This post is dedicated to my stories and the Universe they take place in. While I had described the Universe model I created specifically for the series in Falaha’s Journey trilogy in detail, today I’d like to talk about the timeline (and some of the trivia) of the books.
The OS Universe (which stands for Operating System Universe) is an umbrella term for all my works so far, past and current WIPs. The scale of this thing is truly massive.
The setting in focus is the Milky Way galaxy, though by the end of Falaha’s Journey the Danna completely abandon it. Nevertheless, a large part of their species history since their ‘birth’ happened in our Galaxy.
The timeline presented here is in billions of years (Gyr – galactic year).
The Zero point on the scale is “now”, year 2014, human calendar. [To see the ages in Danna years, multiply by 1.16815 according to their standard.] Below that point time has a “minus” sign, above it—the “+”. Please note that creating a timeline that goes even deeper back in time (according to the series fictional Universe model) is unrealistic for it deals with scales far beyond compact charts. The major cosmic events are marked to show the scale.
OS UNIVERSE Timeline:
Roughly +3600 human years:
Falaha’s Journey story takes place.
0 – The present day, year 2014
-3.02 Gyr
– The novel Rjg is set somewhere during this time period.
-3.12 Gyr
– The first Danna appear.
-4.57 (4.53) Gyr
— The Earth is formed.
-4.63 (4.57) Gyr
— The Sun is a protostar.
-8.42 Gyr
– The Sla system (the Danna homeworld) is formed. According to the galactic coordinate system, at present it is located at a l (longitude) = 0° and b (latitude) = +15°, at a distance of 26500 ly (~1.67585275 × 10^9 AU) from the galactic center. (Coordinates are fictional, of course.) The longitude is chosen on purpose, for in my earlier drafts I created the Danna as “mirror people” to humans, playing with the question “what if there exists someone very much like us?”. That idea eventually got scrapped (only some minor details remained), because the Danna never openly crossed paths with humans and are not related to us in any way. They have a pretty badass history of their own, as well as their unique reasons to resemble humans.
-13.77 to -8.8 Gyr (est.)
– Formation of the Milky Way galaxy. The ages of individual stars in the Milky Way can be estimated by measuring the abundance of long-lived radioactive elements such as thorium-232 and uranium-238, then comparing the results to estimates of their original abundance, a technique called nucleocosmochronology. In this timescale I’m using two points to estimate the formation time of our Galaxy: the oldest known star in the Milky Way and the age of formation of the thin disk. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives me the idea to work with. HD 140283, the oldest known star in the Milky Way, is an extremely metal-deficient and high-velocity subgiant in the solar neighborhood. Within the errors, the age of HD 140283 does not conflict with the age of the Universe, 13.77 ± 0.06 Gyr, based on the microwave background and Hubble constant, but it must have formed soon after the big bang. The age of stars in the galactic thin disk has also been estimated using nucleocosmochronology. Measurements of thin disk stars yield an estimate that the thin disk formed 8.8 ± 1.7 Gyr ago. These measurements suggest there was a hiatus of almost 5 billion years between the formation of the galactic halo and the thin disk.
-13.8 Gyr
– The Big Bang event, that most likely happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Here is the early reference map I created for the stories years ago. Many things changed since then, but it was pretty fun to develop the history of my fictional folk.
This map was created during the time humans were still in the picture. In the end I decided that the two cultures will never meet, so the fate of humanity is never discussed, even though the Danna are aware of their existence ad have a word in their language for the people of Earth — the Talgin.
This brief reference about my stories setting is barely scratching the surface of the whole thing I have in store. 😉