We Are Alone

Interstellar expansion continued without encountering obstacles other than those already known. Exploratory missions reached a growing number of systems, while the installations built in the previous decade were progressively integrated into a stable network of mining districts, depots, refuelling stations and shipyards. The more important colonies rapidly took on a function that went beyond the exploitation of local resources. Some became collection centres into which the materials extracted by the surrounding facilities converged; others housed refineries, shipyards or large depots of charged Voidmass matrices intended for the fleets. The ability to produce locally a growing share of the infrastructure further reduced dependence on Earth and allowed subsequent expeditions to depart directly from systems already colonized.

Expansion thus began to proceed through successive branchings: a sufficiently developed colony could support the exploration of neighbouring systems, which in turn became new points of departure for missions still further away. The Solar System continued to be humanity’s main political and economic centre, but a growing share of the activity tied to expansion no longer passed directly through it.

2071-2075

The observations made during these missions produced a growing quantity of information about the planetary systems explored. Planets, satellites and other celestial bodies of widely differing kinds were analysed, some of which presented conditions considered potentially compatible with the presence of water or organic compounds of any kind: none of the early explorations, however, provided evidence of the existence of life forms.

Analyses of atmospheres, sediments and surfaces detected no organisms, fossils or recognizable biological structures. Even on worlds presenting apparently favourable conditions, the water, organic compounds and energy sources available did not appear to have produced living systems. The absence of life was not, however, a particular disappointment, quite the contrary: for the Hegemonies and the megacorporations, a sterile planet was above all a territory on which extraction operations could be conducted without restrictions arising from the presence of native ecosystems; the first drafts of regulations concerning the protection of extrasolar ecosystems therefore remained purely theoretical.

2076-2079

The search for new deposits progressively pushed missions towards systems located tens of light years from the Sun. Successive generations of warp drives made it possible to cover these distances, but interstellar travel remained anything but instantaneous: effective speed depended on the quantity of Voidmass available, on the characteristics of the drive, on the mass of the ship and on the gravitational conditions encountered along the route. Regions close to stars, massive planets and other celestial bodies required particular attention and frequently obliged ships to break or modify their warp. Interstellar navigation thus became a complex discipline, based on the planning of trajectories that avoided the regions in which the geometry of space made it harder to keep the warp field stable.

On the longest runs, the time spent on board could by then reach several months. To these periods were added those required for operations in the destination system, for any repairs and for the return journey; a single mission could therefore keep a crew away for several years. The problem was not only one of resource consumption: keeping human beings confined for months inside a ship meant devoting a considerable part of the available mass to water, food, life support systems and living quarters. The risks associated with isolation, forced cohabitation and the progressive degradation of the crews’ physical and psychological condition also increased.

The solution adopted for long-distance missions was the increasingly extensive use of suspended animation, obtained through drugs, temperature control and automated metabolic support; the body was induced into a state of deep torpor, in which brain activity and metabolism were reduced for prolonged periods. The first systems, however, required constant human oversight: vital parameters, drug dosages and the operation of the capsules had to be checked regularly, while any anomalies could make immediate intervention necessary. This problem was initially solved by dividing the crew into two groups that alternated during the crossing: while one half remained in the capsules, the other monitored the onboard systems, supervised their suspended companions and carried out the necessary maintenance and navigation operations; at set intervals the two groups changed over.

This limitation was progressively overcome with the development of increasingly sophisticated Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems, capable of taking over not only the management of navigation, Voidmass containment and life support, but also the continuous monitoring of the people in suspended animation. Before long, ships assigned to the longest runs were therefore able to make most of the crossing with the entire crew in the capsules, leaving the AGI to manage the ship autonomously and to order a revival in case of emergency. Entrusting entire crossings to systems without human oversight rapidly imposed dedicated certification requirements: AGI cleared for the autonomous command of a ship were classified as Autonomous Executive Guidance & Intelligence System (AEGIS).

The combination of suspended animation and AEGIS made economically sustainable journeys that a few years earlier would have been considered impracticable, and allowed the fleets to reach ever more distant regions. At the same time, it further transformed the experience of interstellar travel: for a growing share of crews, crossing tens of light years meant entrusting the ship (and their own lives) to an AEGIS system, entering a capsule in one system and waking up months later in another.

2080-2085

Suspended animation had reduced the cost of transporting human beings, but it had not eliminated the underlying problem: the consumption of air, water and food, not to mention the costs of wages and of the system of protections needed to guarantee the crew’s safety. For this reason, scientific research continued to experiment with solutions aimed at reducing the number of human beings present on board.

Thanks to the progress achieved in the fields of AGI and robotics, the first anthropomorphic artificial bodies governed by complete artificial intelligences were produced, purpose-designed to operate in the most hostile environments and to carry out particularly demanding or dangerous tasks. These units were designated Humanoid Artificial Life Form (HALF); the acronym, which lent itself naturally to being used as a name, quickly entered common usage.

The solution nevertheless proved less effective than expected: a single unit cost as much as dozens of labour contracts and required specialist maintenance available only in the major centres; human labour continued to be cheaper, especially that coming from the colonies owned by the MC. After the initial enthusiasm, HALFs therefore became a niche product, reserved for missions with a high expected mortality and for special high-risk assignments. The problem that HALFs were supposed to solve, namely the cost of human beings in space, thus remained open. A second and far more radical solution would arrive in the years immediately following, from a direction few had anticipated: instead of building machines capable of replacing human beings, their bodies began to be made replaceable.

The Dark Forest

Humanity by now had permanent installations distributed across numerous systems and had sent probes into most of the neighbouring sectors; the quantity of data collected made it ever harder to attribute the absence of any sign of life to mere chance.

The problem brought the so-called Fermi paradox back to the centre of scientific debate: if intelligent life was not an exceptionally rare phenomenon, and the galaxy had had billions of years in which to produce transformations analogous to those that had led to the development of intelligent organisms, why had no trace of their existence ever been observed? The most widely accepted answer stressed that the appearance of life, and all the more so of intelligence, required conditions far rarer than had been hypothesized in the preceding decades, rare enough to make the sample reached by the probes insufficiently representative.

Among the more evocative explanations, the so-called Dark Forest hypothesis, originating in the fiction of the previous century, even began to circulate again. According to this thesis, the silence would derive not from the absence of other civilizations, but from their deliberate choice to remain hidden, in the awareness that any signal might attract the attention of potential predators. From this followed a disquieting conclusion: human civilization, which in its expansionist zeal had been colonizing and building for decades without troubling to conceal its own presence, and indeed broadcasting and announcing it in every known direction, had not yet encountered anything worth hiding from.

Unfortunately, that silence was destined to break very soon.