While working on what is basically just glorified fan fiction I thought about how true space exploration/colonization will likely not be possible without world socialism.

A Hypothetical Future, likely hundreds of years from now

Social Background

This is following collapse of the U.S., a large regional war, the rise of China as industrial and research superpower, various climate wars, mass migrations, and expansion of a new international socialism that will be unlike anything we could predict today (and might even upset some, it could borrow from a variety of normally oppositional sects). Whatever it is, the material conditions of that moment, as well as historical forces, will give birth to it. Likely a number of currents, some Marxist, some ad-hoc, will form a mutual project and later a Federation. A glorious tapestry of local flavors of worker dominated governments, from libertarian socialist/anarchist collectives to Marxist-Leninist state powerhouses, all united under a world forum government against the bourgeois and exploitation of old.

A short history over a century or so

As capitalist nation after nation falls to rule by the working class, more frantic efforts will be made by the bourgeois to both make Hail Mary colonies (planetary or orbital), set up basic industry to sustain them, and otherwise bootstrap. They will flee from one nation-state to the next, trying to outrun the inevitable and strip their new "homes" for resources for this endevour. Con-men and grifters, they will bring wealth to poor nations and whisper promises, but really they are just there to build a few more rockets and leave wreckage in their wake. Eventually they will start to run out of places to loot, and some of these nations might even force ably exile these former rulers to space (basically a "you ruined the planet, you like space so much, why don't you go there and never come back").

As the world socialist project works on a massive climate change mitigation project, this nascent space society of capitalists, libertarians, reactionaries, and their lackeys is allowed to do whatever it wants outside of Earth's orbit. Eventually the last of the supply launches cease, and it's do or die. Using their stolen wealth, they manage to just barely establish a stable space economy that goes from Earth's Lagrange points, to Mars, and even the asteroids. It relies primary on large orbital stations, spun up to 1G, that receive unlimited energy from the sun and materials and volatiles from asteroids and intercepted comets.

There is an implicit threat here at all times: Leave us alone and we won't direct an asteroid at Earth. Vulnerable and recovering, the socialist nations of Earth make no moves against these "Spacers" as long as they stay out of low Earth orbit. Secretly, China and Russia (or their successor states) place weapons platforms in orbit. A promise of mutually assured destruction. Nobody can hide in space.

Over time (let's say it's around 2200ish), the world socialist project becomes a truly unified Earth government, living conditions are massively improved, and the Earth has a global baby boom as people again have something to live for and a world to bring up a family in. Tentative diplomatic agreements are made with the Spacers to be granted sovereignty where they are established and even trade (such as Earth produced materials/supplies in exchange for zero gravity manufactured stuff). Capitalism after all can hyper accelerate development, and even in space it has done so. They are always kept on a leash by Earth, but there is a sort of arms race cold war that develops.

As the terrestrial work week shortens to 30, then 20, and even 15 hours (meanwhile Spacer workers work 60-70 hrs/week in appalling conditions), most of humanity takes time to build a vibrant cultural scene and large swaths of the population, with universal access to education, start forming research cadres and Earth's technological progress supercharges. Post-scarcity on Earth is a realistic horizon now, with both fusion and solar power becoming mature and widespread. Life extension using regenerative biomedical science means a healthy quality of life until 100 or more. Sexuality and families become flexible and post-capitalist outside of some local respected cultural and religious norms. Gender becomes post-gender, and some experimentation with further biological modification becomes common.

While most cultures maintain their integrity, there is a new "Terran" culture that begins to form that unites humankind as comrades and children of Earth. True AI is developed and put in service of humanity as a whole, allowing central planning and automation in service to the People and further accelerating cultural and scientific development.

The Industrial Fabricator, a fully automated factory capable of micron scale precision, combines with highly distributed networks of local fabs, artisans, and craftspeople to produce a new economy of true abundance (lol fuck off ezra).

All of this possible because the worst of the worst bled the planet dry, and were forced off while the bulk of humanity spent generations planting trees, pushing back deserts, evacuating and housing the vulnerable, and rebuilding the husks the capitalists left behind. Often they did not even see significant results in their lifetimes, but did this knowing it would help their children and their comrade's children.

Earth, united and healed, returns to the Heavens

Soon the Earth government starts sending significant state assets into space. Research cadres, now with the state capacity of 21st century major nations, begin a flury of space exploration. Imperatives to secure the "wild west" of the last capitalists begins to drive manned expeditions and outposts. A research cadre maybe builds a Skyhook, space elevator, or magnetic accelerator to basically help assert it's authority over the Spacers and sovereignty over the Earth-Luna system. After all, the counter-revolutionaries (if there are any among them) cannot be allowed the high ground and dominance of the Solar System.

