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We need a Creative Commons sci/fi universe that people can create from instead of using some copyrighted story. We need a pallet to paint from.

There is one. Orion's Arm has been around more than a decade and anyone can contribute.

It began life as a fan site for Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep but has since morphed into something a good deal bigger. It has sucked in everything from Iain Banks' Culture novels to Ad Astra to Niven's Ringworld and Dyson's Sphere, not to mention the neofeudal societies of Frank Herbert's Dune and Jordan Weisman's Battletech.

Unfortunately the quality of visual artist it attracts is decidedly subpar. The fan fiction contributed is tolerable. There are a number of Patreon projects based on it, and many many pages of text on the site itself. The site tends to go offline for extended periods of time, as there's no money behind it to speak of, and the attention it attracts waxes and wanes.

What about spinning up Venus?, as this article describe: http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_st...

RIP Star Trek, You will be missed.

And Star Wars, Disney is flogging it to death. Time for some new _sci _fi_ universes - preferably ones that are creative commons from the outset so some corp like paramount can't use it's grubby influence to limit the possibilities in the stories.

You might be interested in Orion's Arm. A collaboratively developed hard SF universe originally heavily based on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, it has since branched out, picking up elements of Ian M. Banks' Culture universe and David Brin's Uplift Universe, plus generated new material. Two short story collections have been formally published in paper. Unfortunately, the main website is broken at the moment. Interest in the project has been waning for some time. Apparently it has reached a fairly severe nadir.

A Fire Upon the Deep was an incredibly broad setting with lots of room to grow and Orion's Arm pushed it right to the wall. Setting stories in that universe is actually difficult because it's so very big, but it's even worse for visual artists. The universe is so vast and complex in its writing that it doesn't attract many talented illustrators, let alone filmmakers. So it languishes in obscurity. You might investigate the domain and send an email to get the site back online.

Beam enough laser light at the object to heat its surface to the point that it ablates

Another extreme light solution, also reliant on melting its surface are giant parabolic mirrors deployed near the object. This interesting discussion points out some of the realities of gathering and focusing sunlight.

Once our civilization hits Stage 1.5 on the Kardashev scale we might revisit an idea proposed in 1993 by Paul Birch, How to Move a Planet through the use of what he calls a 'solar windmill' to transfer angular momentum between the sun and planets. It's Rube Goldberg as hell!

"We conclude that through the use of high-velocity dynamic compression member to apply forces efficiently, planetary orbits can be modified on convenient engineering timescales ~30 years, that the cost of such operations is not excessive in conjunction with terraforming or artificial-planet-building projects, that energy can be converted to and from orbital energy with little loss, and that the technique may also apply to the regularisation of stellar motions."

Then we could just bob the Earth and scoot it out of the way. If lowly earthworms are deserving of our protection, surely an asteroid may be.

Meh, they need to invent a way to reverse ageing.

Isn't that what they've done? "This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger." Sure, it might take a while for your body to heal the damage, and it might require further medical help in extreme cases, but the core cause has been fixed.

Seriously, how annoying will it be when they invest booster spice and all the people under 30 can live that way forever?

Or until an accident or illness kills you. Which will eventually happen, of course. But eliminating the physical effects of old age would surely make whatever time you do have more pleasant.

Of course, overcoming death in our current state could lead to a Queen of Pain scenario.

The average surface temperature of Venus is 462 degrees C (863 F). That's hotter than Mercury. How long would it take for it to cool down enough to be tolerable for human habitation?

According to this analysis the time could be as short as 200 years, if we cut off all sunlight falling on Venus so that it radiates heat away as fast as possible.

This assumes though that there is no problem with having 460 C rock only 30 m below the surface. The upheavals that will develop as the crust shrinks, creating fissures, may complicate this optimistic scenario.

You can spend some time on this website for an alternate future http://www.orionsarm.com/

Do they pay for the content they download? If not, in 20 years, when those 20 somethings are 40 somethings, who is going to generate the content?

Everyone, if current trends continue. We're already at the point where the best stuff in most franchises are produced by fans, with the "official" content serving mostly as a seed to get things started; and are currently seeing a shift where textual fan-made content is increasingly supplemented by videos, music, etc due to the increasing quality of tools at Joe Average's disposal. Add the entirely original settings (such as Orion's Arm) made possible by the community-building power of the Internet, and it seems likely that in 20 years the so-called Big Content will be both dead and unmourned.

Orion's arm is fantastic new hypertext literature - plus its open source. Check it out if you like good science fiction. From its homepage;

"Welcome to Orion's Arm, a scenario set thousands of years in the future where civilization spans the stars. Godlike ascended intelligences rule vast interstellar empires, and lesser factions seek to carve out their own dominions through intrigue and conquest. And out beyond the edge of civilized space and the human friendly worlds, adventure awaits those prepared to risk all.

