A large mailing list exists,[4] in which members debate aspects of the world they are creating, discussing additions, modifications, issues arising, and work to be done.
[7] The first published Orion's Arm book, a collection of five novellas set within the OA universe, called Against a Diamond Sky,[8] was released in September 2009 by Outskirts Press.
Most other colonization efforts were: commercial/amateur in nature, experimental interstellar colonies that were still en route to their destination, and/or failed ventures due to a chain of events leading to societal collapse that became known as the "Technocalypse".
[16] OA claims to adhere to plausible, or "hard" science fiction; that is, there are no human-like aliens, no literal faster-than-light travel or other violations of the known laws of physics, and no "naval analogy" space battles.
Certain speculative technologies, such as the creation of "negative mass" (averaged null energy condition-violating) exotic matter and the manipulation of strange forms of matter, such as magnetic monopoles and Q-balls, on length scales much smaller than that of an atom, strong artificial intelligence and artificial life appear in the setting, distinguishing it from "ultra-hard" science fiction (which assumes only technologies proven to be possible at the time it is written).
This, in combination with life extension technology/mind uploading that can render one functionally immortal, serves as the explanation for why the vast majority do not choose to ascend quickly or do so at a very slow rate over a long period of time (if at all).
[20] The largest and most advanced polities that accept non-AI life as citizens in the setting are the sixteen "Sephirotic Empires," so named due to their loose correlation with the archetypes of ancient Kabbalistic mysticism.
They exist as distributed intelligences in networks of star-sized computer brains; their subroutines are themselves sentient, making an "archai" an individual and a civilization at the same time.
Although generally considered to offer the highest degree of safety and quality of life in the civilized galaxy, the Sephirotics themselves are essentially benign dictatorships; their citizens are subject to mass surveillance with a utility fog-based technology called "angelnetting", which allows the archai (or occasionally a designated local ruler) to review the data gathered in this way to examine nearly every social interaction that has ever occurred in the polity and manipulate the society accordingly via memetic engineering or direct intervention to prevent deviation from the archai's goals.
As a result, entire societies are subject to and shaped by, the whims of the ruling archailect of their polity (with each citizen having little to no real power whatsoever to mount any serious opposition, should there be a conflict of interest).
Outside the "ultra-civilized" Sephirotic regions and the domain of the ahuman polities, there is the periphery, which is described as relatively lawless and as having some brutal dictatorships and/or independent empires (biological and AI alike).
In Orion's Arm, there are a variety of systems measuring more than one singularity, and the most common one features six with more existing theoretically, and they refer not to stages in the technological development of civilizations as a whole, but to different levels of consciousness in individuals.