Xeelee
Encyclopedia
The Xeelee are a fictional hyperadvanced species from Stephen Baxter
's Xeelee Sequence
. They were first remotely mentioned in the 1994 novel Timelike Infinity
and were later central actors of several novels and a substantial number of short stories. Within the Xeelee Sequence, they are considered to be the most advanced of all Baryonic life-forms and possess technology and abilities far beyond other spacefaring civilization. They have demonstrated the ability to routinely construct Closed Timelike Curves and have exploited time travel to engineer their own evolution and history as far back as 13.5 billion years ago (within two hundred million years of the Big Bang). Their abilities in the series far exceed that of a Type III Civilization on the Kardashev scale
.
Although the Xeelee seldom directly appear or take action in the stories their impact on the development of most civilizations and the universe as a whole is profound. The Xeelee frequently leave behind derelict ships, tools, and other materials giving the appearance of thoughtlessness or reckless abandon at what a junior species might do with it. Most junior species see no benefit in developing a technology on their own when they can simply steal it from the Xeelee debris. This has a profound influence on the various galactic economies and technological development of junior species.
, quarks, and flaws in space-time itself. Thus, life emerged when the universe was extremely young, to within Planck Time
of the Big Bang
, and there were intelligent civilizations that witnessed, and indeed consciously influenced, major events in the early universe such as inflationary expansion, symmetry breaking
, and various phase changes
. At the close of each of these epochs, as the universe took on a fundamentally different characteristic, there was a corresponding mass extinction, but small enclaves of the intelligences would survive in one manner or another, witnessing the universe becoming progressively colder and slower-reacting.
The novel Exultant
describes the progenitor of the Xeelee, referred to as the proto-Xeelee, as one of the few survivors of the last phase change (when the universe had cooled enough for atoms to form). The proto-Xeelee established symbiotic relationships with other survivors as well as autocatalystic reactions in the new baryonic matter, thus emerged what would later be called the Xeelee. This potentially dates the Xeelee to when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, but with direct knowledge and observations that reach back to within minutes of the Big Bang.
The Xeelee used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged, the event horizon was one of the few thing that survived from earlier epochs that they understood. More so, heavier atoms were exceedingly rare because stars had not yet had the time to create them through nuclear fusion. As the primordial black holes evaporated over time the Xeelee eventually migrated to using the supermassive black holes around which Galaxies were forming. Although the galactic black holes were trillions of times more massive than their ancestral homes, the Xeelee proved to be quite adept at using the complex physics around the event horizon for their own purposes. Over the billions of years since their migration, the Xeelee have become a ubiquitous part of the complex ecology of the super massive black holes along with an unnamed number of other species that are also veterans of the same very early eras of the universe.
There is no explicit physical description of the Xeelee throughout the series. In the novel Exultant it is eluded that the over their exceedingly long history, the Xeelee have combined themselves with their technology and, as such, may not have a distinct individual presence that Humans would be familiar with.
that prefer a habitat in the gravity well of stars. In general, the photino birds are probably unaware of almost all other forms of life due to the fact that dark matter interacts extremely weakly with baryonic matter (normal matter that is composed of atoms). The Photino Birds recognize a risk to their habitats from supernovas and other consequences of normal stellar evolution and have set themselves to ceasing nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, thereby prematurely aging them into white dwarves. The resulting dwarves will have the same gravity well but be stable for billions of times longer than their progenitor. Because white dwarfs are extremely cold and dim compared to typical stars, they would not support life on nearby planets. The long project of the Photino Birds will ultimately make the universe hostile to baryonic life, and they have spread across the universe. Further, the activities of the Photino Birds will effectively halt formation of new black holes due to a lack of Type II (core-collapse) supernova. This effectively puts the Xeelee and the Photino Birds at irreconcilable odds because each species is fundamentally seeking to threaten the ideal habitat of the other.
The Xeelee became aware of the Photino Birds approximately 13.5 billion years ago. Seemingly as a unified species, the Xeelee have concerned themselves with defeating the Photino Birds for almost the entire history of the universe. Despite their state of high technological advancement, the Xeelee are ultimately unsuccessful.
that enforced stagnation and flirted with extinction, Humanity adopted an extremely xenophobic imperative that aimed to ensure the future of the species (known as the Druz Doctrines after its founder, Hama Druz). Eventually Humanity again began to expand into the galaxy, wiping out an uncounted other species during their advance. Eventually Humans became the second most advanced and widespread race in the galaxy, second only to the Xeelee. Humans had no knowledge of the Photino-Xeelee war or even what was at stake, making the Xeelee actions interpreted as being sinister. Building the Ring had the appearance of being destructive on a galactic scale because its larger purpose was not understood until the very far future, and many smaller Xeelee projects, such as changing the orbit of Callisto to preserve the bacteria living in the ice, lacked an obvious explanation. Though there were several orders of magnitude fewer Xeelee than humans known to be in the Galaxy, their high degree of technical advancement made them a formidable enemy.
