Astra Planeta - Tumblr Posts

I'm starting to come back around to Astra Planeta in a really substantial way, and if you don't mind I'm gonna think out loud here for a little.

Astra Planeta is categorically hard science fiction, in that it adheres to the definition of the genre: the scientific and technological elements presented in the world's canon are within the realm of what we consider possible with our current collective knowledge of science and technology. However, ASP breaks the mold of hard science fiction by being optimistic in three key ways: technological, social, and existential.

Astra Planeta is technologically optimistic in assuming that any engineering problem standing between us and efficient interstellar travel can be solved. According to the canon timeline, fusion power is relatively commonplace by the mid-21st century, and by the start of the 22nd century humanity have developed a proper torchship. Human health issues stemming from long-term space travel are easily resolved with high-power magnetic shielding and centripetal pseudo-gravity, plus a touch of good ol' genetic therapy to keep the body strong and healthy. Wormhole technology is developed for instantaneous communication by the 22nd century, and by the end of the 23rd century humans have begun to unlock faster-than-light travel by engineering our first warp drive. In the few centuries between the first spaceflight and the first extrasolar mission, humans figure out (non-cryogenic) stasis, perfect closed-system environment maintenance, and build AI with thought patterns so similar to people they might as well have souls. We have our cake and eat it too. All of this is within the scope of "scientifically possible," though certain parts are hotly debated in academic circle. But the rapidity with which we achieve these milestones is shamelessly optimistic. It has to be, or else the premise of the setting falls apart.

Astra Planeta is socially optimistic in assuming that humanity, as a global entity, can overcome -or at least overlook- the cultural divisions which set people apart and cooperate as a singular civilization. I've talked about this extensively elsewhere, but one of the keystones of the project is the thorough demilitarization of planet Earth and all her nations. By the end of the 21st century, "war" is a word that has passed out of the news cycle and into history books. It took some doing, sure, but in this reality humankind was faced with the imminent degradation of their home planet and collectively decided that there were bigger fish to fry than each other. Complex issues left unresolved for generations were gradually untangled and sorted out, with a lot of patience and a bit of nihilism. Implanting a profound sense of human fragility into the global consciousness helped give them all a sense of perspective. Nothing can last forever. There's no point to being the best. The only solace we have in the vast and indifferent universe is each other, and isn't it important, then, to make life better for ourselves and everyone around us? This is how we finally reached the stars: together. Upon making contact with other sapient beings, we carried this lesson with us and did our best to befriend them. Astra Planeta operates on the principle that the Great Filter is the shedding of tribalism, and assumes that the human species is smart -and kind- enough to achieve this.

Astra Planeta is existentially optimistic in assuming that life is not rare in the universe at large, and thus there are not only dozens of worlds nearby which harbor biospheres, but there are also several advanced, peaceable civilizations in close proximity -both in space and time. Statistically, the number of civilizations in the setting implies a maddeningly large number of contemporary civilizations present in the galaxy at large, which does not line up with current evidence whatsoever. It breaks from expectation not only with first contact happening at all, not only with first contact going relatively well, but with multiple first contact events all going relatively well. It assumes that mutually intelligible communication is possible for all contact events, and that most contemporary civilizations share our basic morals and aspirations in some sense. All of these elements are, given our current hypotheses on alien life, immensely improbable –but not impossible. Granted, this isn't baseless contrivance purely to make the setting interesting; there is underlying justification for most of the more conspicuous contrivances. For example: taking our planet Earth's biosphere as a point of reference, it seems likely that if complex life exists anywhere in the universe for a long enough span of time, it will evolve some degree of sapience. Odds seem to be very slim that any of these hypothetical sophonts would develop advanced technology, and even less to the point of globalization and multi-planetary society. But the fact remains that they could, and in a universe where life is far more abundant than expected, a small fraction of biospheres generating spacefaring civilizations still makes for quite a few spacefaring civilizations. ASP does not posit that the clockwork of reality has a conscience and is merciful –it is often explicit in stating that the universe simply is what it is. What it does posit is that, however statistically improbable this may seem given our current level of understanding, the cosmos is practically teeming with life. Without this concession to "realism," the premise of the setting falls apart completely.

