-Major concepts and themes of the hard SF novel Infinite Thunder:


- The Universal Rights of Man (revised).
The end result of decades of UN negotiations, humanity is bound by only two laws. Both are enforced by the world security agency Millipol:
-Freedom of Location
Anyone can leave whatever area they may find themselves in (but other areas are not required to admit them).
-Freedom of Inspection
UN inspectors can visit any location, and report any threat to humanity or to other countries they may find there, and take action when authorized.

- Millipol: the world police
The alliance of every legally armed force on Earth.
Over half a million public and private police and military forces are authorized to assign temporary and permanent agents to work with Millipol.
The agency has two primary responsibilities:
Wherever they're stationed, agents have to obey and enforce the local laws without question, including religious proscriptions.
Their second role is to protect people and nations from each other (and humanity from itself), up to and including military action.

- B.O.X. technology
Total life management software and personal memory extension. A Box always knows what its owner is doing, keeps track of their long-term interests and goals, and maintains a permanent interface between the user and the world.
The user's brain may eventually resemble a Box index, and performs high-level tasks.

- Fams
Most people belong to one or more tightly knit, often intrusive groups which fulfill different social needs.
Members will be encouraged to specialize and develop useful skills.

- Software games
The most interesting interactions with other people involve artificial scenarios and simulated problems.

- Virtual Reality: the end of history
Most people will retreat into artificial worlds of their own choice and design.
VR reduces the need to travel, and allows people to live in much smaller spaces. The real world will slowly move backstage.
Ultra-high bandwidth graphics with positional and resistance feedback will provide a god's eye view of reality (and incidentally solve man's shortage of attractive sexual partners).

- Neurology
The human brain is composed of many linked sub-systems.
Activation networks:
Different neuron groups fire at different frequencies, and become synchronized.
Various networks evolve to perform common tasks.
Suppression networks:
When someone seeks a specific pattern in their environment, brain networks methodically suppress common patterns that don't resemble the target.

- The age of abundance
Along with a low-impact lifestyle, cheap mass-production and automated manufacturing will end poverty.
Once pattern duplication becomes affordable, money itself will become obsolete. Everyone will qualify for a monthly stipend.

- The dissolution of the United States
The US is the most complex and regulated entity on the planet. At the moment, it's also the most efficient one, with no real competition. China and India may even be falling behind in ways that matter.
However, if there's ever a better idea about how to organize society, the power balance will start to shift almost at once.
History gives no indication that mankind wants freedom, but in the event such a notion does take hold, change could come fast.

- parallel universes
Theory: There exist infinitely many different versions of Earth (among all other things).
Near-copies of everyone alive have already made every possible mistake in other realities.
The Multiverse theme parks simulate vastly different worlds that seem as familiar as magic realism.

- The greatest threat: future death cults who think they're the good guys
The theory of parallel universes leads to the ultimate ethical paradox: the only way to improve reality may be to eliminate imperfect individuals. Their consciousness would not be adversely affected, since more perfect versions of the victims would always survive in other universes.
A process of anthropic elimination could also explain the Fermi paradox. All the aliens may have already committed suicide, knowing that in other universes they will have attained perfection.
Eventually, evolution can be expected to reverse this trend, probably through the spread of religious delusions.

- The end of manned spaceflight
Thanks to robotics, no human will ever need to leave Earth again.

- Higher universes
If infinite minds exist, the implications are staggering. For all intents and purposes, they would appear omniscient.
Statistically, any randomly selected possible mind is certain to know us better than we know ourselves.
So why aren't we one of them?

- Why are we here?
The first four paradoxes (somewhat different versions are described in non-fiction books by the same author):
-Why is our universe consistent, when there are many more ways it could be random?
-Why are our minds finite, when there are more ways they could be infinite?
-Why do we live near the beginning of time, at the start of an infinite future? Shouldn't the past and the future be equally unbounded?
-Why is our universe vastly larger and more redundant than necessary to generate our mind types? Why do we have all this wasted subatomic complexity, that almost perfectly cancels out, and doesn't appear to affect larger structures?

- Nanotechnology organisms
Microscopic robots called microns could assemble themselves into complex structures, or disperse like a sentient dust cloud.

- AI
The 'Hard Problem' of AI remains a total mystery after centuries of pondering. There isn't even a good description of the core mystery, yet everyone can sense its outline.
How does something that feels 'real' emerge from a physical pattern - essentially a large number?
Awareness is even more complicated than it seems.
It appears to be an endless, elaborate changeover, a vast collection of unrelated responses, rapidly compressed and simplified into memory.
The first software minds will probably be very different from humans.

- Interface technology
A new method to induce profoundly life-changing, mystical experiences, by submerging the user in customized interactive environments.
The next step in spiritual development will require many scientific breakthroughs.

- Electrodynamic matter control and manipulation
A centrally controlled electromagnetic 'ghost' with invisible tentacles to sense and manipulate events throughout a building or small area.

- Impulse transfer 'Tranjet'
An electromagnetic scramjet using 'cold exhaust' principles to mix fuel and air at extreme speed.

- The Resistance
An emergent, constantly changing alliance opposing illegitimate force in any form.
It considers itself a necessary counterbalance to Millipol.

- The Cripplers
A group which perfected the art and science of Digital Restrictions Management in the twenty-first century.
With the general abolition of intellectual property laws in 2030, they needed a new purpose.

- The quantum exchange spacedrive
It takes an incredible amount of energy for a spaceship to accelerate.
It must drag along most of its fuel before ejecting it in the other direction, multiplying the total effort.
If thrust could somehow be transmitted across empty space from Earth to the spaceship, the journey would take much less energy.
In theory, a one-square-meter solar panel intercepts enough energy to accelerate a one-kilo mass to a nearby star in less than a century, but currently there is no good way to convert light into motion.

- Life after death: the scientific case
Every mind follows a timelike path through mathematical space.
The actions people take while alive will affect the ways their minds are likely to be recreated by more advanced future civilizations.
This will be a major theme of the sequel.

- Five Dimensional Time
An observer travels through a chain of slightly different universes, spending only a moment in each. Since the universes are progressively different, it looks like time is flowing normally, but all the clocks appear to have slowed, stopped, or reversed, depending on the angle to the prevailing timestreams. More complex paths are also possible.
In the novel, the fictional observer is embedded in an eight-dimensional manifold with self-canceling feedback paths to maintain a stable course.
Our universe could have five-dimensional time, which would explain many mysteries of physics.

- Epilogue: the post-human future
Post-human minds will enter periods of apparent stasis, repeating and improving complex simulations in a search for Platonic perfection.
Their vast, synthetic concerns will make all current human problems seem trivial.

- Other themes and concepts:
Nanosat clouds.
Vacuum energy.
Quantum computers.
Reliable personality tests.
Nuclear terrorism.
Socio-cellular terrorism: simple actions by many people can combine into deadly violence.
Prion terrorism.
Future hacking and software infiltration methods.
Advanced non-sentient software (DEEFx, the Zondyne organism).
Relic objects of the Big Bang.
Economic and technological free zones (the Depot).
Chinese social control policies.
The temporary return of communism.
Virtual persons (Anonymous, Roger Xyrghyz).
World real estate markets: Expatriate communities colonizing previously violent or impoverished lands.