Come join us in this ever-expanding collective worldbuilding effort. Within the vast universe that is Orion's Arm you will find:

        Hard Science
        Plausible Technology
        Realistic Cultural Development
        A vast Setting
        10,000+ years of historical development
        Realistic Exobiology"

http://www.orionsarm.com/

You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.

What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.

Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.

Ah, you've read "Yes, Jolonah, There is a Hell". Pretty warped stuff. I like it.

A Nicoll-Dyson beam!
Although probably due to the cancellation of that show about a single female lawyer.

Computers primary advantage is speed, for all our pattern recognition capability are mathematical capability is pretty limited besides modern computers.

Computer's primary advantage is that it was custom-built for the task, rather than evolved into one task and adapted to another. A human brain has at least a hundredfold advantage in raw processing power, however abstract thought - including mathematics - runs over layers and layers of interpreted virtualization (think Python running a JVM running an x86 emulator running Linux running a Bash script, all without JIT). However, pattern recognition is implemented right at hardware (wetware?) level, so of course it's ridiculously effective. It also allows a (very primitive and inefficient) JIT, which is why you tend to get better with practice.

Eventually computers will catch up and surpass human brains in power, at which point I suspect we'll see mind uploading for the sake of boosting one's intelligence and getting around that inconvenient planned obsolescence of human body thing. Yup, we'll see if Orion's Arm will come to pass :).

If your society travels between the stars, you can get all that want from ANY star.

No. You can get anything you want from almost any star. However, you can't get everything you want from a single star; after all, our Sun only has the mass of some 1.98892 × 10^30 kg, and produces about 3.86×10^26 J per second. We already have science fiction suggesting a use for such resources.

Unless, of course, Star Trek is right, and all aliens are essentially just like us.

I don't think that we will be like we are now for very much longer. We already spend much of our time online, in ever-more-sophisticated virtual worlds and forums, and replacing worn-out body parts with technology is already routine. A while longer and we become outright cyborgs, and once brain is understood well enough I'd imagine that mind uploading - converting yourself into a computer program - will become commonplace. After all, that form has many advantages, from not being tied to a single physical form to not having your intelligence limited by how much brain matter can fit inside your skull.

Human beings of weak and fragile flesh and blood traveling in starships will likely never cross the gulf between stars, but human beings who are starships... Well, that's another matter entirely. In fact I'd wager that most of humanity will have left flesh behind 5 centuries from now; and probably sooner. At that point our technology should be at the point where there's simply no advantage to being tied to and dependant on flesh, since virtual reality is ultrarealistic, and you can always use a remote-controlled humanlike robot body if you need one - or even download your mind to its control computer, if you really want to.

Laser eye surgery can correct defects in the organ of the eye, but what technology will correct a defect in your awareness?

Direct high-bandwidth interface between my brains and computer chips, allowing the addition of extra lobes? Reaching first singularity should be a huge improvement. Me wanna...

Karma is real - it is the relationship of causes and effects that ensures that war brings war, death brings death, immorality brings immorality, and ignorance brings ignorance.

So why are the BP executives still living and unharmed, while people who had nothing to do with the whole mess suffer?

And "karma" refers to the Hindu concept where what you do affects you reincarnation (specifically, what you get reincarnated as). What you are talking about - consequences in this life - is called "justice", or would if it actually got inflicted on the guilty party rather than innocents...

Visit Orion's Arm for an idea what populating the galaxy might be like.

http://www.orionsarm.com/

Faster-than-light travel always causes causality paradoxes, so a priori, FTL drives are impossible unless special relativity is wrong. (That's is a bit like saying that perpetual motion machines are impossible unless thermodynamics is wrong.) The proposed mechanism behind the FTL drive doesn't matter -- it'll still cause a time paradox.

Just like we know any proposed perpetual motion machine must have a flaw, any proposed FTL drive must also have a flaw. They belong to the same class of impossible device, and deserve the same degree of consideration.

The size of the universe has expanded faster than the speed of light due to the expansion of space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Faster-than-light travel always causes causality paradoxes, so a priori, FTL drives are impossible unless special relativity is wrong. (That's is a bit like saying that perpetual motion machines are impossible unless thermodynamics is wrong.) The proposed mechanism behind the FTL drive doesn't matter -- it'll still cause a time paradox.

Just like we know any proposed perpetual motion machine must have a flaw, any proposed FTL drive must also have a flaw. They belong to the same class of impossible device, and deserve the same degree of consideration.