All three of these assumptions are crucial to the Astra Planeta canon, as their interplay forms the diverse interstellar near-utopia that is the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition –which, of course, the setting centers on. As mentioned, ASP does not assume that the forces of nature are kind; the randomly catastrophic nature of the universe is the prime source of narrative conflict here. But Astra Planeta stands as my monument to hope: a world that is better, but still interesting.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk :)

Diaspora worldbuilding update:

I have now documented 420 planets on the DSP master spreadsheet. Nice.

Of course, at the moment they're almost all just a name with simple annotation, but still! Current total is 224 individual stars (and substars) documented, in 164 systems! I passed the 25-ly boundary and I think I'm getting close to the edge of known space (barring RCC systems far beyond the USSC frontier, naturally).

Here's a peek at what the sheet looks like! This is just the first page, documenting the stars. I have separate pages for each system and a linked list document with planetary annotations.

Some fun facts! Or at least, facts that I think are fun.

While the largest star system by physical reach is Fomalhaut (several lightyears in radius) and the largest by number of component stars is V1054 Ophiuchi (5 stars), the largest by planetary count at the current time is actually Eta Cassiopeiae, aka Valhalla-Folkvangr, with a grand total of 20 documented major planets. Originally I'd planned for that honor to go to Alpha Centauri, but alas, ε Cas has more stable orbital space to shove planets into. Inevitably, this will change as I move further out into alien territory where I can keysmash names.

Large systems are fairly uncommon, but so are solitary stars! Most zero-planet systems are those with a brown dwarf as the central body, because the formation of substars lacks many key factors that trigger planetesimal formation in solar nebulae. Most true stars have at least one to three planetary companions, though more than five is rare -this is partially because larger stars, which are more likely to have a greater number of planets, are also fairly rare.

In the course of NAMING all these worlds following the convention of using mythological names, I have referenced nearly three dozen real-world mythological traditions! It's made me appreciate all the more just how much cultural history the real world is steeped in.

Diaspora worldbuilding update:

I have now documented 420 planets on the DSP master spreadsheet. Nice.

Of course, at the moment they're almost all just a name with simple annotation, but still! Current total is 224 individual stars (and substars) documented, in 164 systems! I passed the 25-ly boundary and I think I'm getting close to the edge of known space (barring RCC systems far beyond the USSC frontier, naturally).

Here's a peek at what the sheet looks like! This is just the first page, documenting the stars. I have separate pages for each system and a linked list document with planetary annotations.

oh right! I wrote another short piece set in the Diaspora the other day: Out of the Cradle [link], a story about the first words spoken on Mars.

okay since the monoxide post seemed to be reasonably popular, here’s another take:

bones (and biology in general, but particularly bones) are frequent subjects of humor. every species has a unique approach to a skeletal system: humans and rimor have calcium phosphate + collagen bones, shyxaure have hollow cobalt carbonate + collagen bones augmented with carbon fiber, skae have chitin bones on the inside and the outside, and ziirpu just have a springy tube-shaped cartilage lattice. so even after hundreds of years of regular contact and cultural integration it’s still funny to have conversations like

“did you know humans have five bones in their EARS?”

“damn I wish I had bones in my ears”

“damn I wish I had bones”

“you do have bones and they’re bright pink you idiot, I don’t have bones”

“haha yeah boneless ziivor”

fun fact about the Diaspora canon: all known sophonts except humans (and later rimor) are immune to carbon monoxide poisoning* because they have different blood oxygen carriers, the most common being coboglobin and hemocyanin. naturally the other species make fun of humans for having hemoglobin instead, and so humans get sent stuff like this

*they can still suffocate from lowered oxygen percentage but they can tolerate well above our limit of 70 ppm CO

The Lost Starfarers

An excerpt from the book The Lost Starfarers by Dr. Erin Burke, published March 2472 CE. Image: the planet Hemera in 2470, seen from high orbit.

Ten thousand years ago, the apocalypse happened.

Not on Earth, of course; we were spared, and our pre-agricultural ancestors never knew the fortune that had shone upon them. But the ruins of nearly a hundred worlds in nearby space tell us everything: ten thousand years ago, the world ended eighty-seven times at once. Far more, in fact, if one counts the tens of thousands of shattered stations and constructs that lay scattered across the expanse of more than a dozen solar systems. Our own system did not fully escape this fate, and indeed the derelict station over Uranus is how we came to realize that, once, long ago, humanity was watched over by beings far more powerful than ourselves.

