their technology even from scraps. Oops.

HOWEVER... the need for xenoarchaeologists to pore over hundreds of thousands of sites on dozens of worlds –and potentially millions of partially-demolished spacecraft– to gain a comprehensive enough understanding of skgri'i language to start deciphering their works... that would necessarily be the work of millions of researchers, for possibly hundreds of years... which is the PERFECT excuse to explain the gradual human settlement of the Alpha Centauri system without the need for bullshit manifest destiny (because manifest destiny is for losers and We Don't Do That Here).

I still have a great many other problems to solve about the existence of the skgri'i, but this is one fairly big problem solved! thanks for tuning in, and if you have questions go ahead and ask. :)

Hey, its Australia day! Aka the day a bunch of English arrived in Australia and began two centuries worth of genocide and cultural erasure.

In honour of Australia day, do you wanna help some indigenous people reclaim rightful ownership of their unceded lands?

I'm sorry but 3 is approximately #00CC00 (which is incidentally my favorite color)

the idea of consuming two conflicting things that promise to do the opposite of each other has always been hilarious to me. there’s a liquid shot-based sleep aid called 6 hour sleep and as soon as I saw it i immediately imagined mixing it and a 5 hour energy together for a 1 hour nap

yeah no that's exactly what's going to happen. every first contact event is FIRST contact all over again, ​because every single event will expand our horizons juuuust enough for us to wonder... was that last contact? was that it? are there more or are we the only ones?

in this big and lonely universe, any fellow intelligence is infinitely precious because we are the only ones, as far as we know.

that is why the motto of the pan-species alliance in my main sf universe (the Diaspora) is solum habemus invicem et stellas: we only have each other and the stars.

what if we meet intelligent alien life out there but the novelty eventually wears off and we’re back to “i wonder if we’re alone in the universe or if there’s more than just humans and galorphasians”