Cool Backstory Syndrome

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by MKMcArtor

I really hope you didn't just up and delete all those words and not save them elsewhere for later use... O_o

http://flatblack.wikidot.com/long-history

I still have a copy of the first words I wrote for that setting, on a Mac Plus, back in 1989. The disks are unreadable, but the printout is just fine.

I know that for all that 22 pages of history is too much in a primer, there are still players who are going to want to know:

• What was the name of the flinger that the Interplanetary Society built to transport the first colonists to Tau Ceti?
  
  A: Bifrost
  
• What was the name of the first colony ship to arrive at Tau Ceti?
  
  A: Red Earth. Golden Barque arrived six days later.
  
• Who was the first person to set foot on a habitable extrasolar planet?
  
  A: Gwen Missahan. She was hand-in-hand with Wim van Zaanen and they had been supposed to do so simultaneously, but careful examination of the recording shows that Missahan's boot hit the ground about 0.04–0.08 seconds before van Zaanen's.
  
• Who was the first person born on a habitable extrasolar planet?
  
  A: Adam Missahan-Bertucci
  
• Why did people set up 840 colonies before the first one was full?
  
  A: Partly because lots of them were cultural or religious separatists, or religious or secular utopists and they wanted a planet to themselves. Also partly because teh flingers were big delicate objects in orbits beyond Mars and had a narrow field of fire almost directly away from thei Sun. That means that a flinger built to serve one destination only got a few shots at it in a brief window every two years or so. Between times it offered occasional shots at other places in the plane of its orbit at very low opportunity cost. i.e. getting to the establish planets was expensive, getting to new ones was cheap.
  
• Why does everyone speak English?
  
  A: It isn't exactly the English we speak, but I can't be bothered with a conlang. They [almost] all speak Standard because Earth became a global village before emigration started. Even though other major regional languages had not died out by 2120, International Standard English was the common language of most pioneering teams. And by the 24th century other languages had died out, so when the really thick streams of migrants started they all spoke standard, brought cultural materials and technical literature in Standard, etc.
  
• Wouldn't it be (a) more realistic and (b) better if the setting was amazingly polyglot, with at least one different language on each planet?
  

  A: (a) Not really. (b) Definitely not.

• Why is nobody religious?
  
  A: That's partly an illusion. Some people are explicitly religious. As for the others:
  
  Progress in neurology and AI discredited the concept of an immaterial soul, and that undermined the concept of gods. The global village effect exposed people to the variety of religious experience, which discredited "the religious way of knowing". So explicitly religious belief became uncommon (that's what the religious separatist emigrants were fleeing from, but of course they brought it with them). But lots of people have beliefs, follow practices, and identify with groups that fulfil the role of religion while being ostensibly secular.
  
• What was Anchises Inangulo up to?
  
  A: Trying to perpetuate his posterity.
  
• I don't believe that raiding low-tech planets and extorting valuables from high-tech ones could possibly be lucrative enough that piracy would pay for ultra-tech pirates. And I don't think that intercepting and seizing ships in transit is feasible.
  
  Well, pirates did a lot of other stuff, such as dealing arms and narcotics, setting up fortified trading posts and defying local governments, transporting settlers who invaded low-tech colonies, transported blokes with guns who wanted to make like Cortés and Pizarro, transported (religious, political, cultural, and economic) missionaries with toxic memes, and transported pathogens that caused plagues and crop failures, besides devastating ecosystems. They're called pirates because they pirated Eichberger's IP, not because they wore eyepatches and parrots.
  
  Think of the heyday of piracy in terms of conquistadors in Mexico; Portuguese, French, and British trading posts in India; British settlement in Australia; religious and anti-communist wars in Africa; the Heart of Darkness in the Congo; and smallpox in North America.
  
• Why didn't the pirates' homeworld governments control them?
  
  A: Well, do you see governments doing much about the overseas behaviour of their big companies now? How long did it take for them to get started? The pirates' governments tended to support their commerce and their missionaries as heroes, disclaim responsibility for the acts of passengers, protect their emigrants, and disbelieve or affect to disbelieve reports of what was going on. While treating the deaths of hundreds of millions from neglect of quarantine as a sad accident, nobody's fault.
  
• How exactly did the Formation Wars end in an exhausted draw? The [Foundation | Belligerent Colonies] should have won outright!
  
  Well....

Have to have answers for them somewhere!