In our fledgeling centuries of starfaring we would come to learn that these beings called themselves "skgri'i," and came from a world called "o'Kora" -the planet now known to us as Hemera. Over two thousand metric years, they spread across the stars, developing their science and technology to heights we still will not match for another dozen centuries. And yet, somehow, they did not fully shed their primordial divisive nature –much the same nature as the human race– and this was ultimately their undoing.

Our predecessors, our cosmic kin who once flourished across the stars for millennia, were erased from existence in thirteen short years by the most cataclysmic war in known xenoarchaeological history -so absolute in its destruction that it has been simply dubbed "the Apocalypse." We know very little of the conflict itself, or of the terrible weapons with which it was fought, but we can still see plainly the cost that was paid: billions of souls eradicated by the actions of a few; thriving global ecosystems turned to dust in mere seconds; planets left scarred with radioactive craters and unnatural volcanic glass. Most worlds in space are simply dead, inert from their birth... but can you fathom looking upon a world which was killed?

Centuries ago, Earth’s scholars puzzled over the lack of evidence for advanced intelligent life in the universe. After much thought and debate, some proposed an event common to the development of all sapient species called the Great Filter: that which determines whether a civilization will achieve starflight or collapse into oblivion. The ancient Hemerans show us the sobering truth: only cooperation will see us through the Great Filter, because cooperation is the Great Filter. We must take to heart the lesson which those magnificent starfarers did not survive to learn: if we do not forge our path through the stars with goodwill and camaraderie, all that awaits us is the end.

Alien cultures have mythology too! Every civilization that humans have encountered within the Diaspora canon has a cultural history with some sort of mythological tradition –often multiple different mythologies, in fact. Sophontologists generally agree that while specific religions are not universal, evidence shows that the concept of belief systems (created to fill in the gaps of a culture's knowledge) is common to most sapient species. Some examples:

A certain ziirb culture, the Driizunn, once believed in a great deity representing order, wisdom, and protection. This deity, Nzmarri, became the namesake of the powerful artificial intelligence which now administrates all of ziirb civilization.

Like humanity, the shyxaure named the planets of their home system, Aelycah, after mythological figures. The chief deity of the Elashareyu, a prominent shyxaure culture, was the god of the sky, Haaçayor. However, very close behind them in importance were Vymara and Valimora: love and death. Those are the two constants of the world in Elashare myth; the compromise between the need of nature and the desire of the sentient being. Valimora assures the cycle of nature keeps going, while Vymara allows the most important parts of a person to exist forever in the flock: their family, their legacy, their love.

In the ancient rimor civilization of Ilen, the sun was embodied by a mother goddess named Alai, who made the world Volkh as a nest for her children: the rimor themselves. This belief helped to drive the rimor's pursuit of spaceflight as an instinct to leave the nest and explore on their own.

Unfortunately, we do not have very good records of the skgri mythos, just names from which xenoarchaeologists must derive mythological roles based on context.

FTL in Astra Planeta

All known interstellar civilizations in the Astra Planeta canon are capable of faster-than-light travel, in some cases (skae and Calypsians) thanks to the teachings of humanity, but mostly because of their own scientific merits. The only known form of macroscopic FTL travel is the warp drive, which has historically been achieved a few hundred years into each civilization's spacefaring age since the physical and engineering challenges that must be overcome to actually make a working prototype are extremely complex.

A warp drive works by bending spacetime in such a way as to simply amplify the vessel's real velocity; it doesn't actually generate any acceleration. An object's real velocity at warp drive activation determines its FTL velocity, but it takes time to accelerate to that real velocity at a safe acceleration (one standard Earth gravity). What results is a tradeoff between the time spent speeding up and slowing down, and the time spent in warp, which varies depending on distance and real velocity.

Finding the optimal interstellar vector utilizes a simple asymptotic formula (created by @catgirlbionics, thanks again!) involving three variables: the distance to the target in lightyears (d), the warp amplification factor (a), and the maximum real-space velocity of the object as a decimal value of the speed of light (v). This function equates to the total flight duration in days (T).

(707.646*v)+((d/(a*v))*365) = T

By plugging in specific values for (d) and (a), and then deriving the function, its positive local minimum will be equivalent to the shortest possible travel time and ideal velocity for the given interstellar vector. For example: a modern Generation VI warp drive has a maximum amplification factor (a) of about 4000, and the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri (d) is about 4.34 lightyears. Using these values in the formula results in an optimal velocity (v) of about 0.0237c, and a minimum travel time (T) of 33 and a half days!