Through a bitter war of attrition, Humans eventually contained the Xeelee within the Galactic Core where the battle lines stagnated for at least three thousand years. Both humans and the Xeelee gained strategic intelligence through time travel by constructing Closed Timelike Curves, further contributing to the stagnation. Human casualties were estimated to exceed more than 10 billion per year and more than 30 trillion over the course of the assault. The imperative commitment to total war also stagnated human physical and intellectual evolution. The Druz Doctrines did not encourage exploration or research and there was little new development. Further, very little effort was directed toward projects that did not have an immediate and conspicuous benefit to maintaining the massive logistics tail necessary to continue the assault.
Eventually the Humans developed a means of hiding their actions from the Xeelee by making movable pocket universes that had no causal relationship to the universe as a whole, thereby eliminating any advantage of moving information into the past with time travel. Humans further developed a time-travel based computer that allowed humans arbitrary computer power to out-think the Xeelee by analyzing tactical problems (giving the pilot tactical information to defeat Xeelee maneuvers) and a dual black-hole cannon that would fire two singularities to merge at a known distance away, releasing enormous gravity waves in the process. Knowing that the ecology around the event horizon and the creatures that live within it would be damaged of destroyed if humans continued to batter the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, the Xeelee withdrew from the Milky Way within minutes after the humans scored the first successful hit.
No longer having the Xeelee as a unifying threat, humanity fragmented into multiple governments over the next several hundred years. The doctrinal stagnation collapsed and Humanity advanced technologically over the next 100,000 years. Humanity then unified again to begin directly attacking Xeelee concentration in the greater supercluster of galaxies across the local group. Humans proved only a slight annoyance or distraction to the Xeelee.
The Xeelee have, however, demonstrated several instances of compassion en mass and even charity toward other species, particularly when it involved escaping the Photino Bird's destruction of the habitable universe. In the conclusion to novel Ring, set 5 million years in the future, they did not interfere with the humans escaping to another universe despite hundreds of thousands of years of humanity's war on the Xeelee (some interpretations are that they even provided an armed escort for the humans in the final leg of the voyage). Even though they were thought to have been driven to extinction by the humans, the Xeelee constructed a universe for the Silver Ghosts that was appealing to their mathematical nature. Before their own retreat from the universe, the Xeelee left ships as 'life boats' at various locations so that other species could use them to escape the Photino Birds through the Ring.
The Xeelee were masters of time and space. Their starships, known as Nightfighters, are crafted from a strange form of matter that seems to violate the Pauli exclusion principle
, which states that no two electrons of the same atom can be in the same state at the same time. The material is sharp, hard, and transparent. Due to its unique space-time construction, it has strange gravitational effects.
Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter is a prolific British hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering.- Writing style :...
's Xeelee Sequence
Xeelee Sequence
The Xeelee Sequence is a series of novels and short stories by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. The novels span several billions of years, describing the future expansion of Mankind, its war with its arch-nemesis , and the Xeelee's own war with dark matter entities called photino birds...
. They were first remotely mentioned in the 1994 novel Timelike Infinity
Timelike Infinity
Timelike Infinity is a 1992 science fiction book by Stephen Baxter. The second book in the Xeelee Sequence, Timelike Infinity introduces a universe of powerful alien species and technologies which manages to maintain a realistic edge due to Baxter's physics background; it largely sets the stage for...
and were later central actors of several novels and a substantial number of short stories. Within the Xeelee Sequence, they are considered to be the most advanced of all Baryonic life-forms and possess technology and abilities far beyond other spacefaring civilization. They have demonstrated the ability to routinely construct Closed Timelike Curves and have exploited time travel to engineer their own evolution and history as far back as 13.5 billion years ago (within two hundred million years of the Big Bang). Their abilities in the series far exceed that of a Type III Civilization on the Kardashev scale
Kardashev scale
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization's level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective. It was first...
.
Although the Xeelee seldom directly appear or take action in the stories their impact on the development of most civilizations and the universe as a whole is profound. The Xeelee frequently leave behind derelict ships, tools, and other materials giving the appearance of thoughtlessness or reckless abandon at what a junior species might do with it. Most junior species see no benefit in developing a technology on their own when they can simply steal it from the Xeelee debris. This has a profound influence on the various galactic economies and technological development of junior species.
