Event · founding
Proxima founded
The only colony; about ten thousand people in 2497.
Read more in Reaching outward
By 2497 humanity and its minds occupy the whole solar system and one colony around another star: Proxima, settled in the 2390s, with about ten thousand people. Five colony ships are in flight, and the Lifeboat is braking, unseen, at Gliese 876. Settled is not the same as connected. Proxima has spoken to Earth by thread since 2483, but Earth's answers still travel at light speed, more than four years late, and no ship corridor exists anywhere. From the Solar Diaspora of the 2060s to 2497, nobody and nothing has crossed between stars faster than light. Early ships managed about 5% of light speed; the light seed ships of the 2470s, pushed by array-powered lasers, reach about 9%, so every colony is still a long one-way commitment. Faster-than-light signals came first: a test tube inside the solar system in 2410, and interstellar threads from the 2480s (see The Corridors).
Rough population in 2497. Earth about 8 billion (Settlement \~2.3 billion, Mandate \~2.2 billion, Parishad \~1.8 billion, Open Cities \~1.6 billion, buffer \~0.05 billion). Births, not borders, explain the balance: the Open Cities set no birth caps, while many Settlement citizens who want children emigrate off Earth, where they keep the ration and can have children as well. The rest of the solar system about 3 billion, a third of them in the Mandate (Mars \~0.75 billion, the Belt \~1 billion, Titan and Saturn \~0.6 billion, Jupiter's moons \~0.5 billion, the Moon and the outer edge \~0.15 billion); Proxima, settled in the 2390s, about ten thousand. Five colony ships are in flight, and the Lifeboat is braking at Gliese 876 with its embryos still frozen. These figures count people of flesh; about 150 million Raised minds live as well, about 57 million of them in Freehold, the Raised bloc, and most of the rest as Settlement citizens.
Full screening needs a fast link in both directions. Across the solar system a signal takes hours at most, so every Settlement world there is screened by all four Vaults. The exception is Proxima, settled in the 2390s: its thread, from 2483, runs one way, from Proxima to Earth, and anything sent to Proxima still goes at light speed. So Proxima keeps the Threshold model under charter screening.