Warp drives have limited usefulness due to the enormous amount of power they require and the peculiar effects of bending spacetime. Acceleration must be accomplished in real-space or else the exhaust from the engine will reflect off the drive's event horizon and cook the ship, and the same goes for any heat radiated by the vessel. This is why warp drives typically operate in "stuttered" format: an interstellar flight is composed of multiple FTL segments interspersed with periods of real-space STL flight where the ship dumps the heat accumulated by the drive into space via radiator.

Warp drives are not the only method of circumventing the speed of light. Wormholes are also physically possible; however, the largest stable wormholes ever documented are of atomic scale, and anything with rest mass passing through the singularity will cause it to collapse. Wormholes, therefore, are only used to facilitate FTL communication in the form of ansibles, passing extremely narrow laser beams around a network of linked wormholes to achieve near-instantaneous communication.

Because of their nature as loopholes in relativity, both technologies incur some very bizarre effects when it comes to temporal reference frames. Ansible connections where one end is moving at relativistic speed create a combination of wavelength shift and frame dragging that render it impossible to communicate in lockstep; a warpship with a relativistic real-space velocity will result in some time-disparity between passengers and their destination upon arrival. However, it's generally agreed that these complications are a small inconvenience compared to an interstellar society without FTL, where time-slips of decades or more would be a haunting reality.

The United Nations of Humanity is the international governing body of almost all Earth-descended polities and territories in known space. Founded in 2210 CE after the independence movements of Mars and the Belt necessitated a reorganization of the original UN, the UNH of the 30th century is composed of hundreds of member star systems across a sphere of influence nearly twenty parsecs in diameter. It is the largest member of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition and one of the two founding members (alongside the Ra’na InterGlobal Council). The UNH has no primary seat, as all business is conducted through ansible teleconference: a vastly simpler way to organize representatives across sixty-five thousand cubic lightyears of space. Members of the UNH include the United Sol System, Centauri Republic, New Nations of Helios, and Dogstar Alliance, to name a few.

The symbology of the UNH emblem is simple. The asymmetrical five digits of the human hand provide a clear distinction from the other species of the cosmos; we are the only species with hands like ours. Beyond that, the hand represents something much deeper. Handprints are ubiquitous in prehistoric cave art found all over the human homeworld, Earth, and have withstood the test of time. Even today, leaving an impression of one's hand in media echoes the purpose of the ancient hands: it is a testament to our existence, a call into the future that in this place and time, a human person was alive and awake. A footprint may show that we have stood in a spot, but a handprint shows we have lived there.

happy birthday hon!! I love you!!

here’s a birthday ask! 💌

how are birthdays celebrated in some cultures of your worlds? any worlds, any cultures within— just whichever ones you’d like to talk about! I love to hear about the cool celebrations you come up with; I’d love to hear about how different people celebrate getting older, if you’d like to talk about it :3

THANK YOU HON! I LOVE YOU TOO!!! 💚

This is a GOOD question, and one that I don't readily have an answer to! I'll do the thing that worldbuilders do best: improvise an answer on the spot and overthink it later.

[ASP] Birthdays (or hatchdays, if you're a species which emerges from an egg/cocoon) are still a common event planetside, particularly in human cultures! But for spacers it's less meaningful –between time dilation and the wildly different year lengths of various worlds, it gets hard to keep track of. Sure, you can track it by metric time (using the rounded Earth year), but when most of your life is spent in space without the seasonal cycle of a planet, you tend to perceive time as a more continuous thing, or at least segmented in a different way.

[SPH] Birthdays are a big deal to some cultures, but utterly mundane to others. The Orniikh people treat the day with great reverence and joy: it's the anniversary of the day their principal deities chose to incarnate as you! Orniikh people generally spend their birthdays invoking jeha –that is to say, having a lot of fun!

For Aurians, particularly those of the Temoran belief system, one's birthday is a time for gratitude towards the elder spirits and one's community. You were brought into the world by the grace of the spirits, and it is with the help of your community that you have lived through another season cycle.

The dwarves, meanwhile, hail from the depths of the Southern Range, sheltered from the sky and the seasons, and thus don't really have a cultural concept of cyclical time. For them, age is a continuously progressing status rather than a number, and life stages ("youth," "adult," "elder") are gradually transitioned through rather than marked with fixed dates.

