HOME | DD

Description

It's the twenty-first century, but Not As We Know It. There was no Outer Space Treaty, and the night sky is dotted with space stations both greater and more elegant than anything existing in OTL (the largest of which rotate in order to simulate Earth's gravity), and experts predict that we'll start seeing even larger projects such as Bernal Spheres and O'Neill Cylinders undertaken in the next few decades. Most major nations now maintain a lunar outpost, or in the case of the US and still-extant Soviet Union (which is now more Democratic, following a series of reforms in the 1990s, and on pretty good terms with the United States, both superpowers seeing China as a growing threat to global hegemony), own two or three.
Space tourism is common for those that can afford it, and orbital honeymoons are hugely popular amongst wealthy newlyweds (who tend to be especially fond of exploring the limitations of the zero-gee environment), although trips to the lunar surface and beyond are mostly restricted to scientific endeavours. A number of healthy children have been born in outer space, and recently, one-year-old Selena Clarke (dubbed the 'Moon Child' by the press) became the first infant to be delivered on the lunar surface. Project Spaceguard (which was enacted after a section of northeast Italy was destroyed by a small impactor back in 1977, causing tens of thousands of fatalities) has catalogued just about every asteroid and comet within the planet's vicinity, and given our own world's dwindling resources, a number of companies are vying to begin mining these objects in the near future.
AIDS was first identified in the United States as early as the mid-1960s, nipping the growing 'free love' movement in the bud, and although there is a working vaccine against HIV, this 2001 remains somewhat more sexually conservative than our own. Things are quickly changing, however - earlier this year in the United Kingdom, after months of speculation, Princess Alice (third in line to the British throne) came out as gay, to very mixed public response. Mobile phones never developed past the brick stage, although picturephones are hugely popular (they are especially common aboard space stations, where crewmembers may go weeks or months without seeing their families). Humanity has been exceptionally fortunate and not suffered any major nuclear disasters, and as a result, nuclear power has a much better public image, with fission-based propulsion now standard for modern spacecraft.
Suspicions of a life-bearing Venus were confirmed in 1962, when Mariner 2 sped past our nearest planetary neighbour to reveal a hot, cloudy world covered entirely with ocean, save for a few small archipelagos. Subsequent missions have shown the Venusian ecosystem to be far stranger than any pulp writer could have imagined - many native sea creatures possess tentacles so long and numerous as to make a giant squid blush, and seem to straddle the line between plant and animal (there's a reason quite a few of them have scientific names derived from the Cthulhu Mythos), while the planet's few large islands, such as Leng, Hy-Brasil and New Hawaii, are blanketed with forests of odd-looking fungi.
Somewhat ironically for a planet named in honour of a love goddess, sexual reproduction is nowhere near as widespread on Venus as it is on planet Earth, most native species reproducing asexually, although the reason for this remains unknown. Some Venusian creatures have been known to grow up to five times the size of blue whales, although if those eerie, low-frequency noises recorded by undersea surveillance are any indication, there may be even larger organisms lurking at the lowest depths of the planetary ocean. The first manned flyby of Venus took place in 1972, and nearly forty years later, there is a single modest space station in orbit of the white planet (Cupid), with a second one currently in the planning stages.
The planet Mars is now understood to have once supported life, fossil records suggesting that the now-desert planet was crawling with insects the size of dinosaurs (which flew with ease thanks to the planet's lower gravity) as little as 250 million years ago, although as is the case with Venus, there's no evidence to suggest it was ever home to anything smarter than a chicken (early reports of unearthed tools and ancient cave paintings have since been dismissed as a hoax). The first manned mission to Mars, the Capricorn One, was launched from McKinley Rocket Base in the late 1970s on a eighteen-month round trip to the red planet. Its three-man crew consisted of Commander Leland F. Quayle, Marvin 'The Martian' DeMartino (who would subsequently enter a career in politics, and is currently serving as the 42nd President of the United States), and Robert 'Buck' Barsom (who holds the distinction of being the first African-American to travel into space, although there was some bitterness that he had to remain on the orbiting spacecraft while his white crewmates explored the Martian surface, especially so shortly after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass ratification by a single vote).
