temporal mechanics
âI am confident, to more than nine nines of certainty, that not only has a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel not been invented, but that a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel never will be invented within our light-cone.â âExcuse me, Academician â but how can you be so sure?
trope-a-day
Extra Parent Conception: Leaving aside for a moment the issue of species which naturally have more than two sexes (which is extra from our point of view, but not from theirs) plus the issue of cladism and other deliberate modifications, this is the sort of thing which the same reproductive
spacer
ââŠand the vacuum is hard out today.â A joke so old itâs evolved sophoncy independently from the primordial slime, but interface vehicle pilots evidently have to say something about ambient conditions at the highport. It seems that talking about the weather comes pre-hardwired into every sophont speciesâ cognome â whether
eldraeic language
As a side note, that cautionary dictionary entry, if anything, understates just how spectacularly insulting uljĂra is, adjective-wise. But then, it was written by a non-native speaker of Eldraeic, even if a native speaker of the Trade dialect. Its literal meaning is âchoiceless1â â and not so due to external forces.
trope-a-day
Exposed Extraterrestrials: Averted entirely, for reasons as disparate as regulating temperature, protection from environmental hazards, etiquette, and perhaps most significantly of all, pockets. (Literally everyone in the galaxy who isnât actually sessile has invented pockets, and arguably the ones who are have too, except they call them cabinets.) Even
eldraeic language
vetel i-seldĂĄ (n.): 1. Employee (lit. âseller of timeâ). 2. Hireling (pej.) 3. Flunky, lackey, stooge. (v. pej.) vetel i-seldĂĄ remains the currently accepted term in Trade Eldraeic for an employee, under the quasicontractual doctrine practiced in many polities, despite being a reuse of the original term in formal Eldraeic
trope-a-day
Explosive Decompression: No. Just no. (In the trope sense. Obviously it can happen in the technical sense.) Well, with one exception. The trope quite correctly notes that it can happen if you have a really high pressure gradient, say, 8-9 atm to 1 atm. As such, some people from planets
trope-a-day
Evil Luddite: Well, obviously. All Luddites are evil*. (* Space Amish excepted, for obvious reasons.) âŠas the assortment of asshats gathered under the banners of the Enforcers of Mortality, Biotist Alliance, Parents for Natural Children, Never First, the Ecoprimacy System, etc., etc., would demonstrate. Unfortunately for them, since Rock does not
trope-a-day
Enlightened Self-Interest: The source of all good things in the universe, and thanks to mĂ©lith, a basic principle of life when youâre an Imperial. Doing well by doing good; doing good by doing well. (Much more reliable than altruism, far less prone to coercive perversion â altruismâs bad enough
trope-a-day
Empty Shell: A âshell running the Minimal Maintenance Architecture, as they do when no-oneâs currently occupying them. It provides for maintaining autonomous functions, interfacing with the systems of a body hotel, diagnostics, and teleoperation, but little more. Also, of course, createable in all the traditional and several non-traditional nasty
A Star Traveler's Dictionary
minigravity (n., slang): The level of gravity present on dwarf planets, small moons, large asteroids, et. al. While not rigorously defined, the minigravity range is commonly held to be between 0.2 and 0.005 standard gravities, anything below which is considered to be de facto microgravity. Unofficially, the range
trope-a-day
Enhanced Archaic Weapons: Lots of them, thanks to a plentiful supply of enthusiastic hobbyists more than willing to apply the latest technologies to their personal obsessions, all the way down to blades hand-knapped from IsimĂr trench ice with micro-manipulators. For the most part, these qualify as Awesome, But Impractical, if