The first citizen of the Moon was born on June 9th, 2044, in Apollo Colony (later Apollo City). Her name was Diana Mavandi-Castellano, born to Jason Mavandi (United States citizen) and Irene Castellano (Ecuadorean citizen), and her birth was a messy affair for the United Nations. Though born into both United States and Ecuadorean citizenship, her birth in Mare Tranquilitatus -literally on the Moon- begged the question: should little Diana be considered, legally, a citizen of the Moon? Or a citizen of the United Nations, broadly? What would that imply?

Ultimately, her birth led the UN to establish its Common Territories Bureau in 2045 to streamline affairs regarding human-inhabited regions that were under international jurisdiction: Antarctica, the seas of Earth, the Moon, and Mars. Ms. Mavandi-Castellano later grew up to head this bureau herself, and later on in her life she would serve as the first UN Ambassador for the Autonomous Territory of Luna (est. 2112).

Life, they say, finds a way.

When humankind sent some of their first interstellar probes, the Sojourner twins, to the neighboring Alpha Centauri binary star system, they had no idea what they would find. The Sojourners' predecessor, the Darwin probe, had already discovered complex life on a frigid moon in the Proxima Centauri system, showing humanity they still had much to learn about the cosmos. With the Sojourners, all bets were off.

The one thing they never expected to find, of course, was an abandoned alien megastructure -which was exactly what Sojourner 2 discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Dubbed the Tellus Ring, after an ancient Roman goddess of the Earth, this thousand-mile-diameter, hundred-mile-wide ring orbits in a debris belt within the star's habitable zone. The ring rotates at the right rate to produce centripetal force just slightly weaker than Earth's gravity, equivalent to the gravity of a planet called Hemera -later discovered to be the origin point of the life present on the ring. Indeed, life thrives on the interior surface of the Tellus Ring, which is sculpted to bear landmasses and seas, under a halo-shaped sky kept in place by centrifugal force and five-mile-high walls on either rim. On Tellus, vast cities lie dormant; thousands of years more advanced than human civilization yet left to ruin and claimed by the nature that their builders had imported.

The discovery of Tellus changed humanity's understanding of the universe forever, and provoked countless questions about its origins that would only be answered with centuries of research and further interstellar exploration. The native people of Hemera, some eight or ten thousand years extinct by now, had a fondness for carrying their ecosystems with them wherever they went. This is evidenced by nearly a dozen terraformed worlds and hundreds of ecology-bearing megastructures scattered around known space, all overgrown and feral with the loss of their mysterious ancient wardens. It was recognized, relatively soon after human explorers arrived in the Alpha Centauri system, that Tellus was the sole surviving construct in its debris belt: the debris was, largely, parts of destroyed ringworlds and similar constructs. Similar destruction has been found in every other system once inhabited by the ancients, leading xenoarchaeologists to suspect a vast and cataclysmic war as the cause of their extinction. Yet, by some grace of powers unknown, some products of their great hubris still survive.

While many other examples of ancient constructs have since been adopted and restored by humanity in their attempt to decipher the lost history of this ancient civilization, Tellus remains a lone monument to the tenacity of life -even when taken from its home and subjected to existential threat, it will endure and, in time, thrive.

Lore Tuesday is on hold because I'm on vacation! Instead please accept this meme about the Diaspora canon:

For All Mankind

Ares 1 \\ Mission Day 128 \\ Surface Mission Day 30 \\ 11/02/2018

Commander Anna Wilson gripped the United Nations flag in her hands and closed her eyes as she unfurled it. The camera Ari held was now rolling, and despite the isolation lending her the confidence to do this, she was still a bit nervous. The light-lag delay of mission control’s inevitable reaction wasn’t helping the anxiety bubbling under her conscious mind. What would they think? What would the world think?

She thought back to training, years ago, when the mission was still a young idea. She had confessed to her crew, in private, her thoughts about the inevitable flag-planting ceremony. To her surprise -and delight- they were in agreement: planting a flag would send the wrong message. It was an archaic practice too laden with negative symbolism, no matter the intentions. So for the next several months, in moments of free time away from the watchful eyes of NASA, they'd planned an alternative. And now, seven light-minutes away from Earth with no one to stop them, they could enact it.

