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Background
If you've seen the movie "Gattaca", then you've heard Uma Thurman (playing Irene) say the words "Once Around The Sun". She speaks them as she is dancing with the main character played by Ethan Hawke. He is leaving the Earth in a few days for Titan, largest moon of Saturn. He will be away from the Earth for a year, which is how long it takes the Earth to travel once around the Sun. His character, whom she knows as Jerome, is regretful that he has found a reason (Irene) to stay on Earth just as he is leaving.
He says to her "A year is a long time". Irene responds "Not so long, just once around the Sun".
Once Around The Sun, the boardgame, uses only components from 6 Billion™ - so you need no other components. However, Once Around The Sun is a stand-alone game and not strictly a variant of 6 Billion™ at all. In effect, you are getting 2 games for the price of one!
The idea in Once Around The Sun is that you and your fellow players are rich space tourists. You are bored with life. You can afford the very best of everything. You have your pick of partners. Business is pointless as it only makes you more money. You are bored,
bored, bored. Perhaps fame... or acts of altruism... One of you suggests that you have a competition. Another comes up with the idea of travelling - after all, travel broadens the mind, absence makes the heart grow fonder...The more they thought about it, the better the idea was. In the end, they resolved to visit at least 1 colony at each of the planets in our solar system, and also visit the Asteroid Belt. They would have one year to complete the trip. During their travels they would compete with one another to be the most famous, as measured by the billions of words reported about each of them in the media of the future. YOU must become more famous that each of your competitors!
Check the Spacefuture website's feature on Space Tourism for current treatments of this subject.
To get an idea of travel times in our space tourism future, here's a Crude Guide To Travel Times in The Solar System
Quotations* on Travel:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
John Keats (1795–1821), English poet. On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer, opening lines.
Journeys end in lovers meeting.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Feste’s song to
Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in Twelfth Night, act 2, sc. 3.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The
great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn
with cutting flints.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), Scottish novelist, essayist, poet. Travels
with a Donkey, “Cheylard and Luc” (1879).
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or
hate them than to travel with them.
Mark Twain (1835–1910), U.S. author. Tom Sawyer Abroad, ch. 11 (1894).
I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850), English poet. I Travelled Among Unknown Men
(written 1801, published 1807).
Quotations* on Philanthropy:
Are there not thousands in the world . . .
Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good?
John Keats (1795–1821), English poet. The Fall of Hyperion, cto. 1.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing
characteristic.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Henry, in The Picture
of Dorian Gray, ch. 3 (1891).
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist. Letter, 10 Sept. 1918 (published in The
Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, ed. by Anne O. Bell, 1977).
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Anglo-American poet, critic. Thomas, in Murder in the
Cathedral, pt. 1.
The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it
found out by accident.
Charles Lamb (1775–1834), English essayist, critic. Quoted in: Athenaeum (London, 4
Jan. 1834).
Always do right—this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain (1835–1910), U.S. author. Message, 16 Feb. 1901, to the Young
People’s Society, New York City. President Harry S Truman had this remark framed
behind his desk in the Oval Office.
* All quotations from Microsoft Bookshelf (1994 edition).