Hacker NewsProject Dropstone: A Neuro-Symbolic Runtime for Long-Horizon Engineering [pdf]
https://archive.blankline.org/api/media/file/d3_engine_public_release%20(1)-1.pdf
#HackerNews #ProjectDropstone #NeuroSymbolic #Engineering #LongHorizon #AIResearch
Paul DryeTravelling to another star system is not easy and usually only happens when two stars approach each other closely.
Most such journeys are made while knowing that something similar has been done many times before. This wasn't so with the very first, when Martian civilization leapt to LSPM J2146+3813 in ~86,000 (Old Reckoning). Humans broke out into the galaxy thanks to Sto An, a visionary fascinated by the approach of that system over the previous several thousand years.#Lore24 #LongHorizon
Padma cultures are those that think the Milky Way can and should support many more people. One quadrillion is a nominal goal, which is 10 to 50 times the peaks it has reached before.
This implies major galaxy-wide changes, so many view Padmans with unease. They usually outstrip their parent system and die out, but at times they do make it to other stars. War in space is difficult, but often erupts when they arrive on someone's doorstep and start settling every empty rock. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
There are few brute force attempts to settle a world by starships launched an arbitrary distance. It's not that there are no interstellar ships, just that they have different purposes.
One is "future anthropology", where people launch themselves at a settled world on voyages necessarily taking thousands of years. On arrival, they study that society's changes in the interim. After refurbishing their ship, they launch for another target, moving ever further into their future. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
Quectobes are an oddity found on the surface of some pulsars. While some sport planets they are rarely settled, but refugees from a new-born hive mind took to one during the First Period. There they noticed tiny, replicating patterns in the tortured space-time between star and vacuum. Five orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length--one quectometer--their name is on the model of "microbe". They're more like viruses, though: alive or not based on how you define "life". #Lore24 #LongHorizon
Theseism is a human philosophy that has arisen many times. While human species have long circumvented natural selection and inheritance, most are largely derived from those processes. Theseans turn genetics into culture, with individuals taking on the genomes of many different human species, often changing them again and again in one lifetime. They often want new viewpoints leading to highly creative federated cultures, but sometimes it just results in chaos and collapse. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
When the TxiTatrin transitioned from their paranoid, cluster-bound period into exuberantly resettling the galaxy, they rejected their former stealth in many ways.
One subculture took to launching their dead into interstellar space after interring them within three-meter long capsules loaded with grave goods. Only select members of their society were honoured, but enough have been seen traversing other star systems by chance that they must have numbered in the millions. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
The Milky Way has no sentient species that are not derived from Earth, but some have been detected in other galaxies.
The closest of these is NGC 3877, 15 megaparsecs away. The "Drummers" are sending a repeating sequence of gravitational waves beginning with two prime numbers, 19,681 and 19,867 (the two closest to 3^3^3) and then 387,459,847 trinary bits. This superficially suggests a bitmap, but all attempts to extract meaning from the Drummers' transmission have failed. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
The galaxy has many worlds that suffered a runaway greenhouse with resulting dense, scorching atmosphere. Few have been visited, but one was the original, Venus. During Mars' authoritarian-scientific era some unfortunates had their brains grafted into refractory bodies and were sent to Venus with orders to explore. One of them, Gakumjaagu Sube, found a way to disable their Compliance Detonators and the last recorded message from any of them was COME DOWN AND MAKE ME. #Lore24 #LongHorizon
A Locust Swarm is an incursion of wild machines from interstellar space into a planetary system. As they normally dwell on rogue planets and Oort Clouds, a swarming begins with one of those bodies being deflected into a long descending orbit and then coincidentally passing by an icy moon as it loops around the star hundreds of thousands of years later. The delay makes them hard to predict, and they often gain a considerable foothold before their presence is detected. #Lore24 #LongHorizon