Anna inhaled deeply, faced the camera with the flag, and spoke: “We do not claim this world.” She began rolling the flag back up to stow in her pack. “We will not plant here the flag of any nation or even all nations, because this mission -our presence here today- is much greater than the concept of nations. We came here, to another world, in peace for all mankind. So we cannot plant a flag. It represents arrogance and dominance.” The clock was ticking now. The video stream was hurrying back to Earth, but the whole ceremony would be over before the reply arrived. We’re on our own script now, she thought. Better not mess it up.

As they’d agreed, Oye produced a small aerosol can from his pack -spray paint, specially engineered by a friend to resist the environmental conditions of Mars. Their mark here would endure everything short of a direct meteor strike for millennia. He began to walk toward the rock outcropping nearby, with Ari and Ayami falling in behind him.

Anna brought up the rear, and continued to speak as Ari swiveled the camera back over his shoulder. “Instead, we leave behind only our footprints, which mark our journey…” She paused, and placed a hand on the ancient rock face, making sure Ari was pointing the camera at it. “…and our handprints, showing that we do not seek to claim this world –only to know it.”

Oye gently shook the can and blew the dust from the rock with an airbrush, normally used for geology sampling. Anna blinked a little longer than normal. Here we go.

He aimed the nozzle at her hand and pressed down. The paint sprayed out into the thin air around her suit glove, staining the glove and surrounding rock a deep, cobalt blue. The mission director and tech teams would be pissed, but the crew had taken precautions: covering the tools, wrist camera, and flashlight with tape. When Oye finished moments later, Anna lifted her hand and gazed at the blue stenciled outline on the three-billion-year-old alien sandstone.

As the rest of the crew created their hand stencils, Anna continued. “Maybe in a thousand years, Mars will have its own flag; its own nations. But the marks we leave here today prove to the future that we came not as envoys of nations, but as people, baring our raw humanity for all to see just like our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. We are here today not only as representatives of our fellow humans, but on behalf of our oldest ancestors, who did not know of nations; they only knew how to be human. These markings are for them as much as they are for us.”

She took a step back as Ari passed her the camera, and aimed it at the four painted hands on the Martian rock. She zoomed in a little to emphasize her closing statement. “Across all of time and space, we are one people, forever.”

I'm in the process of giving the Diaspora star map a much-needed aesthetic overhaul. It's turning out pretty well so far! Here's the first stage: up to 10 ly from Sol.

Some notes:

all stars (four and eight points) signify an individual star, colored according to its spectral type.

eight-pointed stars are the homesuns of sapient species.

stars with rings have at least one planet. green rings indicate native life present; red rings indicate prior terraformation by the extinct Hemeran civilization.

the two other markers, one white dot and one white dot with an angled ring, indicate rogue interstellar planets.

the map is arranged by right ascension (celestial X coordinate) and distance, so the +/- number above each system is its declination (celestial Y coordinate).

the arrows at the center indicate the directions of the galactic core and rim, using the symbols of Sagittarius and Orion, respectively (although this map is aligned to right ascension which means the plane we're viewing is actually almost perpendicular to the galactic disk)

Second stage complete! Now featuring all systems out to 15 ly from Sol.

Additional notes:

The green-colored rogue planet, Murray-Callahan, is the only unbound interstellar object (UIO) known to harbor life.

The blue links in the network are systems and routes that are claimed by the United Nations of Humanity.

The yellow links in the network are systems and routes that are claimed by the Ra'na InterGlobal Council.

The turquoise links in the network are systems and routes that are claimed by the Worldtribe.

Grey links are neutral and under jurisdiction of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition, usually either crucial hub systems or systems with carefully managed native life.

I'm in the process of giving the Diaspora star map a much-needed aesthetic overhaul. It's turning out pretty well so far! Here's the first stage: up to 10 ly from Sol.

Some notes:

all stars (four and eight points) signify an individual star, colored according to its spectral type.

eight-pointed stars are the homesuns of sapient species.

stars with rings have at least one planet. green rings indicate native life present; red rings indicate prior terraformation by the extinct Hemeran civilization.

the two other markers, one white dot and one white dot with an angled ring, indicate rogue interstellar planets.

the map is arranged by right ascension (celestial X coordinate) and distance, so the +/- number above each system is its declination (celestial Y coordinate).

the arrows at the center indicate the directions of the galactic core and rim, using the symbols of Sagittarius and Orion, respectively (although this map is aligned to right ascension which means the plane we're viewing is actually almost perpendicular to the galactic disk)

Mercury is a small, airless world in the deep inner Sol system, the closest planet to its sun and consequently a world of thermal extremes. Its solar day is over 1400 metric hours long, meaning that any point of the surface is exposed to sunlight for 700 hours or more. Because of this Mercury isn't an especially populated world –just under twenty million souls live and work almost entirely beneath its rocky crust– but the surface facilities shine brightly because there is no atmosphere to dull their light.

