This is a notes page; it is not very well organized or really intended for public consumption, but if you're curious, here it is.

Connected Space is a spiritual prequel to Beyond the Twelve Worlds, taking some of its concepts (particular, backstory concepts) and using them to develop a hard sci-fi "space opera" with appropriate setup to avoid adventure-destroying technologies such as characters who can be backed up (either because they are natively digital intelligences or because they are digitized human minds.)

Basic problems with a hard sci-fi space opera:

1. The universe is too big to have multi-system civilizations.
   • No true FTL; there is no hard scifi FTL drive that seems plausible.
   • Wormholes mostly solve this, but artificial wormholes are probably something that only can be made by extremely dramatically-boring civilizations for whom all problems not like "the heat death of the universe" are trivial.
   • Naturally occurring wormholes are not likely to be navigable or go anywhere interesting to people.
   • Preferred solution, then, is that the wormhole network was created by a now non-interacting "dramatically boring civilization" for their own inscrutable reasons.
2. Individual biological life will probably become irrelevant before a large multi-system could arise.
   • In the 2020s, the most likely mid-term technological scenarios favor a transition away from organic life as the species that would be sent to explore the universe. Humans would follow far behind a friendly AI colonization effort preparing the way for them, or be absent entirely because of unfriendly AI.
   • If the current AI Spring proves to be a false start on human-level AI (for example, because stochastic gradient descent is too training-data inefficient), this probably still only buys a century or so before brute force approaches like artificial evolution become viable. If artificial evolution isn't viable, then human consciousness is probably an extremely rare fluke in naturally-occurring life as well, which is unfavorable for a setting with non-human sophonts.
   • A reactionary movement rejecting AI, in the presence of a false-start 2020s AI Spring that leads to AI which threatens mass social upheaval but not superhuman intelligence, could suppress AI development for a long time only in the presence of a general technological contraction. Otherwise, it will probably be too easy for a rogue actor to develop AI anyway, given the potential rewards.
   • An interstellar civilization arising from the scenario above is likely to be crushed by the first rival which has/is strong AI that it encounters.
   • The civilization in above would need independent reasons to reject pursuing human mind-uploading. This is plausible but a civilization that would categorically reject human mind uploading is probably highly regressive socially. If they don't reject it, why wouldn't uploads be doing the highly-dangerous galaxy exploration?
3. Extreme technological disparity between species is highly likely.
   • Let us accept the premise that life is reasonably common in the universe, and is found on many planets where conditions compatible with large self-organizing molecules exist (which, of course, remains an open question), and that general intelligence is highly adaptive. (N.B. there is no implication that human-like psychology is adaptive.)
   • Stars are in many different stages of their development. Different species encountering each other might have started developing intelligence, technology, etc millions or billions of years apart. This means that randomly-selected alien life is likely to be either pond scum or Cthulhu in comparison to us, wielding no technology or being post-singularity.
   • Ameliorating the above, if there is one post-singularity civilization (such as may also have built the wormhole network), they may actively be suppressing the development of rivals.
   • Encountering pond scum or non-technological sophonts is not really a problem, and finding technological peers or moderate superiors is also fine (and in fact all these are desirable dramatically). So we really need to concern ourselves mainly with vastly superior aliens as a problem.
   • Vastly superior alien civilizations (VSACs) diminish player agency; if conversely the players are the VSAs drama is diminished because the challenges faced by the VSAs are unfamiliar to the game players and likely highly abstract. So, interaction with VSAs needs to be avoided.
   • VSACs may have no interest in lower orders of life, but if they sometimes casually exterminate such because it is on planets made of atoms they need for something, it becomes basically an unpleasant cosmic horror scenario.
   • VSACs may be interested in lower orders of life scientifically or aesthetically, but again their complete superiority means that these interaction with the party civilization will diminish player agency, which is dramatically undesirable.