There are bigger problems with conventional science fiction faster-than-light travel: namely, the problem of FTL travel implying time travel. As much as I'd love to see FTL work, I think we're limited to slower-than-light travel, as in Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth/a) (probably my favorite hard science fiction novel.)

http://www.orionsarm.com/civ/Stochocracy.html

Or possibly a Type III Kardashev civ taking issue with the occupants of a nearby galaxy (or *maybe* an S6 or even S7 Galaxy Brain trying to insure a rival doesn't achieve the same status and threaten it?)! Looks like a cosmic beat-down either way!

They've got ready-made kits of cell building blocks that you can piece together like Legos, and are adding thousands of new ones each year.

Cells are enormously more efficient at storing information that we can in silicon

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

Orion's Arm is a bold new shared worldbuilding and creative writing project, creating and exploring a new vision of the future of humanity and other sentient beings, ten thousand years hence.

Our goal is to create a dramatic far-future universe that is internally consistent and abides as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Thus matter cannot travel faster than light, matter and energy are conserved, no evolved humanoid aliens have been discovered, future ultratech social issues are likely to be very different to those of today, and so on. We embrace speculative ideas like drexlerian assemblers, mind uploads, posthuman intelligences, femtotech, magnetic monopoles, wormholes, as it is proposed that future sciences, technologies, and developments will make these possible. And we attempt a logical explanation for even the most fantastic-seeming elements in OA. We aim to paint a future that is plausible at every level, from the scientific to the social to the psychological.

An interesting website, about a possible future where humans have already colonized part of the galaxy:

http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.

What I don't get is why people (especially Sagan's followers and B-movie 'writers') are so fixated on planets. Why, once you managed to get out of one steep gravity do you want to throw yourself down another? Is not a planet but a big lump of resources, inconveniently located?

Right now, once we get out of orbit we return to Earth because that's where all the good stuff is (hookers, paychecks, hookers to blow paychecks on.) Terraforming in the movies takes all of 5 minutes at the push of the big ol' Genesis button. In reality, you are looking at centuries of work with our (and our grandkids) level of technology. I can't find the study, but someone posted to USENET an article describing how, compared with sublight travel between the stars, building a self-sufficient colony using the pop-sci idea of glazing a dead world with a thin layer of Earth's ecosystem is ludicrously slow. Were talking a few throusand yeas of travel vs. 10 to 100's of thousands of years of terraforming, building infrastructure and human breeding rates that would make a nymphomaniac break out in sweat.

Iain Banks Culture Novels and the Orion's Arm take a much more sensible view of things. Once you build the luxury space colony ships, why live planetside? Just cruise from star system to star system and see the sights. And we are talking ships the size of Halo here, not some 160 crew member job with a pie-tin shell and day-glow tipped vibrators for engines. Like O'Neil colonies with engines where whole generations of people can grow up to only work the order counter at the McDonald's space-colony franchise locations.

Then there is the fundamental assumption behind the Drake equation and Fermi's Paradox: both only talk about life as we know it. For all we know, every star system has an exact copy of Earth, save that the people consider radio a religious Evil to be suppressed and lasers and robots to be tools of the Devil. It smacks of egocentric anthropomorphism to assume that if we encounter a phenomena that at least fits the definitions of life (increte, excrete, secrete, and reproduce) we'd be able to recognize it, and not accidentally kill it.

Ignoring robots, what would a world be like if no personality ever died.

http://www.orionsarm.com/intro.html

Orion's Arm, a hard sci-fi setting and global project, has posted a nice analysis of nanoweapons and nanodefenses.

http://www.orionsarm.com/tech/Limitations_of_Nanow eapons.html

Really a good read - especially considering that none of it is bullshit.

Try this: http://www.technovelgy.com/ The site lists sci-fi stuff and real world instances of that tech.

I also suggest Orion's Arm. It's a "reference" for a pretty in depth sci-fi universe and has a nice encyclopedia of tech and social ideas.
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/index.html

Try this: http://www.technovelgy.com/ The site lists sci-fi stuff and real world instances of that tech.

I also suggest Orion's Arm. It's a "reference" for a pretty in depth sci-fi universe and has a nice encyclopedia of tech and social ideas.
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/index.html

The problem with Banks is that somehow the energy is gone. My nethack-flavored review of Look To Windward was: "A cheap plastic imitation of a Culture novel." Well, it worked, since I bought it in hardcover.

I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed directly ripped off from Orion's Arm, and Banks didn't even get into the truly fascinating issue of Empire Time, and what it would mean for competing civilizations. Probably our Linux buddy Strosser nailed it in one of his books I haven't read yet.

Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book), The Player Of Games, or Feersum Enjinn (after learning to read again). They've all been sucked up deep into my mind.

The problem with Banks is that somehow the energy is gone. My nethack-flavored review of Look To Windward was: "A cheap plastic imitation of a Culture novel." Well, it worked, since I bought it in hardcover.

