Future History Project

An Explanation:

Future history.  It's kind of an oxymoron.  But it’s the sort of detailed world building (or universe building) that I enjoy wallowing in.  It's what transformed me from an engineering-physics major to a history major a couple of decades ago (that and a struggle with differential equations and imaginary calculus - math is easier in history, once you realize there is no year zero).  I blame a youth misspent on fantasy, science fiction and roleplaying games, stories and guidebooks loaded with appendixes, Tolkien, Niven, Pournelle, Asimov, Howard, Brin, Foster, Miller and Chadwick and many others - anyone who built a detailed and consistent imaginary place.

Since in the late eighties, armed with that not particularly employable history degree and starting to work on a more useful business graduate degree, I've been building my own detailed imaginary future.  It's been a sporadic effort, but the level and quantity of detail makes me wonder if I've got some sort of mild Aspergers (among other things).  There's at least a thick book's amount of material here, and I'm aware that it is in serious need of better editing.  Most of my short stories and both my finished and unfinished novels (all still unpublished I'm afraid - except for on this site) are based on this future history.  So is much of my artwork.

This future history covers the period between 2052 and 6778 in detail, though I have sketched out events from the distant past to half a million years in the future.  I picked the start date as a cusp in history, the end of a terrible war, and a date far enough in the future where I didn't care if I'd get contradicted (I may be wrong about that, I'd be 87 for most of that year - one of my grandfathers made it to 100 and I hope surpass that feat).  Forty-seven centuries is a long time.  It's greater than the age of the Giza pyramids; it spans the period from Gilgamesh to Saddam Hussein.  I make the assumption that we Humans will still be around and still be (mostly) recognizably Human by then.  But I could be wrong (for sure in detail, probably in general).

Starting in the fall of '01, partially in reaction to September 11th and in recognition of my own mortality, I began a concerted effort to expand, modify and document this future history.  I began with a year-by-year detailed chronology of the entire period.  From that effort spawned many tangential articles, maps and convoluted spreadsheets detailing statistics, demographics, economics and technical designs.  This section of geir.org is a repository of all that, including pages on aliens, technology, government, religion, maps, languages and other miscellanea (see links on the right).

The governing premise for the documents and commentary in this future history is that they represent data from version 7.0.3 (the 6778CE Edition) of the PUMA (Planetary University of Morris at Alerton) Encyclopedia, a common reference work in Coreward Human Space.  The chronologies, articles, maps and charts represent data available to educated members of Human-centric interstellar civilizations at that time and place.

This is definitely a work in progress. Much remains to be done.  I'm revising and expanding the chronology again from the beginning, and that will take years.  I expect I'll still be working on it if I make it to 2052.  And then, for sure, a major rewrite - at least of the third millennium detail, will be in order.
 

The background pages contain chronologies, articles on governments, religions, people, languages and other miscellanea.

The tech pages contain articles focused on technologies, including spacecraft, biological transformations and overviews of various technological epochs.

The aliens pages contain overview and detailed information on various intelligent races.

The maps pages contain maps of various regions of space over a range of eras.

The updates page contains links to recently updated articles.

The Future History Project was last updated on 02/12/2011.