   • Therefore, the best VSAC is one that is deliberately aloof from lower orders of life, except perhaps to maintain the wormhole network it left behind and suppress civilizations that threaten to become a hostile technological peer. This leaves plenty of room for moderately superior aliens, of course.
   • Such a VSAC may in fact maintain the wormhole network partly to encourage technological homogenization, out of largess, or because they find multi-species multi-system civilizations inherently desirable. Or because they like putting two bugs in a jar and seeing if they fight.
4. The presence of an interstellar civilization may have effects on human history prior to overt contact.
   • This is undesirable because alternate history is absurdly difficult to develop in a way that knowledgeable people will agree is the most likely outcome; it's highly speculative. If a stargate is orbiting Mars, or worse Earth, when do we discover it? If it looks natural, that will influence our ideas about physics; if it is artificial, you can bet space programs have much higher budgets! Do aliens ever pop out of it to explore, and do they intentionally contact humans? Even if they are avoiding contact, there is no stealth in space, and they may be hard to miss after the early 20th century. (OTOH if they aren't burning their engines much, they _could_ be missed perhaps.)
5. While certainly quite performant by the standards of chemical rockets, given wormholes and hibernation technology, they do not need to be so overwhelmingly dangerous as to preclude semi-private or private ownership of interstellar craft. That being said, you do not want to be behind them.
   • The VSAC has antimatter torchships which are used to build out the wormhole network. They are the size of a small moon and convert a gas giant into a wormhole gate and wormhole, often but not necessarily leaving the wormhole gate in orbit around the gas giant remnant. They then fly to some nearby star, orbit a "nice" planet, and deposit the other end of the wormhole in orbit around it. The torchships do not fit through the wormholes; fueling vehicles travel through the network to refuel them with antimatter as needed. Propellant is harvested in situ. The torchships can self-replicate and sometimes do so when finding multiple suitable gas giants.
6. The VSAC are a civilization of Von Neumann replicators fulfilling the command of their long-extinct organic creators to build a universal wormhole network. They have antimatter drives capable of 10g acceleration, but only when they are building out the network. The reason for this is that they need somewhere to put the heat and get propellant. The wormhole end they are carrying will do, because at the other end will be the vast radiators of the exotic matter factory that has finished turning a gas giant into a wormhole and wormhole accessories, now conveniently unused. If the ship must use internal radiators, it is limited to about 0.5g (still very performant of course relative to the non-VSAC state of the art!)
7. The topology of the wormhole network is constrained such as to make the violation of causality functionally impossible. Though of course the torchships experience hecka relativistic effects (as do the wormhole ends).
   • A physical effect causes wormholes to collapse if they would be able to permit backward time travel, e.g. by bringing a wormhole end back (which is a useless thing to do anyway for travel purpose)
   • The wormholes are "large", but tidal forces limit the size of ships, especially that are going to contain squishy things such as people.
   • The wormhole network is a branching acyclic graph. Branching is limited by availability of multiple appropriate gas giants or other sources of mass-energy in the system.
8. Earth was part of a boring string of the network and lies at the end of its branch. The torchship is floating out in the Kuiper belt, quiescent, waiting for a signal that may someday call it to action once more, perhaps build a factory megastructure to process one of our gas giants over the course of several hundred years... (using self-replicating technology that can reproduce exponentially, if the VSAC wants to do things in a hurry, they can completely ravish a system for metals, build a much larger factory and infrastructure, etc.
   • A lot of waste heat is left behind by the wormhole-building operation. The gas giant remnant is probably really hot for hundreds of years if not longer. It may have a noticeable warming effect on moons, perhaps transiently making them more habitable; a newly spacefairing civilization might be caught out by this...
9. The VSAC are not too good about picking up their toys and tend to just leave stuff lying around. They do recycle their facilities and ships if they need them, but the branching structure of the network and the inability of the torchships to fit through the wormholes mean there are a lot of them just floating around out there, decommissioned. The wormhole network provides transportation and communications relay services for more primitive species, which is probably what it is designed to do.

