Warning: If you hate spoilers, finish reading Interstellar Refugees before you read this page.
Arkship Kizunor
When I started Interstellar Refugees, I chose to design Kizunor using technology that humanity might develop within about fifty years. Put simply, I wanted the arkship to be something Earth could build by the end of the century if we focused sufficient effort on the task. This meant Kizunor would have to do without faster-than-light engines, teleportation, gravity plating, stasis fields, and other science fiction staples. Instead, Kizunor produces artificial gravity through simple rotation and is propelled and powered by direct fusion drives (DFD), a technology NASA and others are already working to develop.
For redundancy, Kizunor consists of four structurally identical cylinders, each housing 120,000 Teewuns. The cylinders are capable of independent operation, so Kizunor is really four spaceships (K1, K2, K3, and K4) strapped together.
Each cylinder is one kilometer in diameter and ten kilometers long. The core of each cylinder is a non-rotating, zero-gravity hangar one hundred meters in diameter. Bow and stern endcap sections and two smaller divider sections are also non-rotating. The non-rotating sections form cradles for three rotating sections which are suspended above superconducting magnetic coils, eliminating friction between sections. The middle rotating section is twice as long as the fore and aft rotating sections and rotates in the opposite direction. This counter-rotation minimizes gyroscopic effects, eliminating precession and wobble. Due to structural strength limitations, Kizunor’s maximum safe acceleration is two meters per second squared (0.2g).
Kizunor’s Direct Fusion Drives offer tremendous advantages over the chemical propulsion currently used by Earth rockets, but DFD alone would not allow Kizunor to make the trip from Trappist-1 within a thousand years. The mass of helium-3 and deuterium necessary to accelerate the arkship to the required interstellar cruising speed (four percent of lightspeed) and slow it down for arrival is far beyond what Kizunor could transport. So, even Kizunor’s hellacious DFD engines needed help.
I chose two technologies to provide that help: a one-hundred-square-kilometer light sail and a plasma magsail “the size of Florida.” When Kizunor left Trappist-1, huge laser arrays filled the light sail, making it far more effective than if only the light of Trappist-1’s red star was shining on it. To slow Kizunor enough to enter Earth orbit, the solar shield array formed a giant mirror focusing our sun’s light on the light sail.
Unlike the light sail, which was deployed only in the final weeks before Kizunor reached Earth orbit, the plasma magsail was deployed fifty years earlier. For five decades, the tiny drag produced by the magsail acting against the interstellar medium, the solar wind, and eventually Jupiter’s ionosphere worked to gradually slow the massive arkship from four percent of lightspeed to something manageable for maneuvering within our solar system.
Actual construction of a ship like Kizunor would require major scientific and engineering advances in super-conducting materials, control of fusion reactions, asteroid mining, space construction techniques, and high-strength, lightweight materials. Large-scale helium-3 and deuterium production, along with long-term cryogenic storage methods, would also be major challenges. Nonetheless, with sufficient funding, focused effort, and determination, it is conceivable that we could overcome these challenges by the end of the century. Barring a dire threat to our solar system, we won’t be building anything like Kizunor anytime soon, but we might be able to if it were necessary.
Do the numbers add up? Would the combination of the direct fusion drive, the plasma magsail, and the laser and mirror-assisted light sail be sufficient to accelerate Kizunor to four percent of the speed of light and then decelerate it to reach Earth orbit? My gut says yes, but I admit that I didn’t crunch the numbers. The mathematical demonstration of the adequacy of Kizunor’s propulsion systems is left as an exercise for the reader. Have fun, and send me a copy of your work, please!
Artificial Intelligence
AI capabilities are expanding rapidly, and more people are interacting with ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) every day. Furthermore, the rise of agentic AI allows AI agents to operate with increasing autonomy, introducing new capabilities while also massively expanding the opportunities for bad actors to violate privacy laws and commit cybercrime. All of this sets the stage for the introduction of a product like Addy, a personal assistant with immense agentic capabilities who is permanently tied to a single person and who works diligently to protect the interests of its owner. Even before she starts getting alien software upgrades from Dr. Aiko Trapp, Addy is pretty amazing. Yet PAs like Addy, I think, will likely be on the market in the near future.
Even so, I think we are still a long way off from truly self-aware, sentient AIs—meaning AIs that are actual persons in the full meaning of the word. AIs that can convincingly simulate personhood are clearly in our future, but it remains uncertain when or if those AIs will become self-aware, feeling beings. Nonetheless, for storytelling purposes, I have portrayed the emergence of self-aware, sentient AIs that are truly persons. In Interstellar Refugees, several AIs “wake-up” and become self-aware when Teewun algorithms interact with large stores of self-contradictory Earth data while simultaneously being confronted with unsolvable problems or conflicting commands/priorities. This path is explicit in the case of UniFact3 and implicit in the emergence of other AI persons.
Universal Factories
UniFact technology is arguably the most advanced tech depicted in Interstellar Refugees. These amazing AI-controlled factories use a combination of nano-machines and programmable bacteria to break down raw materials into their component atoms, rearrange atoms into new molecules, and build whatever you need. UniFacts aren’t magic; they cannot make something from nothing or change lead into gold. But they can, for example, make virtually any needed hydrocarbon molecules, given a supply of hydrogen and carbon. UniFacts can capture asteroids, refine them into base elements, and manufacture cell phones or cheeseburgers, but they can’t do it instantly. Complex manufacturing jobs may take weeks or months.
Kizunor was not built by UniFacts because they didn’t exist when it was constructed. Rather, UniFact technology was developed during the thousand-year journey from Trappist-1 to our solar system. Here on Earth, some specific applications of nano-machine technology and programmable bacteria already exist, but UniFact-style all-purpose manufacturing capabilities will probably not be available to humans for a very long time.
