Science and Technology
Ante-Tempest
In the earliest years of its development, the mission, project, and undertaking that was Novaluna One was cemented in somewhat of a native stasis. With a personnel count of only 2000 at its onset and concerned solely with its mere survival, Novaluna One was wholly dependent on the technology, developed on Earth, it had arrived with, as well as whatever crucial information could be transmitted from its former home, along a narrow-bandwidth channel burdened by a twelve-
year latency. Between expenditure on survival, security, and passively researching Novaluna, there was too little time and too few resources to allot for much endemic technological development.
Yet however scarce their means, the people of Novaluna One were fundamentally innovators. Dominated first by scientists and engineers who provided the skills, then later by entrepreneurs and administrators who provided the means, Novaluna One grew to become a technological-development powerhouse that punched far above its weight proportionate to Earth, which wielded a population three orders of magnitude larger. Provided the chance, the great, civilisation-sized laboratory that was Novaluna One built upon and perfected many of the technologies and their applications thereof developed first on Earth, and in its later years was itself the genesis of many critical new fields of knowledge.
Psionics
History
Part 1
For many decades leading up to the Arrival of the first colonists on Novaluna, and for many decades thereafter, scientists have delved deeper into the realm of theoretical physics, expanding the discipline and increasing its sophistication, complexity, and explanatory power. However, even with this progress, holes always remained, and new ones popped up as others were plugged. What few people expected was for Novaluna itself to hold an entirely new paradigm of the universe to be discovered. After all, the laws of nature are no fundamentally different between Earth and Novaluna; the latter may have been an incredible treasure trove of scientific discovery across most other disciplines, but there was nothing inherently different about the physics of Novaluna.
While this is true in technicality, what Novaluna did hold was a shock; its own indigenous life, through the blind trial-and-error of evolution, had stumbled upon a close-kept secret of the universe that Humanity had yet to discover for itself. It began with a routine ecological cataloguing survey of the wildlife inhabiting shallow reefs along the southern subpolar coasts of the island of Tranquility. Researchers noticed localized eddies and vortices of water that were unusually warm for the latitude, enabling wildlife more characteristic of subtropical regions to survive much further south than normal. Although this was initially chalked up to oceanographic effects (e.g. southern tropical currents) further research demonstrated this to be false, deepening this seemingly minor scientific quandary.
As time went on, more research was done, and more possibilities were ruled out, the puzzle became even stranger and more mysterious. The pockets of warm water coincided with the presence of a species of algae-like aquatic organism called "Cowl of Grey/Pallium canastrum". Although appearance-wise it is an extremely bland and unremarkable organism, as investigation deepened, scientists realized that Cowl of Grey was not just a correlate of this effect, but perhaps its cause. So they dug deeper. First, they found that Cowl of Grey possessed a strange and complex organelle (an organ-like substructure of a cell, like a ribosome or mitochondrion). This did not mean much to the wider scientific endeavor, of course, until they found out what this organelle did. It was the deciding factor for those anomalous pockets of warm water. The mechanism by which it did this was unknown and boggled the mind as to its possibility, until in 152 PA it was discovered how.
The organelle worked by interacting with an elementary particle thenceforth dubbed the psion. Until this moment, the psion had been entirely unknown to science, but through the contrivance of evolution, Cowl of Grey had stumbled upon it, and in turn so had humanity. In short (and to be explained in greater depth later) the psion could theoretically redirect energy from any source in any form into any other form, skirting the edges of yet still obeying the already-known laws of thermodynamics. Cowl of Grey had, in part, been using psions to redirect ambient kinetic energy present in the ocean into heat to warm its surroundings. To humans, in all their aspiration and ambition, the implications of this went far, far beyond the academic. This was something that could be used, and towards ends seemingly endless.
Part 2
Needless to say, upon the creation of psionics--the scientific discipline surrounding the study and application of the fundamental particles known as psions--a truly immense surge of research began in earnest. Mithra Research, the company responsible for discovering the mechanism of the Cowl of grey organelle (dubbed the "psionarium"), and its founder Tiuru Mithra were catapulted to cultural stardom. As is always the case, however, the revolution psionics began to usher in was a slow one, technologically speaking. Creating psions through purely mechanical, inanimate means quickly became trivial, but harnessing them with enough of a degree of control to be useful proved vastly more difficult. Naturally, then, scientists and engineers started with what they knew already worked; the biological method, with Cowl of Grey psionaria. First they decoded the genetic and epigenetic bases of psionaria, and then they retooled those genes to be viable when inserted in organisms more amenable to testing. Laboratory creatures initially, and when their safety was established, humans. Thus was created the subdiscipline of "biopsionics", the study and practice of giving living organisms, humans included, the ability to interact with psions.
