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My interview contribution for El Club de los Astronautas' "10Answers" project.
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Do you think the human being will realize an interstellar voyage one day?
Yes. It may even be possible for baseline humans, who choose both not to augment
themselves or engage in mind uploading, to achieve this if they are tolerant and
accepting enough of those who do use such technologies to accept their assistance.
For instance, having heightened intelligences in the forms of transhumans,
posthumans and/or artificial intelligences calculate very accurately and apply very
well biostasis technologies to such baseline interstellar travellers according to each
one's individual physiology, et cetera, and to monitor them super-benevolently along
their travels.
Do you think it could happen during your lifetime?
Absolutely, though I must prepare myself for the possibility of it not happening. I
think others should too for the sake of their happiness, given how optimistic some can
be, and thus potentially disappointed, and depressed even, afterwards.
What do you think will be the key technology to realize an interstellar voyage?
Perhaps safe, exponentially self-replicating and self-repairing
nano-/subnanotechnologies that will construct an interstellar megascale network
allowing for mind uploads, or rather multiple copies of mind uploads, to travel along,
a la telephone calls across cables.
Do you think regenerative medicine will be the first step to prolong maximum
life-span and allow humans to transform into new life-forms to overcome the
time-space-barrier?
I do, and then to be subsequently combined with other fields in more widely
collaborative and interdisciplinary appraoches towards the issues of life extension
and quality of life.
What do you think medicine can do while you are still alive?
Abolish and/or reduce all forms of involuntary physical and mental suffering...to put
an end to the persistent cycle of new innovations introducing new, or rather amplify
already existing, problems and forms of suffering; yes, cyclo-anarchy!
What kind of breakthroughs in brain-boosting technologies might be achieved
during your lifetime? (smart-drugs, nootropics, neurogeneses, neuronal stem
cells, etc.)
Alongside technologies that will boost such traits as empathy and blissfulness,
pharmaceuticals and neuronanotechnologies, et cetera, that will allow for the
exploration of new aesthetic frontiers; technologies that will allow persons to:
- Enjoy, in real-time, such phenomena as conceptual, abstract feedback loops and
logic loops as we do now with the loops of musical rhythms across time.
- Enjoy, in real-time, their own and others' strange loops of self-awareness, selfconsciousness,
et cetera, in the same way.
- To perceive across the sensory spectrum [as sounds, visuals, vibro-tactics, etc.] the
nervous impulses and activities that are themselves already perceiving, and to
subsequently perceive the impulses, in the same manner, that allow for the percpetion
of the first set of nervous activities, ad infinitum, for a fractalline pattern to be
relished in itself...all in real-time.
- To perceive, in real-time, the rhythm of their selves exerting forces upon their
surroundings and the resultant equal and opposite reactions, as well as the
equilibrium of such a process as harmony (for equilibrium is harmony) for a new
music; to relish the conceptual analogue to this in the form of opposing ideologies
and contradictions.
Do you think you will join future brain-replacement or brain-uploading
technologies?
If non-invasive neurotechnologies were to be developed that would allow for the
uploading, storing and backing-up of my subjective experiences, I would use them. I
feel that throughout my life, I have contemplated many beautiful thoughts and have
experienced many moments of euphoria and bliss which I would be willing to share
with other persons as bemes and encourage their use as source material for
"remixing" by potential future artists. I would be willing, even, for my whole life to
be sifted and scanned all the way through with all the embarrassing, regrettable and
cringe worthy areas intact if it was required for the harvesting of the aforementioned
"golden" moments for others to enjoy and appreciate.
How do you think those technologies can be disadvantageous or dangerous?
By the potentially violent reaction of the opponents of such technologies which could
lead to anti-transhumanist terrorism and Luddite extremism.
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www.elclubdelosastronautas.com/10answers
Many thanks to David Apfel.
Round Up: Presidential Candidates Talk Space
By Bart Leahy
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 31 December 2007
12:50 pm ET
Space exploration has become a topic of interest in U.S. presidential debates for the first time in over 40 years. Seventeen individuals are running for president in the two major parties' primaries. Several of them have expressed opinions about space; but most, to our knowledge, have not spoken directly about space, or addressed it at all. Below are statements from the candidates and/or their campaigns.
Democratic Party
Joe Biden
"The revolution in transportation will also affect foreign policy in the years to come. I don't mean commercial space travel or the supersonic transport. There are limits to how fast or far we need to travel, especially when teleconferencing lets us be 'face to face' without being 'in person.'"
Source: JoeBiden.com "Non-Proliferation and U.S. Diplomacy in a High-Tech World"
"The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman warned on Sunday against fostering an arms race in space after China was reported to have conducted an anti-satellite weapons test...
"'I don't think we should be overly worried about this at this point," Biden said. "We have ways to deal with that ability.'...
"'One of the things we have to talk about is whether or not the, sort of, ideological base notion about how we deal with space and weapons in space and the use of weapons from space is something that is a path we should continue to follow,' he said.
"'This is not the direction we want to go, in escalating competition in space. And we should be talking about it,' Biden said."
Source: Washington Post, "Sen. Biden Warns Against Space Arms Race"
Campaign contact information:
info@JoeBiden.com
Biden for President, Inc.