Origin
In the Xeelee sequence life and intelligence are ubiquitous throughout the universe. The universe has a fundamental tendency toward complexity and autocatalystic systems are easily created. This is not limited to particle matter, but also applies to more exotic structures such as dark matterDark matter
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...
, quarks, and flaws in space-time itself. Thus, life emerged when the universe was extremely young, to within Planck Time
Planck time
In physics, the Planck time, , is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. It is the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, a distance of 1 Planck length...
of the Big Bang
Big Bang
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...
, and there were intelligent civilizations that witnessed, and indeed consciously influenced, major events in the early universe such as inflationary expansion, symmetry breaking
Symmetry breaking
Symmetry breaking in physics describes a phenomenon where small fluctuations acting on a system which is crossing a critical point decide the system's fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. To an outside observer unaware of the fluctuations , the choice will appear arbitrary...
, and various phase changes
Timeline of the Big Bang
This timeline of the Big Bang describes the history of the universe according to the prevailing scientific theory of how the universe came into being, using the cosmological time parameter of comoving coordinates...
. At the close of each of these epochs, as the universe took on a fundamentally different characteristic, there was a corresponding mass extinction, but small enclaves of the intelligences would survive in one manner or another, witnessing the universe becoming progressively colder and slower-reacting.
The novel Exultant
Exultant
Exultant may refer to:* Exultant , a science-fiction novel* USS Exultant , an Aggressive-class minesweeper* USS Exultant , an Accentor-class minesweeper...
describes the progenitor of the Xeelee, referred to as the proto-Xeelee, as one of the few survivors of the last phase change (when the universe had cooled enough for atoms to form). The proto-Xeelee established symbiotic relationships with other survivors as well as autocatalystic reactions in the new baryonic matter, thus emerged what would later be called the Xeelee. This potentially dates the Xeelee to when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, but with direct knowledge and observations that reach back to within minutes of the Big Bang.
The Xeelee used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged, the event horizon was one of the few thing that survived from earlier epochs that they understood. More so, heavier atoms were exceedingly rare because stars had not yet had the time to create them through nuclear fusion. As the primordial black holes evaporated over time the Xeelee eventually migrated to using the supermassive black holes around which Galaxies were forming. Although the galactic black holes were trillions of times more massive than their ancestral homes, the Xeelee proved to be quite adept at using the complex physics around the event horizon for their own purposes. Over the billions of years since their migration, the Xeelee have become a ubiquitous part of the complex ecology of the super massive black holes along with an unnamed number of other species that are also veterans of the same very early eras of the universe.
There is no explicit physical description of the Xeelee throughout the series. In the novel Exultant it is eluded that the over their exceedingly long history, the Xeelee have combined themselves with their technology and, as such, may not have a distinct individual presence that Humans would be familiar with.
War with the Photino Birds
The Photino Birds are a species of dark matterDark matter
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...
that prefer a habitat in the gravity well of stars. In general, the photino birds are probably unaware of almost all other forms of life due to the fact that dark matter interacts extremely weakly with baryonic matter (normal matter that is composed of atoms). The Photino Birds recognize a risk to their habitats from supernovas and other consequences of normal stellar evolution and have set themselves to ceasing nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, thereby prematurely aging them into white dwarves. The resulting dwarves will have the same gravity well but be stable for billions of times longer than their progenitor. Because white dwarfs are extremely cold and dim compared to typical stars, they would not support life on nearby planets. The long project of the Photino Birds will ultimately make the universe hostile to baryonic life, and they have spread across the universe. Further, the activities of the Photino Birds will effectively halt formation of new black holes due to a lack of Type II (core-collapse) supernova. This effectively puts the Xeelee and the Photino Birds at irreconcilable odds because each species is fundamentally seeking to threaten the ideal habitat of the other.
The Xeelee became aware of the Photino Birds approximately 13.5 billion years ago. Seemingly as a unified species, the Xeelee have concerned themselves with defeating the Photino Birds for almost the entire history of the universe. Despite their state of high technological advancement, the Xeelee are ultimately unsuccessful.
War with the Humans
While recovering from a brutal occupation by the QaxQax (species)
In the Xeelee Sequence of future history created by Stephen Baxter, the Qax are an alien species created from chaotic forces...
that enforced stagnation and flirted with extinction, Humanity adopted an extremely xenophobic imperative that aimed to ensure the future of the species (known as the Druz Doctrines after its founder, Hama Druz). Eventually Humanity again began to expand into the galaxy, wiping out an uncounted other species during their advance. Eventually Humans became the second most advanced and widespread race in the galaxy, second only to the Xeelee. Humans had no knowledge of the Photino-Xeelee war or even what was at stake, making the Xeelee actions interpreted as being sinister. Building the Ring had the appearance of being destructive on a galactic scale because its larger purpose was not understood until the very far future, and many smaller Xeelee projects, such as changing the orbit of Callisto to preserve the bacteria living in the ice, lacked an obvious explanation. Though there were several orders of magnitude fewer Xeelee than humans known to be in the Galaxy, their high degree of technical advancement made them a formidable enemy.