The Mars landing, while successful, was tinged with tragedy, however: roughly eight weeks prior to the Capricorn's return, it was reported that Commander Quayle's wife and two children had suffocated in their sleep due to a gas leak in their home (at the time, there was some debate as to whether or not the Commander should be informed of this tragedy, out of fear that it could jeopardize the mission). All three Martian pioneers received a heroes' welcome upon their return, and were personally greeted by President Rockefeller, although Commander Quayle never recovered from the loss of his family. He became largely secluded from public life, developing substance abuse issues, and ultimately passing away from a drug overdose in 1983 at the age of 44. A small number of conservative Christians have attributed the Commander misfortune to a controversial comment he had made shortly after setting foot on the Martian surface (which seemed to imply that the Capricorn's crew had ventured 'beyond the domain of God'). The first Mars base (named Leland Quayle Station in honour of the late pioneer) is presently under construction.
A form of suspended animation (generally known simply as hibernation) was developed by Soviet scientists in the 1980s. It was initially hoped that this technology could be used in treating those with terminal illnesses, allowing them to buy more time while researchers worked on a cure. Unfortunately, the science behind hibernation technology is not so simple, and it is necessary that any potential hibernees are in decent physical condition, as underlying health issues have been proven to cause complications. For this reason, suspended animation is primarily associated with the field of space travel, where it benefits astronauts by allowing them to travel on months-long journeys without the need for extra food supplies (on top of conserving valuable fuel, space-food just doesn't taste that good). Space travel's growing dependence on hibernation technology is not without its controversies, however -- as it is a fairly recent development, there has been little study conducted into the long-term effects of suspended animation on the human body.
While the internet was never developed and home computers never really took off, there are expensive gadgets more than a little reminiscent of OTL's tablets, which are mostly used for viewing television broadcasts. Artificial intelligence is now a reality, the earliest AIs, such as Athena, Socrates and Galileo having come online in the United States during the early 80s, and courses in AI science are now offered at many major universities. The most advanced AI model currently available (and, many have noted, the most cocky) are the HAL (Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic) 9000 computers, one of which is presently in control of the Discovery One spacecraft, which left for the planet Jupiter earlier this year.
The Great AI Debate, which concerns the true nature of machine awareness, rages on in the scientific community. One side of the argument (popularly known as sents) are convinced that AIs are just as aware as any human, and deserving of the same rights accordingly, while the other (called sims) believe that they have all the awareness of a washing machine, and the AIs' apparent self-awareness is merely a result of them being programmed to study and mimic human behaviour. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has caused widespread fear and concern amongst a significant portion of the public, some fearing mass unemployment as machines start taking human jobs (which isn't entirely unfounded - after all, they can already beat the world's best experts at playing chess, what's next!?), others fearing an inevitable robot uprising. A small number of religious figures also believe the creation of thinking machines to be sinful, and one doesn't have to travel too far south to hear televangelists preaching about the supposed evils of AI.
Popular culture looks rather different - with the proliferation of space travel and the discovery of life on Venus and Mars, there is much less of a sci-fi ghetto, with the original Star Trek never getting cancelled (although no additional series were ever produced). Similarly, Doctor Who was never cancelled in 1989 (with Brian Blessed taking up the offer for the role of the Second Doctor in 1967), and the current Tenth Doctor is portrayed by Rowan Atkinson, who took over from Richard Griffith in 1998. Star Wars is non-existent, with George Lucas instead working on a cinematic adaption of Flash Gordon (or, as many critics dubbed it, 'Flop Gordon'). Alien was also never developed, Ridley Scott instead going on to direct the critically acclaimed Dune in the mid-1970s. Around the same time, Disney began working on John Carter of Mars, an animated musical which was released the same week as the Mars landing. Inspired by real-life developments in the field of machine intelligence, Stanley Kubrick (who is still alive and kicking as of 2001) finally got around to making AI: Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, which was co-written with Brian Aldiss, and is widely considered one of the director's greatest works.
In the US, marijuana was decriminalized at a federal level in the mid-90s at the tail-end of the third Kennedy administration, although remains illegal for any usage in all fifty states. There was no Good Friday Agreement, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are still raging on. Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, and the situation in South Africa has only deteriorated since, with Apartheid dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Although there is as-yet no (official) proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, claims of alien abduction have grown far more frequent since the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system, and there are numerous cults which purport that humanity was uplifted by ancient aliens. Many of these groups are kept under close government surveillance, recent evidence suggesting that they may be far closer to the truth than they realize...