Meanwhile, the Spacers (divided into state-like oligarchic Corporate Blocs) entice bored young people of the large baby boom generation to offworld "adventure". Even in a developed socialist society, there will always be some enamored with being competitive and a promise of becoming a "king or queen", as well as reactionaries looking to escape or cultural/religious supremacists that see building an Orbital colony a way to escape the "godless commies". Counter-revolutionaries fail again and again, offering nothing to a content and purposeful global population, but mercifully are often simply exiled to Spacer colonies instead of being executed or imprisoned.

"Keep your capitalism and feudalism off our planet, you can go join your fellows up there. We'll even give you a free ride."

So basically the world socialist state slowly exerts it's influence against increasingly technologically backward Spacers, pushing them further into the frontier of the Solar system. A worker's revolt (supported by Earth) on the Mars colony establishes the Earth-Mars Collective. And the Spacers are pushed into the Outer System.

Advanced propulsion and power technologies are stolen by spies and Spacer AI systems, allowing them to scrape by. They remain backwards compared to Earth-Mars, but occasionally make their own breakthroughs often by just developing a novel but dangerous new method of using Earth tech. And of course, the elite of the Spacers live like kings of old, in orbital palaces. The vast majority are indentured servants, permanently indebted and highly policed and surveilled. Many of the wayward youth, betrayed, start seeds for militant unions and worker revolts. After all, they are typically educated and have connections back home.

And the Spacers need them. They always need fresh meat for the grinder.

So yeah this is just some basic background. Originally this was a project to fill my own timeline for Warhammer 40k's Age of Terra and Age of Technology and it can still be used by I might split it off into my own Kim Stanley Robinsonish semi-hard sci fi space opera. Like Expanse but more communist. With capitalism still there to add a dynamic setting and conflict (it's just too damn peaceful on Earth! everyone just hangs out at the theater and parks and wants for nothing!)

The Open Sign Language Animation Project (OSLAP, Esperanto: Aperta Signolingva Animacia Projekto, abbrev. ASLAP; Japanese: {自由手話|じゆうしゅわ}アニメプロジェクト, romanized Jiyū Shuwa Anime Purojekuto) is an official partnership between the Japanese state-owned animation studio Musashino Animation and Locotian public broadcaster PDS (formerly PBS), to create publicly-available Blender files and other free animation assets based on popular anime films and TV series, for the purposes of creating sign language versions of these anime. OSLAP pioneered the techniques of slubbing ("sign language dubbing"); these techniques have since the beginning of OSLAP been used by other groups to create sign language versions of other films and series, both animated and live-action.

The Open Sign Language Animation Project was first announced on March 1, 2061, and was initiated by PDS for the purposes of creating programming in Hand Talk, a sign language which was designated as Locoti's primary national language the previous year. PDS had prior to OSLAP only dubbed films and series into Esperanto — Locoti's second national language — with only a Hand Talk interpreter in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. The idea of completely remaking films and TV series in sign languages, rather than simply showing an interpreter on screen, came about from a belief that sign language remakes would be more immersive, legible and accurate, more effective as language learning resources, and would increase the prestige and public awareness of Hand Talk and other sign languages. The decision to remake classic anime specifically was primarily motivated by practical concerns.

Most of the anime remade by OSLAP are critically-acclaimed or extremely and enduringly popular across all age demographics and genders, particularly films and series created 50+ years ago. OSLAP slubs are released together as "golden collections"; as of 2080, these are the Studio Ghibli Golden Collection, the Animated Auteurs' Golden Collection, the Rumiko Takahashi Golden Collection, the World Masterpiece Theater Golden Collection, the Kyoto Animation Golden Collection, and the Magical Girl Golden Collection.

Although OSLAP follows the Coordinating Body's Sustainable Computing Guidelines, the project's use of motion capture technology, machine learning technology, and other technologies which increase the water footprint, electricity consumption and render times for the animations, have raised sustainability concerns among some critics. At the same time, although OSLAP has been praised as a mainstay of a new "golden age" of Deaf representation and sign language in popular media, the project has also been criticized for not involving the Deaf community enough in the animation process.