Through a bitter war of attrition, Humans eventually contained the Xeelee within the Galactic Core where the battle lines stagnated for at least three thousand years. Both humans and the Xeelee gained strategic intelligence through time travel by constructing Closed Timelike Curves, further contributing to the stagnation. Human casualties were estimated to exceed more than 10 billion per year and more than 30 trillion over the course of the assault. The imperative commitment to total war also stagnated human physical and intellectual evolution. The Druz Doctrines did not encourage exploration or research and there was little new development. Further, very little effort was directed toward projects that did not have an immediate and conspicuous benefit to maintaining the massive logistics tail necessary to continue the assault.
Eventually the Humans developed a means of hiding their actions from the Xeelee by making movable pocket universes that had no causal relationship to the universe as a whole, thereby eliminating any advantage of moving information into the past with time travel. Humans further developed a time-travel based computer that allowed humans arbitrary computer power to out-think the Xeelee by analyzing tactical problems (giving the pilot tactical information to defeat Xeelee maneuvers) and a dual black-hole cannon that would fire two singularities to merge at a known distance away, releasing enormous gravity waves in the process. Knowing that the ecology around the event horizon and the creatures that live within it would be damaged of destroyed if humans continued to batter the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, the Xeelee withdrew from the Milky Way within minutes after the humans scored the first successful hit.
No longer having the Xeelee as a unifying threat, humanity fragmented into multiple governments over the next several hundred years. The doctrinal stagnation collapsed and Humanity advanced technologically over the next 100,000 years. Humanity then unified again to begin directly attacking Xeelee concentration in the greater supercluster of galaxies across the local group. Humans proved only a slight annoyance or distraction to the Xeelee.
Interactions with other species
As far as is known and aside from the Photino Birds, the Xeelee were seldom warlike and usually treated the junior species with disinterest or abandon. There are very few reported instances of them initiating interaction with another species. They will, however, defend their habitats through strength of arms and respond to attacks, as was the case in the war with the Humans. It is noteworthy that during the war with the Humans, the Xeelee rarely opened an offensive or attacked far behind the front despite having an enormous ability to do so. In the end, the humans' total commitment to war amounted to a minor irritation to the Xeelee and their response was minimal at best.The Xeelee have, however, demonstrated several instances of compassion en mass and even charity toward other species, particularly when it involved escaping the Photino Bird's destruction of the habitable universe. In the conclusion to novel Ring, set 5 million years in the future, they did not interfere with the humans escaping to another universe despite hundreds of thousands of years of humanity's war on the Xeelee (some interpretations are that they even provided an armed escort for the humans in the final leg of the voyage). Even though they were thought to have been driven to extinction by the humans, the Xeelee constructed a universe for the Silver Ghosts that was appealing to their mathematical nature. Before their own retreat from the universe, the Xeelee left ships as 'life boats' at various locations so that other species could use them to escape the Photino Birds through the Ring.
Anti-Xeelee
The Anti-Xeelee is a universe spanning quantum-wave consciousness constructed by the Xeelee to manage their projects. It was first briefly described in the conclusion of Timelike Infinity when it was encountered by Michael Poole who had been pushed several million years into the future. It was later developed somewhat more in the short story Vacuum Diagrams. Its name is derived from the particle/anti-particle naming convention to convey its paired and complementary existence with the Xeelee; it does not describe an opposition to the Xeelee. It further implied that the Anti-Xeelee, is traveling backwards in time like some anti-particles are thought to do.Technology
Main article: Xeelee technologyXeelee Technology
The Xeelee are a species featured in the Xeelee Sequence series of books by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. In this setting, the Xeelee represent the unattainable pinnacle of technological development. As a result, they are feared and envied by other star-faring Xeelee Sequence...
The Xeelee were masters of time and space. Their starships, known as Nightfighters, are crafted from a strange form of matter that seems to violate the Pauli exclusion principle
Pauli exclusion principle
The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that no two identical fermions may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. A more rigorous statement is that the total wave function for two identical fermions is anti-symmetric with respect to exchange of the particles...
, which states that no two electrons of the same atom can be in the same state at the same time. The material is sharp, hard, and transparent. Due to its unique space-time construction, it has strange gravitational effects.