I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed directly ripped off from Orion's Arm, and Banks didn't even get into the truly fascinating issue of Empire Time, and what it would mean for competing civilizations. Probably our Linux buddy Strosser nailed it in one of his books I haven't read yet.

Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book), The Player Of Games, or Feersum Enjinn (after learning to read again). They've all been sucked up deep into my mind.

What would be even more insidious is the idea of some kind of intelligence amplified so greatly verses your own that you could be just going about your merry way doing every thing of your own free will but in a human imperceivable way completely controlled by said super-intelligence.

See the Empire Ship entry on Orion's Arm for a snippet that refers to the idea.
That kind of remote control would really suck.

There's a SF world called Orion's Arm based on a post-singularity scenario.

It's collaboratively created and published with a Creative Commons license.

If you travel more than a light year in less than a year, you've made a "time-like" journey. Theories about wormholes mostly permit this. That implies some strange causality, but not nearly as strange as what's ordinarily thought of as time travel. You still can't send yourself a signal "from the future", or affect your own past, even with multiple hops.

Already in the works. Try Orion's Arm for an "open-source" sci-fi universe. Some very interesting concepts there, though none of it's aimed at film or television.

Actually, a level of incoherence of the "science" involved in Trekkie technics cancels it aspirations to be SCI-fi.

Or maybe they're from the parallel universe? Laser beams visible in space, FTL with preservation of causality and general relativity, completely naive view of human psychology, most aliens are humanoid...

If you're into science-fiction, better check "Culture" series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture by Iain M. Banks. or for real hard sci-fi, Orion's Arm http://orionsarm.com/

Star Trek belongs to the techno-fantasy genre, not sci-fi.

Thanks for the link to the explanation, that was quite interesting. One thing I definitely don't get, however, is how the author of that page arrives at their arbitrary (to me) definition of Bob and Carol's present. I'm no expert in this area, but what reading I have done suggests that space-time is a cone (the mathematical sort, with two of your everyday cones coming together at the point), with the present being the singular point of junction. I took that to mean that there is only one present, with nowhen else for anyone else to be. Is this model then only relevant for a single reference point? And even if so, any clues on how the orionsarm person figured on Bob's and Carol's present, existing in me's past?

(scratches head)...

Or something like that. Here's an explanation that uses a wonderfully confusing picture to illustrate it.

"Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending?for example, who ?you? really are. You?ve created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside."

This is why it won't be done - it doesn't solve the immortality issue. Copying you does NOT make YOU immortal - it just makes you PERSISTENT.

I as a Transhumanist personally have a more "robust" notion of immortality than that. Unfortunately, most Transhumans don't seem to understand this simple metaphysical fact.

Also, making a copy of me would put me in the position of the character Omne in the Star Trek novel where it was stated that creating a competing copy of himself was the ultimate risk since one of him in the Universe was too many already. (He also said it was the ultimate challenge which is why he had to do it.)

Best science fiction I've read in months is John C. Wright's trilogy, "The Golden Age", "Phoenix Exultant", and "The Golden Transcendence". Ubiquitous nanotech, distributed brains, super-AI's running the human universe.

The best place to see what a future universe might look like is the Orion's Arm game site. Page after page of super-AI's, cyborgs, nanotech, femototech, picotech, "clarketech". Fabulously imaginative resource here.

"Personally, I think it is ethical to terraform a planet which is not presently inhabited (by life of any kind.) Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition."

Ann Clayborne would not like you, no she wouldn't...

This reminds me of the work suits the First Hundred used in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy

Not quite complete spacesuits, but enough to keep you alive and working while on the surface of the red planet. They included a lattice of warming wires beneath a flexible exterior.

Next up: harvesting bodily fluids with a suit.

Fantasy is the the most flexible genre because it can encompass Norse stuff and Star Wars. But settling for a sub-genre seems a bit limiting. If you look at the amount of effort required to create a new sub-genre then it is very daunting. Tolkien practically created modern fantasy by doing all the legwork of language, myths etc. Someone needs to go back to scratch and do something similar. Ug. What comes to mind is the frightening amount of work that, for example, the people doing Orion's Arm have put into it.

Check out Orion's Arm. It is a pretty unique sci-fi website.

I read A Fire Upon the Deep about a month ago. The setting was excellent, with AI Gods who are as much above us as we are above cockroaches. Looking for other material with this setting led me to Orion's Arm. Orion's Arm shares the ideas of the Singularity like A Fire Upon the Deep and has a 10000 year time-line with no humanoid aliens and as realistic as possible physics.

This is a great classic I think, probably going further in time than any other SF book :)

I xerox'd a copy 'cause it's not printed anymore. You can buy a used copy at amazon.

http://www.orionsarm.com/books/Star_Maker.html