Process

Each slub begins with a planning stage. In this stage, which commonly employs crowdsourcing, anime are checked for considerations unique to that film or series, and the individual scenes are checked for the following^[non-exhaustive list]:

• mid-sentence cuts
• close-ups
• props or walls obscuring a character's hands or face
• narrators or other disembodied voices
• characters speaking out of frame
• characters with their backs turned to the camera or each other
• characters being spoken to while their eyes are closed
• scenes in low lighting or cramped spaces
• characters moving quickly or chaotically while speaking
• characters thinking
• characters speaking with both hands full
• characters wearing mittens
• deformation of a character's face or hands
• characters attempting to get each other's attention
• important sound effects whose sources are out-of-frame or not visible to the characters

The findings from this process are compiled into a report on whether the anime is considered to be "viable" for slubbing, and if so, what challenges must be overcome and which changes must be made. This report informs the script and storyboard, which are generally created by Deaf people or CODAs. Hearing characters in slubbed anime are often rewritten to be Deaf.

OSLAP slubs will generally reuse as much as they can from the original spoken-language version of the anime, including sound effects and music, background art, special effects, other animation and assets, and parts of the script and storyboard which can remain unmodified. A few other tropes are commonly employed to minimize differences between the spoken and sign language versions of an anime, such as presenting a disembodied narrator as a person in front of a projection screen; presenting a character's thoughts using a shoulder angel or a "team in the brain"; or using a "bubble in the corner" to depict a character or sound off screen without needing to change the camera angle. Talking animals are often rewritten to communicate telepathically.

The characters themselves will use 3D models, often fan-made, with an array of shaders and other effects to make them appear two-dimensional and as close to the original art style and frame rate as possible. These effects constitute the bulk of machine learning technology use in OSLAP slubs, although machine learning may also see limited use in background art, storyboarding, and other stages of the animation process. Amateur slubbers using OSLAP's files may disable some or all of these effects to reduce render times.

Most character animation is not done by Musashino Animation itself, and is instead done by PDS' in-house slubbing studio — or by other professional or amateur slubbing studios around the world — using motion capture technology.

I am worldbuilding a soft sci-fi setting called The Arm. The setting revolves around an interstellar humanity which is divided into many factions of a mostly ideological nature. Most of humanity lives within a socialist state, but the present day of the setting also contains a corporatocracy, an independent republic of heavy-worlders, a theocracy, and nomadic fleets of communal spacefarers.

Locoti (/ləˈkoʊti/ 🔊, Esperanto: Likotio /likoˈti.o/ 🔊), also called the United Leagues among other names, sometimes referred to totum pro parte as Turtle Island, and officially known as the Union of the Leagues of Commons of Turtle Island (Esperanto: la Unio de la Ligoj de Komunejoj de Testuda Insulo), is a socialist state in northern Abya Yala. Styling itself as “the Decolonial State”, Locoti is a federation of 100 leagues of commons (LOCs), the most populous of which are the LOC for Lenapehoking (which includes Locoti’s most populous city, Manaháhtaan-Liberigo), the LOC for the Haudenosaunee Lands, the LOC for Tovaangar, and the CLOC for New Afrika. The capital of Locoti is Nova Profeturbo, a planned city named in reference to Prophetstown, a multi-tribal village founded in 1808 by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa during their efforts to resist US settler expansion, and destroyed in the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe. Locoti’s national anthem, simply titled “Potpourri” (Esperanto: “Kvodlibeto”, lit. “A Quodlibet”), is a medley of folk songs from different constituent nations, beginning with “Shí Naashá”, a song about the return of the Diné from Bosque Redondo in 1868, which became a popular marching song among Indigenous militias during the Locotian Revolution (2057-2059).

With an area of 19.8 million km^2^ spread across seven time zones, Locoti is the world’s second largest country by area, behind only the Soviet Union. Locoti comprises roughly the northern four-fifths of Turtle Island per se, stretching from Unangam Tanangin in the far west to Taqamkuk in the far east; from Umingmak Nuna in the Arctic Archipelago in the far north — which is the northernmost point of Abya Yala when excluding Greenland — to the Florida Keys in the far south. Locoti’s only land border is with Mexico, an open border defined by the course of the Rio Grande and a set of arbitrary straight lines set by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the First US-Mexican War. Locoti’s territorial waters also border those of Cuba, the Bahamas, Greenland, and the Soviet Union.

With a population of 450 million people, Locoti is the world’s seventh largest country by population, behind only India, China, the European Federation, East Africa, the Soviet Union, and Indonesia. With an estimated 430+ languages spoken or signed within its borders, Locoti is also among the world’s most linguistically diverse countries. The most common first languages in Locoti remain English, Spanish, and French, all of these being Western European languages introduced to Abya Yala during the continent’s colonization. The number of native speakers of English has however decreased significantly in recent decades as a result of Locoti’s investment in immersion programs for endangered languages during the Crush Anglo Chauvinism campaign. This campaign also established Hand Talk and Esperanto as the primary and secondary official languages of Locoti’s federal government respectively, making Locoti the only sovereign state in the world with a sign language as its primary official language, and one of only three sovereign states with a constructed language as an official language — the others being the European Federation, which has Esperanto and Interslavic as its official languages; and lutruwita, whose official language is palawa kani.

