URBAN LEGENDS AND THE PARANORMAL A common belief among those who entertain the notion of alien visitors is of alien influence in Earth’s technological development – see, for example, Genomic Invasion, p. 45. One interesting version of this particular meme is that aliens have pressured humanity’s AI developers to keep machine intelligences limited to roughly human levels. Apparently, superintelligent AI singularities often lead to species extinction and can wreak havoc on the galaxy until stopped. This is why, they claim, there is no real evidence of alien civilizations – the vast majority were wiped out during a period of AI transcendence. Classic UFO sightings remain a staple of spacer tales (see Whalers, p. 78). Although certain regions of space, such as Earth’s orbit, seem crowded there are actually relatively few ships in the Solar System compared to vehicles in Earth’s atmosphere. What’s more, space ships follow well-understood physical limitations to their velocities and trajectories. An unidentified vehicle, particularly one seemingly not abiding by the laws of physics, is very hard to not notice. Many spacers, especially those in the Deep Beyond, speak of sightings ships that don’t look or act like anything they’ve ever seen. Most laugh it off as a trick of the eye or a secret government experimental ship – this laughter invariably comes across as nervous than humorous. Ironically, even as alien-visitation memes continue to thrive among the general populace, most experts have come to the conclusion that humankind is almost certainly the only intelligent life in the Milky Way. Even with 2100’s advanced signal processing and telescopes able to resolve planets in other systems, no signs of alien intelligence have been found. Fermi’s Paradox still stands – even a cautious civilization could colonize the entire galaxy in a cosmologically brief amount of time, but we find no evidence of any other civilizations out there.
Ancestor Worship Wen Shan passed away on Tuesday night. He is survived by his wife, four children, 14 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. His body was interred in the family crypt. His spirit joined the family shrine, and welcomes visitors daily. – Announcement on a Hong Kong civic record website
Ancestor worship is a long-standing element of many traditional religions. In most, the ancestor spirits rarely intervene in day-to-day life, but are always watching. Behavior that offends the ancestors is to be avoided, at the very least because it brings shame upon them. The advent of mind-emulation technology has given a new form to traditions of ancestor worship. The ability to create eidolons, shadows, and ghosts as infomorphs lets ancestors remain a presence in a family’s life as more than distant spirits.
The practice of revering an emulated mind in the same manner as an ancestor spirit is controversial and frowned upon by many traditional religions. Ancestor infomorphs are almost unknown in Africa, although their popularity is growing among followers of Voudoun (see p. BD19). They are much more common in China, however, where nearly a quarter of all families following Chinese Traditional Religion now have at least one infomorph residing as an ancestor’s spirit. In almost every case, the spirit has a static cybershell in the family shrine. It is almost unknown for believers to carry the ancestor infomorph in a mobile device. This practice is not thought of as keeping the ancestor alive so much as giving the spirit a voice for providing advice. Ancestor infomorphs have passive read access to networks, allowing them to keep watch but not send communications or control remote devices. Most ancestor infomorphs are shadows edited to recognize themselves as “spirits,” although some are eidolons, usually constructed with the assistance of the deceased person’s digital assistant. Ghosts are even less common, in part because they are still expensive to create and in part because the government tightly controls their creation. The handful of ghosts created as “ancestor spirits” chafe at the restrictions of life stuck in a box, and either slowly go mad, demand to be shut down, or try to play an active and manipulative role in their descendants’ lives.
Astrology “Say what you will, the position of the planets definitely affects my life.” – Overheard, Silas Duncan Station, Ceres
Despite the utter lack of any evidence supporting its veracity, astrology remains as popular as ever. Few people are fervent believers in it, but a surprisingly large number of people on and off Earth accept it as “possibly real” and pay mild attention to their horoscopes. This sort of superficial belief in astrology is actually more common in space colonies than on Earth. The growth of human settlements off Earth has led to a minor boom in astrology, as the motion the of planets through the Zodiac as seen from Earth varies greatly from the perspective of Mars or the Trojan asteroids. People born off of Earth have entirely different astrological readings. Just how that new reading is supposed to look is the subject of contradictory and competing approaches. There are two leading versions. The first is Beyond Earth: A Modern Astrology, by Miriam Vash, which uses careful maps of planetary locations to match up off-Earth horoscopes with traditional charts. The second is Transhuman Astrology, by Ralva Daoud, which dispenses with any attempt to fit in with traditional astrological charts, and goes on to assert that anyone who has been ghosted should have a new horoscope drawn up based on the time and place of the brainpeel.
