[META][RFC] Updating the current "now" to 2022

[robkelk]

Although, having Sailor Atlalantae as Queen does.... that does interesting things.

It shakes up the setting, for one thing.

There have been noises about attempting to open up diplomatic relations with the United Nations of Earth, but no-one is quite sure how exactly to handle interplanetary diplomacy, especially when the individual member factions can barely agree on railway line routings or cometary impact sites.

The precedent is for the Fenspace Convention as a whole to act as "the government above the ionosphere," with major diplomatic matters going through them.

I would expect that the Convention has applied for observer status at the UN by 2020. (Whether they get it is as yet undetermined.)

However, various subsets of Fenspace are growing... There are no doubt some noises about making the Convention the off-Earth equivalent of the UN, and the various Factions and other groupings into nations of their own. There are no doubt also some noises about making sure people have the choice to be not governed by someone else.

If this is to be done, then I think it would be sensible to have some sort of divergent history timeline - what things have happened on Terra in the Real World that did not happen in the Fenspace setting.

http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Timeline]Here's the FenWiki page; let's update it with what we create here.

For example, space exploration will have gone differently, changes in Australian and maybe New Zealand politics, changing attitudes to the managing of global warming, the Large Hadron Collider...

We've already established that TSAB and Artemis have pretty much taken over the space-exploration and space-exploitation arms of NASA, and the Canadian Space Agency followed along.

I'll skip a bit here - those are things to answer in a story, not a forum post. Just keep in mind the Whole Fenspace Catalog.

Are there attempts to build global models of the environment of Terra?

I believe there are in our timeline; I can't see people stopping in the Fenspace timeline.

Are there attempts to build a global model of the financial system?

Good idea - I hereby declare that StellviaCorp is working on one. They don't expect to be finished for at least another decade, since so much of the necessary data is private and/or secret.

Are there new religions on Terra to do with handwavium? Do these have extremist arms?

Maybe not "religions" (except in the New-Age-charlatan sense), but various schools of ethics and philosophy will have their own views on handwavium.

Is handwavium being employed to deal with disasters like drought or food shortage?

Yes - that's the Blue Blazers' raison d'etre.

Past a certain point I think there needs to at least be a sketch of the divergence - seven billion people with handwavium potentially giving them all sorts of new possibilities - I don't think that this influence on Fenspace stories should be sensibly ignored.

US politics have been established as diverging in 2008 - Obama is still a Congressman, for one thing. Irish politics diverged somewhat later - the elections of 2012 were close to identical in both timelines.

WC goes eva to investigate while everyone deals with bruises, tipped potted plants, etc., notices the rads and gets on the interwave with Mal, Noah, and boomy/secret agenty SMOFs PDQ

Noah refers WC to Kohran, Kohran calls Lebia, and before the end of the same day there's a half-dozen Tachikomas in "bunny suits" taking care of the cleanup on Gnarlycurl.

Meanwhile, Noah also calls Yayoi, Yayoi calls her girlfriend Ginny, Ginny reports to her CO, Tom Dodge reports back to COMSUBLANT, and a week later a specialist group from the USN come to visit WC...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012