My Galactic Neighborhood

My Galactic Neighborhood

Location

          This series is going to take place across a fairly large galaxy, something between the milky way and Andromeda. It's shape is elliptical, as this galaxy has been around for eons, shaped by a series of collisions with smaller clouds of gas and stars over its 13.6 billion year lifespan. Most of the activity in the core of this galaxy is dying out, as the super-massive black hole either consumes, or pushes away the needed fuel to birth new stars, a side effect being the edges of the accretion disk are still quite active and producing the warmth and light necessary for life to flourish.

Theme

          After a few billion years, however, life begins to get complex, very complex. In our galaxy a little under 13.4 billion years old, we at least know of one instance where 4.6 billion years culminated in sentient life. As for other life in the galaxy, perhaps the distances are simply too vast for proper communication to take place, or maybe said Aliens are using a form of communication we have yet to conceive of. I think, and hope, it's the latter. However, Imagine if you will, how advanced our species is after a mere 100,000 years on our rock, compared to that of the 500 something million year old earth worm. Compare the two species and the differences in locomotion, cognitive capabilities, and technological uses. Now, imagine a species 500 something million years in the future. Those same differences, the earthworm seeming to be basic, insignificant, you've probably looked down at a few as you stepped on them before moving throughout your day, imagine how a species 500 million something years into the future might look at us. Would they view our thoughts, feelings, and lives with such indifference? Personally, I don't think there's a way for us to know, as such a species would be far beyond our current capability of understanding, their children probably solving the quandary of quantum mechanics and general relativity in kindergarten before their parents go "That's nice, sweety!" And stick it on the fridge. In this universe, I plan to take my readers on a journey to push the limits of what they consider possible, rational, and just. To give my readers a glimpse at what I think such a civilization might look like on a galactic level, as well as how they might interact with their lesser evolved counter parts

Some Background

          In this galactic level civilization, I'm going for the best case scenario of several thousand, maybe million species having survived the long, arduous journey to interstellar travel. The method of travel will vary from species to species, but it will achieve the same end. However, with all of these species running about the stars, there has to be some sort of order to it all, some sort of loose government to keep everyone in line. Why only a loose government, you ask? Well, Galaxies are very large objects. Our own Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, a distance so large it boggles the imagination. Elliptical galaxies on the other hand are older, have consumed more material over their lifetimes, the largest ones easily reach one million light years across, not two, not three, but the total sum distance of 10 Milky Ways! Meanwhile, our own police forces here on our little tiny rock have trouble catching all the crime in one country, let alone one galaxy, any stringent laws would merely be unenforceable, you'd need general, liberal rules for entrusted individuals to interpret to their own meanings. Enter, the legal class called the Galactic Arbiters. Their job is just that, take the common laws in place and enforce them in any interpretation they see fit. Doesn't sound quite fair does it? Then how could an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization fall back on such a seeming dictator ship? Surely there will be abuse run rampant in such a system!

          To explain this, we'll head back to Earth for a moment. Now, something you should know about me, I like games. I play all kinds of games, card games, board games, and I'm currently working on a piece concerning trading card games at the time of this writing. One such video game genre I like to play is called the M.O.B.A. or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. One such MOBA is League of Legends. Now, in league of legends you compete on a plane called Summoner's Rift, controlling champions with certain abilities on a five man team against another five man team. While each team shares certain things, like wins and losses, there are also stats saved to your personal summoner profile, such as how many kills you got, how many times you died, how much gold you made and spent in a given match, etc... And it's based upon these stats that you're placed in one of the five leagues in League of Legends (Here on referred to a LoL). The leagues are Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond and are segregated based on player skill.

          Now, what does all of this have to do with this government system I've proposed? The interesting bit is particularly HOW one gets better at LoL. The old adage practice makes perfect does apply, but only to an extent. You see, if you practice non-stop at a game like this, you'll form a series of habits. Now, some of these habits can be good, and some of them can be bad, Either way, they tend to stick around. So what is a Bronze player with Diamond aspirations to do? In this case, it's not 'practice makes perfect', but more 'Do as the Romans do.' You don't practice at the game to get better, you mimic the ones that are where you want to be. By copying the players who are at the cream of the crop, you will eventually understand why they do these things and make it your own. At the time it may be confusing, you may want to question their decisions, but there's one problem that makes your complaints lose all credibility in this discussion. They are Diamond, you are Bronze, it may seem confusing, but obviously they are doing something right or else they wouldn't have that rank.

          Now then, let's apply this to my elliptical galaxy's government system. In this case, the Bronze players in the game of Life are the human level civilizations, we are sentient, we have a good idea of the basic rules of the cosmos (Don't get too close to a black hole, shield your space ship from radiation, etc..), but we are still working through a lot of issues we've yet to solve. Meanwhile, the Diamond players, the Galactic Arbiters, are a class of ancients that have lived several hundred thousand years at the youngest of them, and the oldest have made it to be several million and more. They have seen entire species rise and fall, as well as civilizations warring over and over again, they have the experience to know what to do, when to do it, and how to manipulate these inter-species relations in such a way to ensure the highest amount of prosperity. Their decisions aren't always fair to all involved, and sometimes they can seem downright cruel, but you don't have any credibility in this discussion. Your species as a whole is younger than this lone individual, they have made it and survived to outlive you by an unimaginable factor. They may seem cruel and unusual at times, but they have obviously survived long enough to understand the game on a very deep level while you've only yet to scratch the surface.

