<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 6:30 PM, William Flynn Wallace <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com" target="_blank">foozler83@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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Assume
tens of thousands of years from now:</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I would recommend 1-2 thousand at most. That's time enough for practically anything to happen as it is; tens of thousands is time enough for tens - at least - of anythings to happen, each going from its own base rather than anything that readers in the present might recognize.<br>
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what kind of power will they be
using?</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>That is a question with many possible answers. What kind of power would be convenient for your story? Even assuming no FTL, it's quite possible for mankind to have rearranged much matter from the asteroid belts and beyond (possibly just the Oort Cloud, if every solid body from Neptune inward was claimed) into a full Dyson Sphere within a couple thousand years, perhaps with a thin slice left open to shine upon the planets' and asteroids' orbital plane (which would still leave over 99% tapped), and ship energy around in the form of antimatter (produced, stored, and consumed at close enough to 100% efficiency).<br>
<br></div><div>Compared to certain other possibilities, that's downright tame - and easy for an audience to relate to. Of course, if one political entity owns the Dyson Sphere, it also owns the chief energy production means in the solar system. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your story; if it is not, then simply have multiple political entities each controlling some portion.</div>
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Will they still use wires for anything? I hate wires! What do you need to go wireless? More wires.)</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>That's possible today - you just have to have a way to beam power and data from point to point. Broadcast energy is less efficient, but given the time you're talking about, it's not much of a handwave to say that they've found a way to focus beams to coherent enough over long distances. Just don't have anything get in the way - and make sure to have receivers specially designed, since very high energy densities are weapons-grade. (Or, again, just ship physical fuel around.)<br>
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Alternatives to circuit
boards?<br></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>"Data crystals" are an old trope in science fiction for a reason: they're quite plausible, assuming standard interfaces.<br><br>It might be better to think in terms of what properties you want, and then see if there's a hard-enough sci-fi way to achieve that. E.g., data crystals - and synthetic crystals for most computing architecture - fits right in with the <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas</a> motif used in a lot of sci-fi, especially ones depicting the kind of society I suspect you're going for.<br>
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</div><div style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">Assuming
everything now known is digitized and so is everything from now to
then: how big a sphere or cube would it take to hold all of man's
digital data? Assuming some sort of storage in atoms/molecules/???<br></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Less than a cubic millimeter. Beyond that...unless you've a good plot reason to care, it's probably best to just say "less than a cubic millimeter", so you don't get tripped up by calculation errors.<br>
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</div><div style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">I will use anti-gravity and teleportation whether they are ever going to be feasible or not. It's fiction, right?<br>
</div><div style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">Everything else is up for grabs.<br></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Sure. It's your story, and there are at least guesses for how those two might possibly be done given much better understanding and control of quantum physics than present technology affords.<br>
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