   • Perhaps the VSAC, being a transpohont, has decided that its prerogative to build and maintain this network for spacefaring species has also caused it attempt to make sure there continue to be such species as could make use of it.

10. The VSAC build the network to a new planet when they detect the emergence of intelligent life. They also build connections to nearby systems and typically a wormhole nexus. This may cause a previously dormant torchship to reactivate and potentially consume a gas giant in an inhabited system if it needs to. Sometimes the VSAC will destroy inhabited worlds for materials, though it seems to prefer uninhabited ones where available.

• The VSAC try to stay very on top of connecting new civilizations and sometimes guess wrong, so there are wormhole clusters associated with planets with a lot of interesting non-sentient life too. They err on the side of connecting in anticipation of, if they are too slow, a rival superintelligence emerging before connection and equilibration can be established.

11. The VSAC recognize the instrumental utility of not allowing any civilization which could thwart them from emerging. In this universe, hard start singularity is not generally a thing, but soft start singularity is (and the VSAC were basically a semi-friendly AI soft start singularity; they just have very restricted interests.)

12. Having the VSAC still active in the universe would be oppressive to the players. So it would be best if they were not, e.g. if they became inactive.

• But they can't have been inactive for too long, because then some other civilization would undergo singularity - not every society has potential to do so, of course. But there are lots of them.

• A widespread belief that the VSAC will come down hard on excessive technological development could explain a degree of technological stasis.

13. What is it like when the VSAC link up a system? Assuming they made the right call and predicted the emergence of an intelligence species, hard to do from light years away, and if the timing worked out so there is someone looking at the sky, they'd see the blazing atomic fury of a 10g antimatter drive in their night sky, probably looking like a planet (the amount of emitted light is probably similar to the amount of light reflected off a smallish planet when the drive is at full power.) A wormhole gate is typically placed in a high orbit.

• Earth's wormhole gate is about 3/4 as far as the moon. The wormhole end is massive enough to be orbited, though the gate aperture is only about 1km in diameter, with only the central 250m or so being suitable for normal crewed traffic due to tidal forces. It is not massive enough to cause significant changes to the tides on Earth or anything like that, though.

14. A belief in singularity-suppressing activity of the VSACs might develop into a stultifying galactic dark age with careful technological proscriptions. Especially if the VSAC does not communicate clearly what will cause them to destroy a civilization for threatening them.

• Again, though, this sort of activity basically makes the VSAC into an evil god instead of a contrivance to explain the existence of the wormhole network.
• VSACs who do this efficiently would be well into the FORBIDDEN ZONE of RPG concepts, here there by Invisible Ninjas.

• It is best if the galactic civilization simply thinks VSACs do this. In reality, maybe they don't, or maybe they do but they're extremely good at it and only actually destroy civilizations that really are about to enter singularity. Or maybe they used to, but don't anymore.

VSAC torchship shows up over Earth, 1985. Its arrival has been anticipated since we've been seeing it in the night sky since it started decelerating in the 50s. All sorts of observation satellites and telescopes watch its every move as it pops out a wormhole gate in high orbit, then (ever so gently) leaves on a banal Hohman transfer for Saturn. Spectral/radiation analysis told us that it uses antimatter drive. Before we can get much of a chance to explore it, unmanned alien probes start coming out and looking around. They make first contact by studying our radio transmissions and we build an isolation facility as an embassy. We learn that there is a galactic empire, and that we are now a part of it. There are minimal taxes (though the Emperor will be wanting some fine examples of Terran art and precious objects for museums and palaces, amounting to a few hundred million dollars worth), but we do have obligations to build and maintain certain space infrastructure; the Empire will help with the plans but we will provide the labor, equipment and raw materials; this amounts to less than a trillion dollars a year though for our entire star system, somewhat front-loaded. We have to let the Empire recruit volunteers for its civil service, and let their merchants buy and sell here, but we can also build our own wormhole-going merchant ships and trade with the aliens too. We can even colonize new uninhabited worlds outside our system, if we agree to let aliens colonize some of the uninhabited worlds in ours that are environmentally appropriate for them. (Some squid-like sophonts with a reducing chemistry have been salivating at the atmospheric spectral data from Titan since the Empire first realized the VSAC was connecting Sol, and even though it's colder than they'd like, they are happy to swap it for a rocky desert planet with a human-breathable atmosphere two jumps away...)

There is a big catch. That wasn't the Empire's torchship, oh no. Wish it was, but it's not... that's the VSAC. The VSAC will kill you if you do something wrong. Unfortunately, they are not the lawgiving type. Would that they'd have written down the rules on stone tablets like a good god might. We are pretty sure they were like us once, but now have undergone technological singularity. They don't want any rivals. If they think you're about to enter a phase of extremely rapid technological development, such that you could destroy them before they could destroy you, they will end you. Oh, and no, we can't work it out by experiment at the cost of a few datacenters getting lasered from orbit, no. See, they don't aim much more carefully than planets. They have a lot of those torchships. They can do a lot of damage moving at 99.99% of the speed of light...