List of U.S. Presidents (1969 - present)

1969 - 1972: Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY)*
1972 - 1977: Terry Sanford (D-NC)
1977 - 1981: Nelson D. Rockefeller (R-NY)**
1981 - 1989: Bob Dole (R-KS)
1989 - 1997: Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA)***
1997 -: Marvin D. DeMartino (R-ND)

* On 13 October 1972, the second President Kennedy was shot through the head by 22-year-old busboy Arthur Bremer in Annapolis, Maryland. Doctors' efforts to save the wounded Kennedy's life were successful, although the once sharp and charismatic President was left with severe brain damage, and remains institutionalized to this day. Robert F. Kennedy was one of three American political figures to be shot in so-called 'Bloody October', the other two being civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. (who survived, but was left wheelchair bound till his death in 1988), and Alabama Governor George Wallace (who was less fortunate, and died en route to hospital).
** Rockefeller became heir to the Republican Party after California Governor Ronald Reagan (who is widely remembered as a second Barry Goldwater) was defeated by President Sanford in the 1972 election. Rockefeller was re-elected in a landslide over Gary Hart in 1980 following the latter's infamous sex scandal, although did not live to see out his second term, dying in 1981 in the middle of a trip to the USSR. Rockefeller remains the only US president to die on foreign soil, his cause of death ruled a heart attack (although despite warmer Soviet-American relations, many are still convinced that the Russkies killed Rocky). Coincidentally, British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and Jamaican singer Bob Marley passed away the same day as Nelson Rockefeller, although news of the President's demise greatly overshadowed that of the latter two.

*** Having divorced his wife some years previously, Ted Kennedy was America's third bachelor President, and the second (after Grover Cleveland) to hold his wedding in the White House, where he married his second wife in 1991. Having been re-elected over Jack Kemp by a wide margin in 1992, EMK remains the only Kennedy to serve more than one term in the Oval Office, throughout which he was target of four separate assassination attempts, more than any other President in American history. The first of these attacks on EMK's life (carried out in Florida by 28-year-old Edith June 'E.J.' Russel, a young librarian from a sexually abusive background who was infatuated with Kennedy, and angered by his then-recent marriage announcement) left him seriously injured, with Lloyd Bentsen serving as Acting President for the duration of his recovery. The second assassination attempt, carried out in Washington by teenage anarchist Jeffrey Ziff (1976 - 1997) left Kennedy himself unharmed, although caused the death of his press secretary, 49-year-old Calvin Kirkpatrick. After firing a single gunshot, Ziff mistakenly believed that his bullet had struck the President, and famously yelled out, 'tell Jack Jeffrey Ziff sent you!'. Sadly, Ted Kennedy could not outrun the family curse forever, and in October 1998, after surviving three wannabe John (and one wannabe Jane) Wilkes Booths, he died in hospital following injuries sustained in a vehicular accident caused by a drunk pickup driver (the 'truck that killed Ted Kennedy' has since been auctioned off).

