Jovian Trojans
REGIONS, NEIGHORHOODS, AND LOCAL CULTURES
First, a quick geography lesson (in case you got your schoolin’ on Mars). The swarm of asteroids preceding Jupiter in its orbit at the L4 point is the Greeks. Trailing Jupiter at the L5 point are the Trojans. The Martian school kid’s approximation of this set up gives you the basic shape of the swarms. Each spans about twenty-six degrees of Jupiter’s orbit, meaning that end to end, each swarm is almost two and a half times the distance from the Earth to the sun in length (2.3 AU) and a bit more than half the Earth-sun distance thick (.6 AU) at its center. Despite the large area, the mass contained within each is only one ten-thousandth of an Earth mass— far less than the mass in the Main Belt. For all their richness in terms of supporting transhuman life, the Trojans are mostly empty. Aside from librating around the L4 and L5 points, a lot of Trojan objects also have steep inclinations from the plane of the ecliptic. If you look at the plane of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun edge on and then make a cross section of it including both the L4 and L5 points, the swarms look like two pairs of parentheses enclosing the hyphen that is Jupiter’s orbit. As I said earlier, the positions of individual asteroids over the long run (and even in the near term, in some cases) are hard to predict. However, inhabited Trojan objects, or at least those whose inhabitants don’t mind being found, all boast navigational beacons. A ship headed from the inner system to the Greeks might not know exactly where its destination rock will be when it gets there, but the ship can track the asteroid and burn mass to correct its course. By making themselves trackable, known settlements can form stable trade and cultural networks.
NEIGHBORHOODS
Where settlements cluster close enough together that regular, physical commerce can take place and lag times are negligible for mesh communications, they’re said to comprise a neighborhood. The physical boundaries of a neighborhood are loosely defined. Usually they’re blobs 250,000 to 2,000,000 kilometers across. In dense areas, neighborhoods may contain dozens of habitats, while in the dispersed areas at the edges of the asteroid swarms, a neighborhood might contain only a handful of stations. Qualities that may define neighborhoods are the languages most commonly spoken, the factions and sub-factions with the greatestrepresentation among the population, and other aspects of culture. The local cultures out here run the gamut. We have big anarcho-syndicalist mining co-ops with multispecies populations and as many languages among them as you’d find spoken in a big Lunar city. We have autonomist transportation collectives whose stock in trade runs from passengers and small, precious cargoes up to entire asteroids. We have monolingual authenticist clades like you find on Mars, mercurials of every political stripe, and even the occasional ultimates outpost. Lurking on the fringes, we have some weird neighbors: brinker enclaves that keep completely to themselves and have any number of reasons for doing so, singularitarians and weird scientists doing their research far from where it can hurt anyone (or be discovered), and exhumans who’d just as soon eat you as look at you. As much as these neighborhoods are bound together by microcultures, the real determiner of where settlements end up being built is as old as transhumanity: cold, hard physical resources.
THE HILDAS
The Trojans and Greeks proper aren’t the only asteroids whose orbits are directly influenced by Jupiter. The Hildas, a group of about 1,100 asteroids, lay just inside of Jupiter’s orbit, locked in a 2:3 orbital resonance (meaning they circle the sun three times for every two orbits Jupiter and the Trojans complete). The Hildas are a lot like the Trojans: icy, rocky, sometimes carbonaceous, and poor in metals, but they’re much more sparsely inhabited. The main reason for this is that they’re harder to reach by ship. They’re not a swarm that’s coalesced around a stable gravitational point the way the Trojans are, making them costlier to reach in terms of fuel. You hear lots of bogeyman stories about this or that asteroid in the Hildas, like the old chestnut that 153 Hilda, the asteroid after which the group is named, hosts a major base for exhuman pirates. A lot of these rumors are just loose talk, but there’s some sense to it. The Hildas are definitely a good place to set up shop if you want to be left alone.
ICEBERGS, BIG ROCKS, AND LUMPS OF COAL
The nested roulette wheels of stellar disc accretion and planet formation bestowed upon our reach of space a little bit of everything—except metals. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Prospectors with luck and grit (usually both) do discover precious lodes of metals and other heavy elements out here from time to time. What the Trojans and Greeks do not want for are the other elements essential to transhuman sustenance and technology: water and other volatiles, carbon, and silicates.
