This is the beginning of my v.3.0 “Big Sky” campaign, which has the same premise and vibe as one I ran in the early 2020s which was well received on the old forum. This will likely be a more literary, low-tech, smaller scale campaign played out over a few months. Audience members will be able to influence the campaign by vote (on the discord). Starting rules were
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industrial start
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no terraforming
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On April 30, 2076 I delete the Sol system, the only survivors being a refugee fleet of 15 ships that must start a new home
-no NPRs or spoilers until I’ve re-established at least some military technology, which may take centuries (it did last time).
(The following was recovered from the audio files of Dr. Curtiss Straub, a geologist on Siyeh colony and very likely among the first naturally born humans on that colony. The recordings date from a period perhaps 40 years after the calamity. Straub’s dictated notes are naturally a valuable historical resource though it’s unclear who he was writing to, if anyone).
We have very little from the era of political tumult immediately preceding the departure of the Big Sky Expedition. We don’t even know why it had that name. The historical record is quite good, impeccably curated in our archives, up to the first decade of the 21st century. Then things began to break down, but of course that makes sense given what happened.
Sometime around 2025, maybe a little later, we learned that space was big. Way bigger than we expected. Many billions upon trillions of times larger than the universe we can see: light only travels so fast, you see, and there is a lot of stuff from the first few microseconds of the big bang that raced away so fast you’d never clock it from earth.
Sometime after that, of course, we began to see if there was some way to observe the unobservable. Think of it this way: I take a $20 out of the petty cash drawer to go down the hall to the commissary and pick up a pack of smokes. You see me walking back with my smokes. It stands to reason I no longer have the $20. We knew we couldn’t *see* the parts of the universe that raced away in the first era of cosmic expansion following the big bang, but we could see stuff that had interacted with it: particles in our observable slice of spacetime still entangled with particles now beyond the edge of space as we know it.
They say it was a string of universities along the Horn of Africa that first started tinkering with these transnewtonian elements in the 2030s and 2040s. It was certainly their mathematics that cracked the most practical application. Faster than light travel is the stuff of science fiction, it’s beyond impossible, it just doesn’t make sense: all manner of mischief would happen if matter could arrive at a point faster than light…simply put, on the old world you’d never get to Sirius B in less than 8.6 years, because Sirius B was 8.6 light years away. Get there faster, and Causality is forfeit.
…only there’s an exception. In the 2050s we learned how to shift matter instantly over extraordinarily great distances, well beyond the observable universe. We’d need to spend 650 years or more crossing the arm of the galaxy to Betelgeuse, but thanks to mathematical theories developed in Addis Ababa, you can shift matter outside the edge of the universe and return there in seconds. It’s not even that complicated once you get the numbers down, it’s like stepping through a doorway. By 2063, they even did it for real, on a microscopic scale, at some lab in Italy.
But this was all happening outside the public eye. In these same decades, the world was falling apart. We don’t know how they knew, but shortly after the 2030s, humanity was beyond certain a calamity was coming: aside from the big bang itself, the most luminous events in the night sky are gamma ray bursts, mysterious, extremely rapid pulses of searing light, enough to sterilize a galaxy. We learned what caused them, and quickly discovered one was on its way to earth, originating a few thousand light years away.
We had a few decades only to prepare for it, and there were no good solutions. The most put-together nations poured trillions into blasting out cities, deep underground, fed by geothermal reactors and hosting huge caverns of hydroponic crops. They built experimental rigs that could hang out at the lagrange points behind jupiter, wrapped in kilotons of water and steel. These projects were ultimately for naught. The numbers didn’t work. Gamma radiation is hearty stuff. Humanity was doomed, and by the 2040s most everyone knew it. A few countries soldiered on trying to find a solution, most gave up.
All this conspired to get us where we are today. Fortuitous. In the span of a few decades we learned from whence our destruction would come, and how to escape it, a coincidence that could only be attributed to the hand of God, and indeed the hand of God is the predominant theory for how something like this could have occurred (on this colony anyway).
In the mid 2060s, the feeble remnants of the UN put their last chips on one crazy plan to leave earth forever using a macro-scale version of the transnewtonian escape hatch: we called it the “Shifter drive”, and with all the combined skill and talent of a few billion humans we were able to make two. We built a fleet of ships, massive things the size of cargo freighters, each with enough thermonuclear fuel to keep a hundred thousand humans in cryostasis for a few centuries.
Inside each, we plugged in a fifty ton computer containing the bulk of human knowledge up to that point: complete histories of the wars of the roses, every marx brothers film, instructions for the construction of carburetors and nuclear reactors, Bach’s concertos, Basho’s poems.
We planned to leave Earth, half a million of us, for another system beyond the edge of the light cone, hoping to find a new home
By 2074 we had the colonists, 500,000 exactly, all 25 and under, handpicked from every race and nation of the world through a rigorous battery of genetic and aptitude testing
By 2075 we had a fleet in the sky, 15 ships, ready to go somewhere new
By 2076, we’d left. The shifter drive worked, 505,229 humans went somewhere new
And of course by 2077, everyone else was dead