An example of Autonomous Settlement
Isminia is a space station where a group of people decide for the rest / oligarchy /. People there live in a sort of technological autarky, only witnessing technological advancements every 20 Earth years. The space station orbiting Sycorax in its retrograde journeys around Uranus. The space station started as a research post and got completely autonomous during the Terran Revolution.
Backstory of the Settlement
It ended up there in an improbable orbit // Sycorax not having a large mass // as the final consequence of several field testing of Ismini’s Laws. The station has been built with leftovers of Ismini Demas’ fortune after she spent almost everything searching for the theories of Relationality to do further field testing of those laws. Its first name was Demas Research Station 4, that she rapidly changed to Sachihiro Station / extreme happiness in Japanese / knowing the importance of what was happening there and the constant feeling she had since the development of her laws. At the very start, it was orbiting Earth and every test was sending it to another part of the Solar system. Ismini Demas being also a great art and design amateur, she made of that station her private designers heaven. At first, they were working in secrecy on the midas device. She wanted her ships to be the best, most beautiful and desirable of all space crafts. This in a time before the human expansion through the Solar system. Before she found the laws there were only human settlements on Luna and Mars, most of them being fully automated because humanity was depending on fossil fuel to leave big astronomical objects as Earth, Mars and Luna.
Very fast, after the commercialisation of her first ships, designers from all over the system came to settle on the station. The ‘original’ station for a lot of them. Thanks to the immense fortune that Ms Demas made with her visionary mind, and because at a moment the station was not fun anymore for her she left the station to her inhabitants. At first the station, for thanking her, got her full name. Although already before that the popular name of the station was Isminilandia, and after the passage of the crew of the Beauvoir, the once reign of design switch place with the reign of free minds, the inhabitants officialised the popular name. Later, the correct Greek name of Isminia was given. During the big changes of the Terran Revolution, the reign of free minds changed into the reign of those who knew the best for all. And although they’ve put a lot of very social populist measure, it transformed itself into an oligarchy, lead by the Σοφοί / sófos – wise people /.
Social Structure
Although Greek is not the most commonly used language on the station the Σοφοί decided to use it as the administrative language, separating them from the rest of the inhabitants. Design for design's sake could still, after all those years, be the motto of the station if it was not for the fact that they now witness technological evolution in waves / called progress waves / at the equinoxes and solstices of Uranus / roughly one wave every 20 years /. After the Terran Revolution, the trend throughout the Solar System was to revisit the main concepts of our society. Here a big critique was done on the ever-changing technology that pushes people to more consumerism. Although the Terran Revolution resulted in a more sustainable society on Isminia they pushed it further. The Σοφοί decided that constant evolution was counterproductive and was not helping their people. They decided to only accept technological advancements inside the station in waves.
In between waves a committee of specialised people, formed of members of the Σοφοί, is testing new technologies for their release on the station. If the tech is declared ‘public ready’ / reliable / it is then released during on the next wave. If not it will have to wait for next wave and in most of the cases, it is replaced by more recent ones.
Introducing tech, even authorised one, without special permission is highly forbidden. Everybody has to enter the space station naked. People with enhancements and/or prosthetics are forbidden. Their network is not connected to the Grid. It can not, physically lacking the infrastructure. Because it is forbidden for visitors to have any technical enhancement and or prosthetics, most of them need to hire an interlocutor to be able to do business with the station while waiting in a kind of “transit zone” attached to the station but no connected their interlocutor is handling their business in the station. Communications between clients and interlocutor can only happen through terminals placed by Isminia.