Visors and Virtual Reality
The concepts behind the visors and virtual reality scenarios portrayed in Interstellar Refugees come from combining precision brain-mapping with highly capable nanobot technology. Open small holes at the temples (the pterions), then implant tiny devices that inject nanobots programmed to build nanowire connections into the brain’s olfactory bulb (for example). Then, when you send the right signals down the wires, you smell cinnamon. If all your senses are connected in this manner, you can enjoy full-immersion virtual reality experiences with minimal external equipment. In fact, the only part of the visor that is necessary is the headband, because it wirelessly connects the processors in the headband to wi-fi and the implants in the temples. The rest of the visor is for social purposes. You don’t want some jerk live-streaming your facial expressions while you are enjoying your favorite VR scenario.
Solar Shield
The concept of a solar shield has considerable history. James Early and Lowell Wood worked on possible designs in the 1980s. Also, in 2006, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona proposed using a cloud of trillions of tiny spacecraft to construct a sunshade. However, the costs and challenges of manufacturing trillions of tiny spacecraft and launching them to the L-1 Lagrange Point are prohibitive, to put it mildly.
The Teewun solar shield was inspired by Roger Angel’s work. While the construction and launching of Roger Angel’s shield is far beyond Earth’s technical and economic reach, the Teewuns were able to build their shield using Universal Factories (UniFacts) and material mined from asteroids. The Teewun design used a controllable constellation of 1.5 million mirrored discs, each 300 meters in diameter, which were to be placed at, or slightly sunward from, the L1 Lagrange point. The Teewun solar shield discs are individually controllable and able to sail in the solar wind as needed to maintain or shift position.
Teewuns
The Trappist-1 star system has a red dwarf star and seven known planets, at least three of which are in the habitable zone. The planets are all tidally locked, meaning the same side always faces their star, just as the same side of the moon always faces Earth. The red dwarf star is much cooler than our sun, and the planets are very close to the star. The development of life in such a star system faces serious challenges; chief among them is that super flares from the red sun can engulf the planets in powerful x-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Additionally, even if water is abundant, one side of the planet may be a hot desert and the other side may be permanently covered in ice. Liquid water may exist only along a narrow strip between the hot and cold sides—or possibly underground, especially if the planet is geologically active.
In the face of these conditions, I hypothesized that Trappist-1 life developed in vast, interconnected cave systems that run long distances below the surface of the planets. Teewuns or their ancestors would have started out living underground, venturing to the surface for short periods only to obtain specific resources, such as leafy plants needed for balanced nutrition. Furthermore, since surface vegetation might periodically be severely damaged by super flares and might take considerable time to recover, I considered that Teewuns could have developed the ability to hibernate for extended periods in order to survive times of food scarcity. Aboard Kizunor, this innate ability to hibernate for months or years is artificially induced and extended to centuries using nutritional drips and other support systems. In hibernation, metabolic activity could slow to a small percentage of the norm, so that a thousand-year sleep might result in only forty or fifty years of biological aging.
In Teewun history, expansion of the population and settling of the surface of the planet likely occurred only after radiation-protected building techniques became common. Since the orbits of the Trappist-1 planets are much closer to their star and to each other than in our own solar system, the planets pass relatively near each other quite often. This could have encouraged early development of space travel. Knowing that our knowledge about the Trappist-1 system is growing rapidly, I hedged my bets a bit by not specifying which planet in the system is the Teewun home world.
Space Law
For those readers who are interested in space law and the legal issues raised in Interstellar Refugees, I want to mention that, although it is still in its infancy, space law does establish some ground rules for human activities in space. The rather vague 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) has been accepted by most Earth nations and is the foundation of space law. Among other things, it prohibits placing nuclear weapons in space. Three follow-on agreements addressing specific issues are also widely accepted: the Rescue Agreement (1968), the Space Liability Convention (1972), and the Registration Convention (1976).
For our current interests, Article II is the most important part of the OST. It prohibits anyone from claiming sovereignty over the Moon or other celestial bodies, but does not prohibit extracting resources or, debatably, private ownership of small celestial bodies. In short, depending on who you ask, the Outer Space Treaty may allow a nation or other entity to capture an asteroid, crush it, and sell off all the pieces, so long as they don’t make a formal claim of sovereignty over it. The United States and a handful of other nations actively support applying this application of the legal principle of res nullius to space resources.
Things are said to be res nullius when they do not belong to anyone and can be freely claimed by taking possession. E.g., a salmon swimming in international waters does not belong to anyone until someone catches it. Once caught, it belongs to its captor, and they are free to eat it or sell it.
The OST is vague on the rules of ownership of space resources, but some would argue that the intent of the OST was to make space resources community property, i.e., res communis—which is basically the opposite of res nullius.
Nonetheless, the United States formalized its commitment to the res nullius interpretation in the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 and in the bilateral agreements known as the Artemis Accords.
Fortunately for humanity, the Teewuns have a mature body of space law and a strong desire to follow it. Their laws parallel the legal concepts promoted in the 1979 Moon Agreement which treats space resources as the collective property of all humanity, a concept known as the Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM). Despite its name, the 1979 Moon Agreement might more accurately be called the 1979 Moon Disagreement, since only eighteen nations signed it. Even so, Teewun adherence to CHM legal principles in their own laws requires them to pay for the solar system resources they consume. Lacking any better alternatives, they agreed to ongoing reimbursement payments to the United Nations with the understanding that the money would be used to help all of humanity. This agreement, plus the gift of the solar shield array, will inevitably strengthen the United Nations and change the global political landscape, for better or worse.