Is this your first visit to the site? If so, we recommend you start by reading the overview on the homepage, which sets out the key facts of our setting.
When the human elite chose to live in Moller Fields, experiencing time at 0.01% of the normal rate, they made it possible for humans to communicate and travel between the stars.
However, their new lifestyle involved many challenges. Outside their habitation zones, time would pass at normal speed – which, from their perspective, would seem like fast-forward. Asteroid impacts and other external disasters would seem to happen ten thousand times more frequently. Stars and planets would have drastically reduced lifespans. Left to their own devices, the non-elites – who lived and worked outside the Moller Fields – would innovate and evolve ten thousand times more quickly than their masters. Since the adoption of Moller Time, the vast majority of initiatives in science and government have sought to address these problems, to the detriment of other fields.
On the flip side of the coin, the dramatic difference between real time and subjective time also created exciting opportunities. For instance: if the Society needed to terraform worlds, or wished to influence the evolution of animals, they would witness a million years of change in a mere century of lived time. Computers running calculations outside the Moller Fields would seem to perform them ten thousand times more quickly. In short, retreating into Moller Fields would have massive consequences, both good and bad.
For historical reasons, in the far future, a “standard year” is used in the Moller Fields, with each containing 365 days of 24 lived hours. The habitation zones are artificially lit, since natural day and night change far too quickly to be useful.
For each standard year, ten thousand pass in the wider universe. Unless noted otherwise, when we’re describing events from the point of view of the starfaring peoples, we use Moller rather than real time.
Tales of the Far, Far Future 