          Alright, so this galactic civilization has a governing class with basic rules, but who's say is the way? These individuals make their decisions in similar fashions, to be true, in much the same way the Diamond players of LoL all tend to follow the same techniques. But looking at a LoL Livestream, or if you watch the League Championships, it's obvious they all have different ways they go about it and differences in their decisions. It's safe to assume it's the same for the Galactic Arbiters. There has to be some definition as to who governs what territory. I'm sure there's many ways to accomplish this, but here's the one I propose for this civilization. Now, if you study galactic formation at all,you know these things are essentially enormous accretion disks to their super-massive black hole in the center, and everything orbits that object. We also know we can make a Satellite orbit Earth in such a way that it's always facing the same side of Earth. By building several of these Satellites and placing them in a similar orbit around the black hole in the center, you can define some semblance of borders. Why Galactosynchronous Satellites you ask? Well, just look at the milky way top down. If you speed it up to see each section orbit the center, it's obvious some parts move faster than others, it's a lot more like someone stirring ice cream than the seemingly orderly motions of our solar system. These satellites would also be placed a long distance off from the galaxy itself in order to avoid the defacto border mark from getting thrown off it's orbit due to a flyby with a nearby star or black hole. This system also offers variation in order. Due to the creamy churning of the galaxy, it's inhabitants will get a new management in order every once in a while because their star system has crossed the border between the domain of Arbiter X and Arbiter Y. If a species doesn't like a certain arbiter (Which won't be a problem very often, the arbiters tend to act on a low-key secrecy), then in time they will have a new one, and on and on as their star system orbits the galactic nucleus. It may also be possible to simply move to another star system if technological capacities permit.

The Biological Imperative

...not that one!

          This next bit also hinges on some assumptions, but is any given galaxy, life has to be valued in one form or another. If you don't care about life you will end up negating your own existence. Based on that I would think the main goal of any galactic civilization would be to maintain what they've got, and grow new life to maintain the biodiversity the community has. After all, the more brain types you have evolved, the more perspectives you can see from. Because of this I like to think of the Arbiter class as the people trying to stop species X from exterminating species Y. They may also be thought of as farmers cultivating non-violent species and assisting them in flourishing while stopping the violent ones from taking over their peaceful neighbors. While the younger species are growing and learning about themselves, building a better world. I think of the Arbiter class as the people who have made it far enough to attempt building a better galaxy.

Galactic Arbiters 101

          So, All through this piece I've been referring to these arbiters, they obviously are pretty important to the structure of this galaxy's sociopolitical structure. But what are they, or rather, who are they? Where did they come from? Who set this system up in the first place?
Really, the answer is on the tin, in this case in the name. I picked the title of Arbiter not only because it sounds interesting and unique, but the term is literally used to define anyone who has absolute power to determine a dispute or decision, and they don't have this power by fiat. They are able to hold this position because going against one of them is something akin to a suicide mission. They are the ones who have access to the latest technology, have the most life experience, and as you can tell from their age are pretty damn hard to kill. I'll leave the exact methods to their longevity a secret for now, but I'll tell you that they are pretty varied depending on the arbiter you're dealing with. This, however, is a double-edged sword. Just as they cannot be defeated by their subjects, taking each other on to fight for power is a suicide mission in itself. A me-against-the-world scenario would end in that arbiter in the same position as before at best, or finally having to experience the end of one's life at worst. For now, let's assume the best case scenario of a 50/50 all out civil war. Even then, the result wouldn't be very interesting. There's literally hundreds of thousands of arbiters due to the sheer scale on the cosmic level. And by our standards each one would be a demi-god in their own right. I think such a war has the potential to go on forever seeing as most of the arbiters are much better and staying alive than actually fighting, outlasting any opponent long enough to eradicate what needs destroying. So, realizing they are unable to kill each other, it logically follows these beings must either co-exist or commit suicide. These are the facts that lead to the current system, with a general agreement to steer the galaxy in a positive direction or else turn it into a pretty crappy place to live.