Fact is, we don't know what exactly provokes them. We know what we do, and that it seems to be safe. We know something about what some of the civilizations that have fallen afoul of them were doing. We have decided to play it safe. We have lots of rules about technology. We admit they are arcane, somewhat arbitrary, and we don't know which ones are actually important. We can't guarantee any new thing is safe, though, you know, we think entirely novel kinds of ceramic pot are probably safe. Your technology is actually fairly far along by the standards of a newly connected species... particularly computers. We see you have developed integrated circuits... very rapidly. Be careful with that... you are lucky we came here when we did, in twenty or thirty more years you would certainly be Transgressing...

If you sign on to all of this, send some of your people to learn the Rules, and accept them, we'll share the Empire's technology with you. We can give you fusion power, and fusion stardrives to cross connected space in months instead of years - you will still need to travel from wormhole to wormhole and planet to wormhole, with your chemical rockets, it will take years for you to get anywhere worthwhile, and that with a miserable little probe. You may still need to figure out how to put your people into suspended animation or hibernation. We can send scientists to help, but some species we haven't figured out a way.

If you don't accept the rules, well, we won't do the VSAC's work for them. We'll leave some probes so we can try to figure out what you were doing when they destroyed you, and quarantine your starsystem, lest any of our worlds be suspected of harboring transgressors. But it's your choice...

This assumes of course that technological singularity isn't divinity or magic: Just the ability to take stuff up to their physical limits. The VSAC aren't omniscient. They are pretty good at looking at planets (from the wormhole facilities) with lots of sensors and intercepting their transmissions, and deciding when action should be taken. Sometimes the wormhole gate will suicide bomb the planet, construct weapons and destroy an orbital facility, etc, but these are just 'prompt' actions to thwart them; the planet crackers are being launched concurrently on a 10g intercept course. (The planet crackers carry wormhole ends for heat dissipation, so must be pre-staged. One wonders if the smitten planet can end up being a small black hole...)

Oppressive luddite aliens is super bleak. Is there any other plausible way to achieve technological stasis? I don't think a religion would work without at least an occasional smiting in historical memory to back it up. And if the player characters don't know the VSAC is gone / no longer in a smiting mood... they're still oppressed. If the player characters do know, how come a hundred other species don't know too, and it's just a few decades before one of them goes supertechnological?

The players have probably had enough of vast oppressive regimes, even if they are the plucky rebel faction, and even if it's not enforced by invisible ninjas, just regular authoritarians in spaceships who can be tricked/beaten.

So, no one is playing defense against technological advancement. Short of contrivedly assuming that technological progress is an S-curve and we are quite near the second inflection point, what can be done?

Also there is the problem that for any plausible universal scheme of technological development "everyone has backups and there is no scarcity" (=no adventures), or collapse into a singleton (=no adventures and it's also not even pleasant) is before "engineering wormholes in any remotely plausible way." So S-curve implies no space opera too.

So the VSAC must have recently, dramatically, left. This is a vast social upheaval. Perhaps they got bored, maybe raptured some people they liked, and departed (mutation in their value function at some critical point?). Maybe they decided that the Milky Way is doomed in the next 100k years or something and are abandoning ship for a different galaxy.

Some civilizations probably think The Rules are still in play and this is some sort of test. They may make war on those who don't. A lot of aliens, now all at technological parity more or less, and thrown into a race for going beyond the rules. Luddite aliens may be trying to prevent this for reasons not dependent on the Rules. (They may even simply be overcautious.) Interesting times.

---

Examples of the Nature of the VSAC leaving: Observed from an empire-wide view, but not so obvious at a local level. E.g. sure _you_ saw the VSAC ship leaving your star system, but the Empire swears up and down their abrupt departure was only from your local sector. Empire might also observe a sudden cessation of VSAC enforcement actions in dark space.

Civil war: One incipient faction discovers a second antimatter faucet wormhole. This is their cue to expose the conspiracy as a recruitment point.

Robot buddies: Can exist, they just have to have been present when a civilization that joined the empire was contacted. "Guess those were safe after all." Can be a particularly complicated subject of rules to force them to be non-boring (e.g. not duplicatable.)