Human Philosopher of measurement, United Space Industry Standards and the Solar System Safety Standards Authority (b. 2098 CE / 2298 UCSD – d. 2171 CE / 2371 UCSD) Historical

Ines Abara

  • united-space-consortium
  • sssa
  • standards
  • certification
  • measurement
  • earth
  • human
Ines Abara, a broad-built woman in her forties with deep brown skin and very short greying hair, in a plain long-sleeved high-necked dark blue dress, seated alone on a wooden chair in a bare pale room, her face turned toward a tall window of flat grey daylight and her hands resting still on her knees.

Ines Abara held that a standard is a claim, and that every claim has a width. A certificate that a hull will hold, a coupling will seal or an instrument will read true says so under conditions, and the conditions are part of what it says. Her essay On the Width of a Standard does not survive. A sentence of it does, quoted in the founding papers of the Solar System Safety Standards Authority: "A certificate that does not say where it holds says that it holds everywhere, and nothing does."

Known History

  • Born 2098 CE (2298 UCSD) on Earth. The record gives no birthplace more exact than that.
  • Worked for United Space Industry Standards through the climate-crisis years and coastal fragmentation events of the 2130s and 2140s CE (2330s and 2340s UCSD), when the body certified all sides and refused directional pressure from any of them.
  • About 2140 CE (2340 UCSD) the United Space Consortium chartered the SSSA and absorbed United Space Industry Standards into it as its largest component. The essay is quoted in the founding papers of that consolidation. The record does not say whether she had any part in drafting them.
  • Died 2171 CE (2371 UCSD). The record does not say where.

Character Notes

The record holds one sentence of hers, and is careful not to make more of it than it says. The sentence is a rule for writing certificates, not a theory of physics. It asks that every certificate state its own conditions, because a certificate that leaves them out does not become wider. It becomes false somewhere.

That is recognisably the habit of the record's own present, which files every physical claim at its stated width and no wider. The record does not trace that habit to her, and a reader should not either. Nearly five centuries separate the sentence from the scope ladder, and a resemblance across five centuries is not a lineage. The record files her as one voice of the consolidation, quoted once and kept.

The record holds her only as a quoted author, never as a scene.

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