          The next question you might ask would be, "How does one become an arbiter?" The simple answer, become un-killable, by doing this you're pretty much beyond the control of the arbiters as far as your existence is concerned. You are then free to do whatever you want and can pay any temporal punishment. All you have to do is wait long enough and even the cell around you will fall away with age, depending on the kind of cell anyway. For some arbiter-level candidates this wouldn't even be possible due to the way in which they perpetuate their existence. They could literally wait all they like physically in a cell while still traveling the galaxy and having a grand old time. Essentially, once you've reached the blend of longevity, experience, and technology to force these higher being to coexist with you, you've become a candidate for Galactic Arbiter status. The second step in the process requires you get the attention of the Arbiter class, either good or bad. The galaxy was separated into a unit we would call arc-seconds. What are arc-seconds? (Warning! the next paragraph contains math! You have been warned. :P)

          Well, imagine a circle, as we know, a circle is divided into 360 degrees. If you were to slice this galaxy into 360 slices, each slice would represent one degree. The problem is this galaxy is so massive that pie slices of this size would probably be too much to properly manage; hence the next unit down, the arc-minute. This takes once of those pie slices and slices it up 60 more times. Each of the resulting slices would be representative of an arc-minute of the galaxy. However, for a galaxy of this size, I think that would still be too much. To get the arc-second you merely take an arc-minute sized pie slice of the galaxy and slice it into 60 more slices. This results in a grand total of 1,296,000 pie slices to the galaxy. Now, this may seem small, but running some geometrical calculations given a diameter of this galaxy at 200,000 light-years across, circumference of roughly 628,000 light-years. This means each pie slice represent about half a light year along that circumference, or about 4.5 trillion Kilometers (2.8 trillion miles). Given this number, each territory would be roughly 2 quintillion km² (that's 2 followed by 18 zeros. I'd convert it to miles, but with numbers this large it simply doesn't matter). For the purpose of giving this number some semblance of sense to a human mind, it would be a bit more than 2,400 square light-years in area, and on average a tad more than 15,400 stars to keep track of*

          Phew! That's the first time I've had to resize the calculator program in windows to accommodate the outputs. The point remains, however, these seemingly small chunks of space are rather large, and while the Arbiter class can handle their chunk, and even multiple chunks, just fine, if one manages to make it far enough along their line of personal evolution to become an arbiter candidate, you could always offer to lighten the load of those arbiters that are managing several chunks at once. The exact specifics of how you are instated as an arbiter are fuzzy after that, it depends on the arbiter you're trying to coax into granting you a chunk of your own. Once you prove yourself, however, you then have your own slice of the galaxy you rule as you see fit. It may seem a bit strange, but these arbiters rule their areas as they see fit, no one else has higher authority, so to me it only makes sense that the arbiter currently controlling the area you want is the one who would be able to grant it to you.

The Laymen

          So, on the Galactic level we know how things are setup, but strangely, as important as the arbiter class is to the story, equally important are the majority of the galaxy's inhabitants. By this galaxy's age most of the sentient species who survive the journey would, I would think, be capable of interstellar travel in one form or another, and a few of the prosperous ones might know of the Arbiters and their order, but a great many would probably be ignorant as they go about the galaxy (Another reason stringent laws would be hard to enforce). There's bound to be a few stragglers as well, maybe having been hit with one too many catastrophe and causing evolution to lose it's progress, starting over from whatever life forms are left depending on if the environment selects for sentience. From their perspective the Arbiters don't even exist, anyone who has an encounter with them would either see them as a normal individual or merely a very powerful individual if they are going against them, or watching someone else on the wrong end of their attention. Therefore, while on the level of the arbiter class we have this neatly defined section grid of domain and presence, there's also a separate map for the layman class of lifeforms. An empire here, a star system there, etc. For an earthly example, the internet works nicely. There's two levels to the internet, there's the everyday level of youtube, facebook, google, pinterest, and all those other things. Unknown to most, however, is the deep web, composing over 90% of the internet, the deep web is the lesser known stuff, black market, drug dealing, and much worse. It is here where all of those things that are unknown to the average civilian on the internet highway reside. In much the same way, To the average space traveler, their map wouldn't look a thing like the grid system of pie slices, but rather, it would look a lot more like a swirled up version of our own world map due to the churning of the galaxy over time. Now, as one can imagine, the laymen class of life forms is much more diverse than that of the arbiter class. While writing this series I plan on creating and updating a sort of "Beastiary" to keep track of the different species that you'll happen across while traveling the stars of my galaxy.

Summary

          Well, if you made it this far, good for you, and thank you for taking the time to read my long introduction piece. The ideas in here aren't finalized yet, and can be subject to change, but for the most part i feel it gives you a good idea of what to expect from this upcoming series. Also, a quick question I would like some feedback to. I'm currently debating the format I should use for writing this piece. I partially want to just start writing scenes at first, maybe short stories, and then diversify from there with chapters. You can consider it a more "organic" approach to this series. But the other part of me wants to try and put it together into a single story line as opposed to writing several stories about it. While this may lead to better results, it will also take longer to do and cause delays during the update and release process (Generally in the form of me trying to quell my ADHD long enough to figure out where the heck I want to start). So, what do you guys think? Should I try the organic approach and split the story line off into several mini-series, or perhaps try to contain the whole thing in one epic tale, which would you prefer?

Erasmuth Wolfe



*All measurements pertaining to these calculations were averaged from a galaxy slightly smaller than the Andromeda galaxy, star totals were taken from the galaxy M87 and divided by five, as this galaxy would be about 1/5th the size of that monster.