Much of Mercury’s 19.4 million inhabitants are concentrated in the capital city of Lóng Cháo, embedded into and under the surface of Rachmaninoff Crater (seen here on the terminator line, in the northern hemisphere). Its orbital space, however, is busier, serving as a hub for the ore traders hauling raw materials from one side of the solar system to the other.

Mercury is an autonomous territory of the United Sol System, as part of the Inner System Territories. Its flag, an inverted monochrome depiction of its penumbra, is shown below the main image.

more worldbuilding stuff! photobash of a future human-inhabited Mercury, plus its flag, created for my hard science fiction setting Diaspora. done using assets from Space Engine.

Venus is the second planet in the Sol system, an Earth-sized rocky world with a dense, hot CO2 atmosphere and aggressively volcanic surface. The only habitable zone of Venus is a relatively thin layer of atmosphere some fifty kilometers above the surface, where the temperature and pressure closely resemble conditions at sea level on Earth.

Because of this air layer, the skies of Venus are swarming with aerostat habitats to support its 25.4 million inhabitants (seen here as a scattering of hazy glowing dots in the thin crescent of twilight). The largest aerostat is the capital city of Najam Alsabah, nestled in the lower stratosphere. One of the key drivers of Venus’ growing population is its wealth: the territory has become quite prosperous over the last several centuries due to the harvest and export of valuable, rare chemicals such as nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous.

Venus is an autonomous territory of the United Sol System, as part of the Inner System Territories. Its flag, a bicolor high-contrast depiction of its vast atmospheric cloud waves, is shown below the main image.

at last, some more worldbuilding stuff! photobash of a future human-inhabited Venus, plus its flag, created for my hard science fiction setting Diaspora. done using assets from Space Engine.

The planet Earth is the third planet in the Sol system, a vibrant terran world with a diverse biosphere recovering from a near-miss ecological collapse. It has six major landmasses surrounded by vast oceans of liquid water, and its atmosphere is a comfortable nitrogen-oxygen blend at a pressure that is dense enough to protect but not enough to crush. It also has one relatively large, airless, rocky moon, called Luna (or simply "the Moon.")

Earth is also home to an indigenous sophont species: humans, one of the founding members of the Coalition of Spacefaring Civilizations. Because of its deep pre-spaceflight cultural history, it is one of a minority of worlds divided into nations, hence its primary governing body being the United Nations of Earth -the ancestor to most of humankind's modern administrative structure. Being Earth's only natural moon, Luna was the site of humans' first forays into extraterrestrial exploration, and today is an industrial powerhouse under the flag of the UN Autonomous Territory of Luna. The Earth-Moon Union (EMU, for short; top flag) is composed of the United Nations of Earth (bottom left flag) and the Autonomous Territory of Luna (bottom right flag), with its primary seat being Midway Station located at the L-1 gravitational stability keyhole between Earth and Luna.

As the birthplace of the human species, the Earth is the most populous and powerful asteropolitical entity in the Sol system, and quite possibly in the entire United Nations of Humanity. Earth itself has a population of just over 8 billion, which has stayed relatively stable since the 21st century. Together with the Moon’s 240 million inhabitants, the total population of the EMU is about 8.4 billion, almost four times that of the next largest entity in the system (Mars).

While Luna’s primary industry in the modern day is mining, Earth’s rich cultural and biological history makes it a tourist destination renowned across known space, though it has stringent biosecurity. For many, it is even a spiritual experience, some going so far as to make it their life’s goal to retire on Earth and connect with the home of their ancestors. Centuries of ecological engineering and conservation have managed to avert the effects of early human industry, restoring the world to a natural balance and even reviving many species driven extinct by human error. Today, one can watch herds of mammoth roam the Siberian tundra, visit dodo birds on Mauritius, or experience the return of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. 30th century Earth is a good place to be, and humanity is collectively proud of their home: the cradle of the Diaspora.

hey look, more art! been a hot minute. photobash of a future Earth and its well-settled Moon, plus their flags, created for my hard science fiction setting Astra Planeta. done using assets from Space Engine.