Description

It's the twenty-first century, but Not As We Know It. There was no Outer Space Treaty, and the night sky is dotted with space stations both greater and more elegant than anything existing in OTL (the largest of which rotate in order to simulate Earth's gravity), and experts predict that we'll start seeing even larger projects such as Bernal Spheres and O'Neill Cylinders undertaken in the next few decades. Most major nations now maintain a lunar outpost, or in the case of the US and still-extant Soviet Union (which is now more Democratic, following a series of reforms in the 1990s, and on pretty good terms with the United States, both superpowers seeing China as a growing threat to global hegemony), own two or three.
Space tourism is common for those that can afford it, and orbital honeymoons are hugely popular amongst wealthy newlyweds (who tend to be especially fond of exploring the limitations of the zero-gee environment), although trips to the lunar surface and beyond are mostly restricted to scientific endeavours. A number of healthy children have been born in outer space, and recently, one-year-old Selena Clarke (dubbed the 'Moon Child' by the press) became the first infant to be delivered on the lunar surface. Project Spaceguard (which was enacted after a section of northeast Italy was destroyed by a small impactor back in 1977, causing tens of thousands of fatalities) has catalogued just about every asteroid and comet within the planet's vicinity, and given our own world's dwindling resources, a number of companies are vying to begin mining these objects in the near future.
AIDS was first identified in the United States as early as the mid-1960s, nipping the growing 'free love' movement in the bud, and although there is a working vaccine against HIV, this 2001 remains somewhat more sexually conservative than our own. Things are quickly changing, however - earlier this year in the United Kingdom, after months of speculation, Princess Alice (third in line to the British throne) came out as gay, to very mixed public response. Mobile phones never developed past the brick stage, although picturephones are hugely popular (they are especially common aboard space stations, where crewmembers may go weeks or months without seeing their families). Humanity has been exceptionally fortunate and not suffered any major nuclear disasters, and as a result, nuclear power has a much better public image, with fission-based propulsion now standard for modern spacecraft.
Suspicions of a life-bearing Venus were confirmed in 1962, when Mariner 2 sped past our nearest planetary neighbour to reveal a hot, cloudy world covered entirely with ocean, save for a few small archipelagos. Subsequent missions have shown the Venusian ecosystem to be far stranger than any pulp writer could have imagined - many native sea creatures possess tentacles so long and numerous as to make a giant squid blush, and seem to straddle the line between plant and animal (there's a reason quite a few of them have scientific names derived from the Cthulhu Mythos), while the planet's few large islands, such as Leng, Hy-Brasil and New Hawaii, are blanketed with forests of odd-looking fungi.
Somewhat ironically for a planet named in honour of a love goddess, sexual reproduction is nowhere near as widespread on Venus as it is on planet Earth, most native species reproducing asexually, although the reason for this remains unknown. Some Venusian creatures have been known to grow up to five times the size of blue whales, although if those eerie, low-frequency noises recorded by undersea surveillance are any indication, there may be even larger organisms lurking at the lowest depths of the planetary ocean. The first manned flyby of Venus took place in 1972, and nearly forty years later, there is a single modest space station in orbit of the white planet (Cupid), with a second one currently in the planning stages.
The planet Mars is now understood to have once supported life, fossil records suggesting that the now-desert planet was crawling with insects the size of dinosaurs (which flew with ease thanks to the planet's lower gravity) as little as 250 million years ago, although as is the case with Venus, there's no evidence to suggest it was ever home to anything smarter than a chicken (early reports of unearthed tools and ancient cave paintings have since been dismissed as a hoax). The first manned mission to Mars, the Capricorn One, was launched from McKinley Rocket Base in the late 1970s on a eighteen-month round trip to the red planet. Its three-man crew consisted of Commander Leland F. Quayle, Marvin 'The Martian' DeMartino (who would subsequently enter a career in politics, and is currently serving as the 42nd President of the United States), and Robert 'Buck' Barsom (who holds the distinction of being the first African-American to travel into space, although there was some bitterness that he had to remain on the orbiting spacecraft while his white crewmates explored the Martian surface, especially so shortly after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass ratification by a single vote).
The Mars landing, while successful, was tinged with tragedy, however: roughly eight weeks prior to the Capricorn's return, it was reported that Commander Quayle's wife and two children had suffocated in their sleep due to a gas leak in their home (at the time, there was some debate as to whether or not the Commander should be informed of this tragedy, out of fear that it could jeopardize the mission). All three Martian pioneers received a heroes' welcome upon their return, and were personally greeted by President Rockefeller, although Commander Quayle never recovered from the loss of his family. He became largely secluded from public life, developing substance abuse issues, and ultimately passing away from a drug overdose in 1983 at the age of 44. A small number of conservative Christians have attributed the Commander misfortune to a controversial comment he had made shortly after setting foot on the Martian surface (which seemed to imply that the Capricorn's crew had ventured 'beyond the domain of God'). The first Mars base (named Leland Quayle Station in honour of the late pioneer) is presently under construction.
A form of suspended animation (generally known simply as hibernation) was developed by Soviet scientists in the 1980s. It was initially hoped that this technology could be used in treating those with terminal illnesses, allowing them to buy more time while researchers worked on a cure. Unfortunately, the science behind hibernation technology is not so simple, and it is necessary that any potential hibernees are in decent physical condition, as underlying health issues have been proven to cause complications. For this reason, suspended animation is primarily associated with the field of space travel, where it benefits astronauts by allowing them to travel on months-long journeys without the need for extra food supplies (on top of conserving valuable fuel, space-food just doesn't taste that good). Space travel's growing dependence on hibernation technology is not without its controversies, however -- as it is a fairly recent development, there has been little study conducted into the long-term effects of suspended animation on the human body.
While the internet was never developed and home computers never really took off, there are expensive gadgets more than a little reminiscent of OTL's tablets, which are mostly used for viewing television broadcasts. Artificial intelligence is now a reality, the earliest AIs, such as Athena, Socrates and Galileo having come online in the United States during the early 80s, and courses in AI science are now offered at many major universities. The most advanced AI model currently available (and, many have noted, the most cocky) are the HAL (Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic) 9000 computers, one of which is presently in control of the Discovery One spacecraft, which left for the planet Jupiter earlier this year.
The Great AI Debate, which concerns the true nature of machine awareness, rages on in the scientific community. One side of the argument (popularly known as sents) are convinced that AIs are just as aware as any human, and deserving of the same rights accordingly, while the other (called sims) believe that they have all the awareness of a washing machine, and the AIs' apparent self-awareness is merely a result of them being programmed to study and mimic human behaviour. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has caused widespread fear and concern amongst a significant portion of the public, some fearing mass unemployment as machines start taking human jobs (which isn't entirely unfounded - after all, they can already beat the world's best experts at playing chess, what's next!?), others fearing an inevitable robot uprising. A small number of religious figures also believe the creation of thinking machines to be sinful, and one doesn't have to travel too far south to hear televangelists preaching about the supposed evils of AI.
Popular culture looks rather different - with the proliferation of space travel and the discovery of life on Venus and Mars, there is much less of a sci-fi ghetto, with the original Star Trek never getting cancelled (although no additional series were ever produced). Similarly, Doctor Who was never cancelled in 1989 (with Brian Blessed taking up the offer for the role of the Second Doctor in 1967), and the current Tenth Doctor is portrayed by Rowan Atkinson, who took over from Richard Griffith in 1998. Star Wars is non-existent, with George Lucas instead working on a cinematic adaption of Flash Gordon (or, as many critics dubbed it, 'Flop Gordon'). Alien was also never developed, Ridley Scott instead going on to direct the critically acclaimed Dune in the mid-1970s. Around the same time, Disney began working on John Carter of Mars, an animated musical which was released the same week as the Mars landing. Inspired by real-life developments in the field of machine intelligence, Stanley Kubrick (who is still alive and kicking as of 2001) finally got around to making AI: Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, which was co-written with Brian Aldiss, and is widely considered one of the director's greatest works.
In the US, marijuana was decriminalized at a federal level in the mid-90s at the tail-end of the third Kennedy administration, although remains illegal for any usage in all fifty states. There was no Good Friday Agreement, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are still raging on. Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, and the situation in South Africa has only deteriorated since, with Apartheid dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Although there is as-yet no (official) proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, claims of alien abduction have grown far more frequent since the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system, and there are numerous cults which purport that humanity was uplifted by ancient aliens. Many of these groups are kept under close government surveillance, recent evidence suggesting that they may be far closer to the truth than they realize...