THE LAGRANGIAN TRANSPORT NETWORK (LTN)
Not all of these delicious elements exist in every asteroid, and prospecting in some neighborhoods of
the Trojans is difficult. Habs tend to spring up where the harvesting is good, but settling in the prime spots doesn’t always work out. The autonomists, one of the dominant cultures out here, hatched their own solution to this: the LTN. Everyone knows about the ITN, the Interplanetary Transit Network (well, just about everyone; again I omit the poor, benighted school children of Mars). The ITN is a series of gravitationally determined pathways along which an object can travel through the solar system using very little energy. It’s slow, but it works. Add some energy to nudge between pathways, and it gets a lot faster. The autonomists realized that despite the virtually unpredictable positions of Trojan objects within the L4 and L5 swarms, pathways similar to the ITN must exist within the Trojans. So they ran simulations to
guestimate likely starting points for the hypothetical network. Then some autonomists who lived in richer regions of the swarms maneuvered a large number of
resource-laden 500-meter asteroids to the hypothetical starting points, tagged them with transponders inviting anyone to mine them—provided the mining didn’t change the rocks’ trajectories—and turned them loose. Not surprisingly, anarchists everywhere loved them for this. The architect of the project, an AGI from Locus named Outward (aka, “the anti-ComEx”) now has sufficient reputation to back just about any project they could dream up. It’ll take decades for Outward’s experiment to prove or disprove itself, but in the meantime, no one is complaining about thousands of tons of free resources drifting through their space. So far, the twisting path followed by asteroids along the LTN conforms pretty closely to the predictions made by Outward and others on the project. Other autonomists have begun to contribute asteroids to the LTN pathways, and a few have even taken up residence on LTN objects. Every rock following the notional LTN sports a beacon, so provided Outward and company got at least a few of the starting points right, in about 150 years we’ll have a complete map of the pathways.
HEAVY METAL AND GRAVITY
Metals are tougher to come by. A few asteroids containing heavy elements have been thrown into the LTN—almost too generous an act, if you want my opinion—but demand goes far beyond what that can provide. Beyond the occasional lucky prospector’s strike, most heavy elements arrive in the Trojans from the Main Belt via either Hohmann transfer orbits or the Interplanetary Transit Network. Luckily, Belters need water as badly as we need metal, so there’s a brisk trade in whole asteroids between the Main Belt and the Trojan swarms. “Andto Mars, too?” one might ask. The answer is, “No, not so much.” Mars doesn’t have a lot that we want out here. Long-view preservationists have successfully made the case that trading iceteroids to Mars, just to have them splattered against the Martian ice caps for planetary warming, isn’t a sustainable move for transhumanity. Let the Martians look to the Kuiper Belt if they want to push ice. It’s not obvious, but one thing the Trojans do have going for them is gravity. The Junta talk a lot about Jupiter’s slingshot potential as a local resource (one they defend like a complete pack of dickheads, by the way), but you don’t need a gigantic gravity well to benefit from our solar system’s orbital dynamics. The Trojans and Greeks are a major waypoint on the aforementioned Interplanetary Transit Network, and this means a lot of long haul commerce comes through our space. Icepushers from the Kuipers, ironnickel asteroids making their way even farther out system, and other bulk goods that have to move by ship all transfer via the Trojans to avoid paying a tithe to the Junta. Unfortunately, this also creates a motive for the Jovians and the inner system powers to occasionally attempt a land grab. The Jovians don’t like trade circumventing them. The hypercorps believe that once they put boosters on an asteroid or comet, they own it. Unfortunately for the corporate sphere’s precious notions about property, autonomists regularly organize whaling parties—flash mobs that mine an asteroid as it passes through our space without stopping it on its trajectory. The asteroid arrives at its destination, but it arrives a bit light. Hypercorps think this is theft. Well, fuck them. They’ve stolen entire planets. We’ve had two real wars in the Trojans, and both resulted from the Consortium and the Jovians trying to make territorial claims out here. To their credit, the Titanians have never tried to do the same—but they got involved in the second conflict,
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