Timeline and Eras
Classification: Setting anchor, era markers
Domain: Canon timeline, period demarcation
Applies to: All articles dating context, retroactive consistency, future-arc planning
1. Where the canon sits
The canonical present is approximately 3,240 CE, mid-way through what is internally called the Construction Spine era: the stretch during which the inner Sol industrial complex is the dominant load on the civilization's coordination machinery, Mercury is the principal feedstock body, and the Dyson swarm is under aggressive build-out rather than fine-tuning.
Energy is locally abundant and structurally scarce. The swarm produces more power than any single project can absorb, but the queue of projects competing for swarm output, fabrication slots, corridor capacity, and beam allocation runs decades to centuries deep. This is the operational regime in which the rest of the wiki is written.
The civilization is not post-scarcity. It is in the construction phase of post-scarcity — the interval between solving energy and solving everything else.
2. Era markers
| Era | Approximate dates | Defining state |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-spaceflight | – 2000 CE | Earth-bound, fossil-economy |
| Early orbital | 2000 – 2200 | LEO industry, ISRU first attempts |
| Von Neumann precursor | 2200 – 2800 | Self-replicating probe networks, foundational corridor and relay surveys, Bengali engineering canon crystallizes |
| Bootstrap | 2800 – 3100 | Mercury surface excavation begins, swarm seed elements, Yatraem corridor metric engineering moves from theory to operations, slime cultivation matures past the lab scale |
| Construction Spine (current) | ∝3,100 – ∝3,500 | Mercury active teardown, swarm mid-ramp, slime farms scaled to feed Mercury polymer matrix demand, LMC just opening, M82 not yet reached |
| Coordination Maturity | ∝3,500 – ∝3,700 | Mercury winds down to maintenance scale, swarm reaches diminishing-return regime, slime production pivots from Mercury matrix supply to terraforming and external markets, M82 outpost established |
| Late inner-system | ∝3,700 – | Mature swarm self-extending; the documented "3,740 CE" reference horizon of earlier drafts of this wiki sits inside this era. |
3. What the Construction Spine era looks like
3.1 Mercury is the body the civilization is currently eating
Mercury entered phased excavation around 2,900 CE and has been under continuous teardown for roughly three centuries. The planet still exists as a recognizable body but is threaded with kilometer-scale extraction shafts, wrapped in active radiator networks, and ringed by mass-driver installations launching processed feedstock outward. Approximately 12–18% of original Mercury mass has been removed, concentrated in the upper crust and silicate mantle. Core exposure is partial and managed (see mercury-extraction-pathway.md).
The teardown is the primary industrial load on the civilization. It consumes more beam allocation than any other single program, employs more bonded labor across more orbital and surface installations than any other single operation, and drives the demand structure of every downstream industry — including slime production.
3.2 The swarm is mid-ramp
The Dyson swarm intercepts roughly 0.2–0.4% of total solar output at current build state. This is small as a fraction and enormous as an absolute number — sufficient to power the entire civilization's coordination layer, run all Mercury extraction infrastructure, and leave a beam-allocation budget that slime hyperscale operators bid against and rarely win in full.
Construction is mass-limited, not energy-limited: the swarm can build itself faster than feedstock can be delivered. The Mercury teardown rate sets the swarm ramp rate. This coupling is the central economic fact of the era.
3.3 Slime is the polymer matrix for everything Mercury becomes
Mercury feedstock is silicate and metal. Every structure built from that feedstock — swarm reflectors, conversion-node housings, fabrication-line internals, corridor relay frames, cylinder habitat shells — is a composite that requires a polymer matrix binder at ratios from 8% (computational substrate) to 70% (statite-thin reflector film). Across the integrated demand profile, the matrix fraction averages ∝22% of total structural mass produced.
The matrix is slime, grades I–VI sorted to application. The Venusian atmospheric slime industry is the largest single supplier of this matrix. The hyperscale beam-fed cloudcraft (see venusian-cloudcraft-design.md) and the conventional photosynthetic Schleimfarmen producing Grades I–III together supply most of the polymer matrix consumed in Mercury-derived construction across the inner system.
This is what makes the slime industry mature, capitalized, and structurally central to the era — not the niche edge industry it will become once Mercury winds down.
3.4 Terraforming Venus is a live debate, not a settled question
Venus has been preserved by inertia, not by explicit consensus. As the swarm ramps and demand for atmospheric carbon stays elevated, factions within the SMA and among Venus operators advocate for eventually drawing Venus down for matrix carbon — a position the SMA has neither endorsed nor ruled out (see terraforming-debate.md).
The debate is structural: every hyperscale cloudcraft built now is implicitly an asset on a planet whose long-term political status is unresolved. Operator capital structures reflect this. Insurance pricing reflects this. The internal politics of the Venusian cloud band is unintelligible without it.
3.5 LMC just opened; M82 is a survey target
The first LMC corridor opened operational service approximately 80 years before the current canon date. Settlement is just beginning. Tourism is marginal. The corridor is outbound-cheap and return-expensive but the asymmetry is manageable on a galactic-companion-scale route.
M82 is a survey target. The Cigar Galaxy precursor network is being seeded by Von Neumann probes that left Sol ∝60 years ago and are still in transit. There are no human settlements in M82 yet, will not be for centuries, and the return-corridor economics that will eventually make M82 "registration-only" are not yet operational.
The civilization is two-galactic-body, not three.
4. Forward arc
The Construction Spine era ends when Mercury teardown crosses below the rate at which the swarm can productively absorb feedstock — projected mid-3,400s. From that point:
- Mercury winds down from primary feedstock to maintenance-extraction
- Outer-system bodies (Vesta, Ceres, eventually the gas-giant moons) take over feedstock supply at lower volume and higher per-unit cost
- Slime farms lose their Mercury matrix customer base
- The terraforming debate becomes urgent: Venus is the most accessible carbon reservoir for late-swarm composite production, and atmospheric drawdown becomes economically viable as Mercury feedstock margins thin
- LMC settlement scales; M82 corridor reaches construction phase
- The eventual ∝3,740 CE state — mature swarm, Mercury remnant, slime as edge industry — emerges from these transitions over the following three centuries
5. Authorial notes (out-of-canon)
Earlier drafts of this wiki described a more mature 3,740 CE state. That material is forward-canon: it documents the civilization the current era is becoming, not the one it is. Articles describing Mercury as "no longer a planet in any operational sense," the swarm as "permanent infrastructure self-extending," and slime as residual edge industry are retained where they fit the forward arc and have been rewritten where they conflict with the Construction Spine present.
When in doubt, the canonical present is 3,240 CE; the canonical body of work the civilization is doing right now is Mercury teardown into Dyson swarm via Venusian slime matrix; and every other industry is downstream of that load.
See also: inner-solar-system.md, dyson-swarm.md, mercury-extraction-pathway.md, polymer-matrix-demand.md, terraforming-debate.md.