Locoti is the successor to the United States of America (USA). The USA was a settler-colonial bourgeois dictatorship declared in 1776 by settlers revolting against the British Empire during the colonization of Abya Yala. Many of these settlers, including notable figures among them such as George Washington, owned chattel slaves stolen from West Africa, or descended from such victims of human trafficking. The fundamental unsustainability of this slave system as shown by Nat Turner’s rebellion and the Raid on Harpers Ferry would eventually culminate in the First US Civil War (1861-1865), but not before the USA would send freedmen to colonize Liberia out of the belief that this would prevent them from organizing slave revolts. The First US Civil War concluded with the formal abolition of chattel slavery and led into the First Reconstruction (1865-1877). However, the newly-former chattel slaves and their descendants, who are today known as New Afrikans, would continue to be exploited for forced labor, as well as segregated, lynched, mistreated by police, never compensated for their injuries under chattel slavery, and generally oppressed, until the Locotian Revolution. New Afrikans are today the largest ethnic group in the highly pluralistic society of Locoti, and their cultural output continues to be enjoyed worldwide.

Following the Second World War, the USA, largely unscathed by the war, and engorged on the profits of stolen land and labor, quickly vassalized much of the world as the new head of the imperialist system. The decline of imperialism in the 21st century led to a period known as the Great Farce (c. 2015-2050), characterized by the rise of Donald Trump, the annexation of Greenland and Canada into the USA, the disastrous Second US-Mexican War, and in 2036 the St. Lawrence Crisis triggered the Second US Civil War (2037-2042) — another violent internal conflict between bourgeois factions, this time also triggering the Deluge of Elephants, the greatest refugee crisis in human history, in which approximately 72 million Usonians fled to Europe. The descendants of the refugees from the Second US Civil War are today known as Americans, and this group played a crucial role in the prelude to the Locotian Revolution, and during the revolution itself, which happened at the tail end of the Second Reconstruction (2042-2057).

I'm indigenous, and my culture is a shadow of its former self. This got me thinking: what sort of a world would it be where indigenous cultures are all thriving everywhere? Then I followed that thought for way too long and built an alternate history world.

It would be a world of strong local flavor: everywhere you go, there's vernacular architecture, traditional clothing, local food. Inuit cultures rule the Arctic. Aztecs rule Mesoamerica.

I've written an alternate history that I won't bore you with. Imagine there was never a 'Great Divergence' (where the West pulled ahead) but instead various cultures developed at roughly equal speeds, and maybe shared technology more rather than use technology to exploit/oppress.

Technical services are on a guild-system. The guilds recruit young people, train them up, and each local community (tribe, if you like) has a deal with the important guilds: you give us your services and we give your members food, board, other privileges. This explains why technology (like the steam engine) spread around the world without being used by one culture to oppress another. A person would have tribe-membership, with its duties and perks, and maybe guild-membership too, with its duties and perks.

The Americas and Australia are totally different in this alternate history, because they never got Europeanised. Imagine a developed (21st century) Aztec culture, Cree, Inca etc. with the internet and electricity and so forth. Every culture is in its bloom of glory – it's a world of strong culture. I understand this opens me to charges of exoticism, but counterpoint: my own culture (not gonna doxx myself) is among them. Some worldbuilding is all about physics, some is all about military theory; this is all about anthropology, all the strange and fabulous variety of human religions, fashions, food.

There are international elements to counter the extreme localism. In the alternate history, in the age of the steamship and telegram, international culture emerged. (This 'internationalist' phase actually happened in the mundane world as well: the first modern Olympics was in 1896; Esperanto appeared in 1887. It just wasn’t very successful.) Speak your local languages at home: the internet, academia etc. are in the global language. There’s art in local languages (storytelling, etc.) and there's international culture in the international language – the equivalent of The Simpsons or Star Wars that you can joke about when speaking with someone from the other side of the world.

Another internationalist element would be cultural exchanges. Imagine you’re a Rus in Russia, and a Himba troupe come to stay in your community for three nights, do dance and storytelling, share your food, flirt. This is a form of diplomacy.

Thriving indigenous cultures implies thriving ecosystems, as the two are inseparable. So it’s kind of a solarpunk/environmentalist world. Which fits with the idea of local economies/local cultures.

Socialist Sister Republics of México and Canada :EZLN: :kkkanada: