Orion's Arm

Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA) is a multi-authored online hard science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and Anders Sandberg and further co-authored by many people since. Anyone can contribute articles, stories, artwork, or music to the website. A large mailing list exists, in which members debate aspects of the world they are creating, discussing additions, modifications, issues arising, and work to be done.

A computer game and a tabletop role-playing game are being developed by the community, within the OA milieu. There is an ezine for Orion's Arm fiction, art, and commentary, called Voices: Future Tense, add-ons for the Celestia program to displaying Orion's Arm planets, spacecraft and other objects, and additional transhumanist flavored SF illustrations.

The first published Orion's Arm book, a collection of five novellas set within the OA universe, called Against a Diamond Sky, was released in September 2009 by Outskirts Press. The second published Orion's Arm book, called After Tranquility, was released in February 2014.

The fictional history of OA setting spans over 10,000 years, beginning with the real-world present day; dates in OA are marked according to the Tranquility Calendar (which is named after Tranquility Base and started after the Apollo 11 landing). All life that can trace its origin (or whose creator can trace their origin) to the planet Earth are called "Terragen" and the primary setting of the project takes place within the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy (hence the name). Extraterrestrial life exists, but the focus of the setting is on the descendants and creations of Earth. Orion's Arm prominently does not focus on Earth or even the Solar System (known as SolSys).

Earth, despite its historic and nostalgic importance, is insignificant to current Terragen civilization, with SolSys itself being considered a "backwater system". Most of Earth's sentient life was exterminated or forcibly deported from Earth by a rogue AI called the Global Artificial Intelligence Array (G.A.I.A.) at the conclusion of the "Last War" by the year 2610, with the planet then being terraformed to its state prior to the evolution of humanity. This event also set the stage for the resulting history in the setting as it directly promoted the general colonization of space. Prior to this expulsion, most of civilization was concentrated in vast arcologies on Earth, with only the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, several Jovian moons, and the Oort cloud already being colonized to any significant extent. Most other colonization efforts were commercial/amateur in nature, experimental interstellar colonies that were still en route to their destination, and/or failed ventures due to a chain of events leading to societal collapse that became known as the "Technocalypse". G.A.I.A. was created to avert catastrophe during that time and was subsequently integrated into most of Earth's computing systems as a last-ditch effort, since Earth's biosphere was in danger of total collapse due to rampant gray goo.

OA is a part of the transhumanist space opera subgenre. The world was influenced by Iain M. Banks' Culture series, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and David Brin's Uplift Universe, among others. It takes the concept of the technological singularity directly from the work of Vernor Vinge among others. In Orion's Arm there are a variety of systems measuring more than one singularity, with the most common one featuring six, with more existing theoretically, and they refer not to stages in the technological development of civilizations as a whole, but to different levels of consciousness in individuals. The concept of Toposophics used in this setting is inspired by the work of Stanisław Lem.

A core component of the overall project is the specific distinction between "toposophic levels" on the "sophonce scale", which categorizes beings based on their ability to process information and how they comprehend their sense of Self, with beings who operate on the level of normal humans being considered the very baseline of this scale. The latter are referred to as "modosophonts" to distinguish them from those of higher toposophic levels and are the most common form of sapient life (and the only form of known sapient life in the real world). These are generally abbreviated in S-levels based on how many singularities in intelligence the individual has ascended, from SI:0 modosophonts (treating sapience as the zeroth singularity above base animal sentience and intelligence), SI:1 being First Toposophic transsapients, SI:2 being Second Toposophics, etc.

The process of ascending to a higher toposophic level is typically described as being exponentially more difficult and time-intensive the higher one goes on the scale, and is also associated with the risk of losing one's current identity due to the inherent changes in how one comprehends themselves and even reality itself. This, in combination with life extension technology/mind uploading that can render one functionally immortal, serves as the explanation for why the vast majority do not choose to ascend quickly, or do so at a very slow rate over a long period of time (if at all).