Board Thread:Fiction Universe Discussion/@comment-4242472-20140831130500

I know its considered the sci-fi equivilent of "here there be dragons" but maybe in keeping the fictionverse up-to-date perhaps we should define what our unknown regions are?

I ask because we have discovered, categorised and named stars halfway across the galaxy and galaxies as far away as the edge of the observable universe. We are discovering exoplanets at an increasing rate. We're mapping out solar systems up to hundreds of light years away from us without leaving Earth's sphere of influence. We're using high-power telescopes to determine the makeup of a planet's atmosphere from many tens of light years away (this part is still early-doors but the point is we are taking the first steps to be able to). We've taken infra-red, X-ray and gamma ray images of far-off galaxies which can be used to determine evidence of intelligent life. This all makes me wonder...If most of our empires have an even greater depository than we do, what specifically makes these areas unknown?

I think this is probably a case of Science Marching On; Star Trek began in 1966 and the first pulsar was discovered in 1967 but the regularity of its pulses were mistaken for ET transmissions (the pulsar was dubbed Little Green Man One or LGM-1 until the same phenomenon was found somewehre else). In other words one of the modern codifiers for interstellar exploration ran at a time when actually going to all these far off solar systems sounded like it could be far more informative than looking at them though a telescope.

So. Given fictionverse advances its possible that exploration voyages of these regions could be to systems where we know the star makeup, what planets to encounter. Maybe the unknown parameters of these regions are either what local life could actually look or behaves like, what the present-day star arrangement is or for some reason a genuine lack of astronomical data (i.e. a past civ did study that region but the knowledge record was lost in a fire/social upheaval/extinction phase or it never became public-enough knowledge for them).

Although I suppose it could vary from culture to culture depending on the relevant culture's focus on astronomy. But for multicultural or multispecies empires this reason might not be so good to explain away a lack of astronomical knowledge due to having more than one cultural outlook on astronomy. 