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A History of Tomorrow
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Orion’s Arm is a future history project anchored on three novels, each with an accompanying graphic art folio designed by the creator.
Contained in a fully realized historical framework, spanning three novels, “A Teardrop Falls,” “When Tomorrow Comes,” and “All the Myriad Ways …”these tales span more than 2,000 years of an alternate history of civilization.
A Teardrop Falls is a tale of first contact and the emergence of AI told against the background of interplanetary intrigue and imminent war. 2472 is an era when technologies which interface the mind and molecular scale digital electronics allow the manipulation of human consciousness. Themes drawn from historical models of the War of Independence and American Civil War illuminate the ethics of force and use of technology in the enforcement of a political agenda. First contact with an emissary from an alien civilization and a new life form, emerging AI, forever alters the shape of human civilization. At the conclusion of the tale Earth lies in ruins and humankind stands on the brink of an expansion into the cosmos.
This alternate history is founded on historical events and emerging technologies during the period surrounding the end of WWII and the dawn of the Cold War and examines one path history might have taken.
In the real world:
Nuclear Propulsion and Project Orion: Manned Missions to Saturn for 1970 (After Mars in 1965) ABSTRACT -- In 1957, a small group of scientists, supported by ARPA (now DARPA), launched a serious attempt to build a 4,000-ton single-stage interplanetary spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for missions to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970, in ships carrying 50 people and payloads of one thousand tons. After seven years of work, the technical challenge appeared surmountable, but political obstacles brought the effort to a halt. George Dyson's presentation will cover the technical and historical essentials of Project Orion, and will discuss -- but not answer -- two questions: What would happen if for some reason we had to build Orion today? What might have happened if we had built Orion in 1959?
Source: NASA Engineering Colloquium
This NASA abstract sparked my imagination and from there I extrapolated the civilization which might arise as a consequence of these events.
The designs and technologies of the first novel, A Teardrop Falls, are derived from perspective thinking incorporating modern advances and actual designs and plans to construct nuclear powered battleships during the cold war era, and an advanced study of large scale colony construction undertaken by NASA’s Aims Space Flight Center, Stanford University,
The result has became the Orion's Arm Future History Project.
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Far Horizons
Yesterday’s Visions of Tomorrow
wblack
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