Next to the steady but slow progress in machine psionics, the results of this method were astounding. Organisms with complex nervous systems (read: humans) could interact with psionaria and thus manipulate psions with incredible sophistication. In turn, that meant consciously levying direct control over energy and matter in a fashion no less glamorous than the magic of fiction. Naturally, this application remained very rough-edged for a couple decades more, but nonetheless the genie had been released from its bottle.
The impact of psionics was not limited to just the realm of science of technology, however. Far from it, in fact. Long before any real headway was made into actually disseminating psionic technology on a wide scale, arguments surrounding its implications had become rife across Novalunar society, arguments that grew into deep ideological rifts. The most notable of these divisions was between the Volitionists and Luminarists. Both ideological factions had utopian visions of society that hinged on psionics, both were pervasive across the highest echelons of power on Novaluna, and both were severely at odds with one another. In a society like Novaluna's, young, naive, and unaccustomed to real conflict, there were few stopgaps against the societal ignition this divide eventually caused. Metaphorical battles worsened into real ones, and in 201 PA, the Novalunar Civil War began.
This was a war at the heart of which lay psionics, not just as its cause, but as its effect as well. Peacetime research into psionics was retooled for war, and true to human form, the greatest advances in the field during that time happened under the pretense of using psionics to make weapons. Notable examples among these were the vast strides made in biopsionics; on the Luminarist side, the Titans, a group of soldiers engineered from the zygote upwards to be veritable superhumans; on the Volitionist side, Neon Black (aka Sila Cei Caire), a walking weapon of mass destruction. The war ended in 204 PA with a notional Volitionist victory that was a stalemate in all but name, marked by the signing of the New Aevia Treaty. In recognition of the issue at the heart of the conflict, the Treaty banned all forms of research into military psionics, placed a moratorium over most forms of biopsionics, and enacted stringent regulations over the rest of psionics research. As a result, the pace of innovation slowed considerably, for all intents an purposes a dark age by design, intended to forestall the revolution psionics might have brought.
Part 3
Although the New Aevia Treaty put a severe damper on psionics research when it was enacted, innovation did not stop. Only slowed, in some places, in some ways, but continued elsewhere in earnest. With biopsionics now severely restricted, efforts began to focus on "mechanopsionics", the discipline of utilizing psionics purely with machines and without biological interfaces. While early methods of producing, manipulating, and interacting with psions existed since the science first came to be, these first devices were crude, expensive, and inferior to biological psionaria in almost all ways. This state of affairs, of course, did not last. These devices, called Psionic Interaction Arrays (PIAs) in a technical context but more commonly referred to as keystones, were improved upon exponentially in the century following their invention, to the point where they went from niche laboratory curiosities to vital components of a new class of psionics-based consumer products. Though they were considerably less versatile than biologial psionaria, what keystones lacked in breadth they more than made up for in power, precision, and cost.
Bit by bit, they began to put many other technological fields through a soft revolution. Keystones opened up new methods of computing, energy generation, transportation, manufacturing, medicine, and more that were more powerful and efficient than before. Though these improvements were, with a few exceptions, piecemeal and iterative, they arrived with great speed and pizzazz and contributed to much substantial material progress.When the New Aevia Treaty was substantially amended in 252 PA, the clauses placing moratoria over biopsionic research were also revised towards greater leniency (albeit still with significant oversight), and in response biopsionic research swiftly picked back up. The approximate half-century that followed was, by many accounts, a halcyon time for Novaluna, largely bereft of the major psionics-influenced conflicts of the century's first half.
It then ended in perhaps the most abruptly tragic way possible. For then struck the Tempest.
Biotechnology
That the science of life holds an especially significant place in the history of Novaluna One is of little surprise, all considered; deprived of it, the original colonists and their descendants for decades thenceforth would never have survived to reap the scientific windfall provided by Novaluna, itself held primarily in the life flourishing upon it. Even Novaluna's greatest secret and erstwhile gift to humanity, the incipient science of psionics, was borne within its native creatures. This simple fact was certainly not lost on the settlers arriving on Novaluna; most of the very colonies they founded were, at least initially, dedicated to the specific study of Novalunar ecosystems and the biota constituting them. Elsewise, biotechnology underpinned the continued survival of the colonists on Novaluna, ensuring an adequate and reliable source of food, amenability to the environment, and, of course, future generations via the Zygotic Reserve Program.
Zygotic Reserve Program
History
Even amidst its cost and ambition, far superlative to anything else previously attempted by humanity, if any aspect of the Novaluna One mission stood out in the radicalism of its conception and the controversy it incurred, it was the Zygotic Reserve Program. Though its anodyne title suggests a contingency plan for the event of catastrophe, its true role as the purpose-built engine of an unprecedented method of organising society was never well concealed.