List of U.S. Presidents (1969 - present)

1969 - 1972: Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY)*
1972 - 1977: Terry Sanford (D-NC)
1977 - 1981: Nelson D. Rockefeller (R-NY)**
1981 - 1989: Bob Dole (R-KS)
1989 - 1997: Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA)***
1997 -: Marvin D. DeMartino (R-ND)

* On 13 October 1972, the second President Kennedy was shot through the head by 22-year-old busboy Arthur Bremer in Annapolis, Maryland. Doctors' efforts to save the wounded Kennedy's life were successful, although the once sharp and charismatic President was left with severe brain damage, and remains institutionalized to this day. Robert F. Kennedy was one of three American political figures to be shot in so-called 'Bloody October', the other two being civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. (who survived, but was left wheelchair bound till his death in 1988), and Alabama Governor George Wallace (who was less fortunate, and died en route to hospital).
** Rockefeller became heir to the Republican Party after California Governor Ronald Reagan (who is widely remembered as a second Barry Goldwater) was defeated by President Sanford in the 1972 election. Rockefeller was re-elected in a landslide over Gary Hart in 1980 following the latter's infamous sex scandal, although did not live to see out his second term, dying in 1981 in the middle of a trip to the USSR. Rockefeller remains the only US president to die on foreign soil, his cause of death ruled a heart attack (although despite warmer Soviet-American relations, many are still convinced that the Russkies killed Rocky). Coincidentally, British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and Jamaican singer Bob Marley passed away the same day as Nelson Rockefeller, although news of the President's demise greatly overshadowed that of the latter two.

*** Having divorced his wife some years previously, Ted Kennedy was America's third bachelor President, and the second (after Grover Cleveland) to hold his wedding in the White House, where he married his second wife in 1991. Having been re-elected over Jack Kemp by a wide margin in 1992, EMK remains the only Kennedy to serve more than one term in the Oval Office, throughout which he was target of four separate assassination attempts, more than any other President in American history. The first of these attacks on EMK's life (carried out in Florida by 28-year-old Edith June 'E.J.' Russel, a young librarian from a sexually abusive background who was infatuated with Kennedy, and angered by his then-recent marriage announcement) left him seriously injured, with Lloyd Bentsen serving as Acting President for the duration of his recovery. The second assassination attempt, carried out in Washington by teenage anarchist Jeffrey Ziff (1976 - 1997) left Kennedy himself unharmed, although caused the death of his press secretary, 49-year-old Calvin Kirkpatrick. After firing a single gunshot, Ziff mistakenly believed that his bullet had struck the President, and famously yelled out, 'tell Jack Jeffrey Ziff sent you!'. Sadly, Ted Kennedy could not outrun the family curse forever, and in October 1998, after surviving three wannabe John (and one wannabe Jane) Wilkes Booths, he died in hospital following injuries sustained in a vehicular accident caused by a drunk pickup driver (the 'truck that killed Ted Kennedy' has since been auctioned off).