In selecting only the most meritable and well-prepared individuals as personnel for Novaluna One, the mission planners realised they had a quandary on their hands; in combining exquisite training and expertise with an aversion to tame and rooted domestic life, the personnel they chose were the perfect—and thus the only viable—candidates for their daunting task, yet conversely were poorly equipped to ensure the second axiom of the mission; a continued human presence across generations. Even discounting this, conventional reproduction would not have been able to sustain the rapid population growth the mission planners hoped to facilitate, would have increased the mission load to an unacceptable degree, and would not have been able to ensure ideal conception and development thereon. All this taken into account, the Novaluna One mission planners created the Zygotic Reserve Program, wherein no fewer than fifty million synthetic cryopreserved zygotes were packed aboard the Ad Astra, alongside the necessary equipment to bring them to term and, most remarkably of all, the plans for a radical new system under which to raise these latent generations.
Under the system imagined by the Novaluna mission planners, the very concept of a family bound by blood, as had been tradition for all of human history, would have to be done away with by necessity. No matter, the socioengineers amongst them figured, for it was imperfect and left much to be desired. Collective rearing had little efficacy to speak for, however, and nobody wanted to replicate public fears of fostering line upon line of mass-raised drones. No, if Novaluna was to be a paragon of human achievement, the social structure forming the foundation for it all would have to preserve the spark of individualism that gave it life. So, the planners drafted up from scratch a system to facilitate this. The drudgeries of childrearing could still be automated, as was convention, but to encourage individual development and personalised social spheres, children were to be encouraged to spend time not only with other children, but with adults as well (and vice-versa), all of whom were incentivised to forge quality bonds as they developed based not on arbitrary blood relationship or circumstance, but personal choice and affinity. Thus would arise a new type of family, small and close-knit enough to provide the individual and personal attention well-rounded children need, yet freed from the tyranny of the genetic lottery.
Of importance arguably even greater in prospect—and most certainly greater in retrospect—than the novel social system needed to facilitate the Zygotic Reserve Program was the basic nature of its payload. Rather than simply being eggs fertilised and screened, the eponymous zygotes, of which there were some fifty million by mission launch, were almost fully synthesised from scratch, their nuclear and mitochondrial genomes artificed entirely. Though the consensus among mission planners was to induce, for reasons both technical and ethical, a level of eidonomic diversity, this somewhat belied the fact that almost every single zygote was preengineered to a certain minimum of physiological standards. The argument that such was necessary to maximise survivability and ensure an ideal ratio of individual life quality to resource requirement did little to attenuate the controversy around such an openly eugenicist program.
Of course, had the mission planners been more transparent about the other reasons for preferring synthetic zygotes, the entire program might have been shut down outright. For by establishing the precedent of using synthetic zygotes, the planners ensured the zygotes' continued amenability to further genetic engineering. The official word, should its use ever be required, was so that unforeseen requirements to survive the Novalunar environment could be accounted for, and to a major degree this was true. Yet the scientists responsible for this decision were prescient enough to recognise that, at some point in the future, the Zygotic Reserve Program would be tapped as a source of biotechnological test subjects. And so, realising the futility of prohibition, instead issued a series of guidelines for would-be experiment designers, permitting the "prepotentiation", or genetic predisposing, of erstwhile individuals for experiments, but forbidding coercion and holding subject volition paramount. Whatever the moral rectitude of their decision, it proved apropos, and ultimately critical in the span of history, for it was only through this system did arise the selected few, centuries later, who would demonstrate the power of psionics to advance humanity by leaps never before conceived.
Whatever the fury and indignation the Zygotic Reserve Program generated on the world it left behind, nothing less would have sufficed for the future of the world it was to create.
Program Structure
The Zygotic Reserve Program is administered by the Zygotic Reserve Commissionary Authority (ZRCA, /ˈzɜrkə/), an independent agency formally considered a component of Novaluna One Mission Control yet afforded a very high degree of autonomy from N1MC and the various governments of Novaluna. Also known, metonymously with its faculty, as the Zygotic Curators or just Curators, the societal importance of the ZRCA as the custodians of Novaluna's new generations is significant.
The exact rate at which zygotes are brought to validity and seeded in incubators to grow and develop is determined by the independent ZRCA, but its mandate is set both by individual Novalunar colonies and by N1MC's other constituent entities in a manner similar to a central bank, based on desired rates of population growth and other demographic factors; in the 200 years between the program's inception and its final major wind-down in 200 PA, it produced an annualised average population growth rate of over 4.8%, though this exact rate varied substantially with time, reaching its peak near 100 PA, and after the program's major scale-back, this rate plunged to a mere 0.23%.
Barring exigent circumstances, every five years the ZRP's stock of synthetic zygotes is fully updated with any novel genetic adjustments deemed sufficiently necessary to be considered "baseline" by the Curators, such as the preemption of genetic disorders or the addition of new health-improving metabolic pathways, and new zygotes are synthesized to replenish the stock back up to exactly 50 million. When zygotes are selected to be validated and incubated into new people, they are done so entirely at random, and no information is kept as to how old an original zygote is; as far as the ZRP is epistemologically concerned, every zygote in its stock is exactly as old as the time since the recentmost update.