P.O. Box 438
Wilmington, DE 19899
(302) 574-2008
Hillary Clinton
"Hillary will enhance American leadership in space, including:
Pursuing an ambitious 21st century Space Exploration Program, by implementing a balanced strategy of robust human spaceflight, expanded robotic spaceflight, and enhanced space science activities.
Developing a comprehensive space-based Earth Sciences agenda, including full funding for NASA's Earth Sciences program and a space-based Climate Change Initiative that will help us secure the scientific knowledge we need to combat global warming.
Promoting American leadership in aeronautics by reversing funding cuts to NASA's and FAA's aeronautics R&D budget."
Source: HillaryClinton.com
"As a Chinese spacecraft is ready to head to the moon, the leading U.S. democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is calling for an increase in overall U.S. robotic exploration, but not necessarily manned exploration of the moon.
"If elected, Sen. Clinton also promises:
Development of increased robotic exploration missions.
Development of "a comprehensive space-based Earth sciences agenda, including full funding for NASA's Earth sciences program and a space-based Climate Change Initiative that will help us secure the scientific knowledge we need to combat global warming.'
Reversal of Bush administration "funding cuts to NASA's and FAA's aeronautics R&D budget."
Source: Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, October 29, 2007
Campaign contact information:
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/help/contact/
Chris Dodd
"Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman announced today that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will provide funds to Connecticut small businesses for research and development purposes. The technology projects were chosen based on innovation and scientific merit.
"'From biotechnology to space exploration to energy innovation, Connecticut businesses continue to develop breakthroughs in science and technology,' said Dodd. 'Our small businesses are an important driving force of these industries, and the partnership between NASA and these companies will secure Connecticut's reputation as a renowned leader in these fields.'"
Source: "Dodd, Lieberman Announce Grants to Help Small Business Research and Tech Projects"
Campaign contact information:
PO Box 51882
Washington, DC 20091
Phone (DC): (202) 737-DODD (3633)
Phone (CT): (860) 244-2008
http://chrisdodd.com/contact
John Edwards
"Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), who is vying with Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination, said in a statement: 'We need a balanced space and aeronautics program. We need to support solar system exploration as an important goal for our human and robotic programs, but only as one goal among several.'"
Source: Washington Post, "Clinton Favors Future Human Spaceflight"
"If elected President, how would you balance the scientific research at NASA with the manned spaceflight program which, arguably, has dubious scientific value?"
"I am a strong supporter of our space program. It reflects the best of the American spirit of optimism, discovery and progress. We need a balanced space and aeronautics program. We need to support solar system exploration as an important goal for our human and robotic programs, but only as one goal among several. And we need to invite other countries to share in a meaningful way in both the adventure and the cost of space exploration."
Source: "Exclusive: Interview with Senator John Edwards on Science-Related Topics"
Campaign contact information:
410 Market Street
Suite 400
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Phone: (919) 636-3131
Fax: (919) 967-3644
http://johnedwards.com/about/contact/form/
Mike Gravel
[No statements about space by Mr. Gravel could be found].
Campaign contact information:
P.O. Box 948
Arlington, VA 22216-0948
703-652-4698
http://www.gravel2008.us/contact
Dennis Kucinich
"When I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president of the United States. And he excited America with a vision of an America that could be. He urged every American to get an education in the sciences in particular so that we could participate in this collaborate effort of reaching for the stars.
"We recognize that our journey is more homebound today, more Earthbound. And so, as president of the United States, I would use the intellectual and scientific abilities that exist in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to move America towards a green economy.
"There's tremendous amounts of research being done at NASA right now, particularly in the area of carbonless burns, carbonless combustion. And it's amazing what is possible today in America. When you think about NASA being dedicated to creating green technologies, where we can call forth a world that we barely understand exists, but knowing the inventive genius that characterizes America throughout our history, we can move towards sustainability using the inventive genius of NASA, where they can create these products in the alpha stage and even license them in the beta stage to help prime the pump of our economy and move quickly, create millions of new jobs."
Source: Newsmaker Transcripts
"Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) called the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 a huge success for NASA Glenn and a big victory for the Ohio delegation.
"'This is a huge success for NASA Glenn and the Cleveland-area, and a big victory for the Ohio Congressional delegation,' stated Kucinich. 'NASA Glenn is a premier research facility. Thanks to our efforts, this bill helps ensure that Glenn will remain an important part of NASA's long-term plans. This is great news for NASA Glenn and our whole community.'"
Source: "Kucinich Hails NASA Authorization Bill as 'Huge Success' for NASA-Glenn and Cleveland Area"
Campaign contact information:
11808 Lorain Ave
Cleveland, OH 44111
info@kucinich.us
Barack Obama
"Barack Obama's early education and K-12 plan package costs about $18 billion per year. He will maintain fiscal responsibility and prevent any increase in the deficit by offsetting cuts and revenue sources in other parts of the government. The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years"
Source: BarackObama.com
Campaign contact information:
Obama for America
P.O. Box 8102
Chicago, IL 60680
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/contact
Bill Richardson
"Richardson has compiled a list of more than a dozen specific programs that can be cut, reduced, or delayed...
$8 billion from scaling back the failing National Missile Defense program.
$3 billion from eliminating the Pentagon's secret 'Space-Based Offensive Weapons' that both are redundant in terms of military capacity and will serve to cause a new arms race in space."
Source: Richardson for President, "Richardson Outlines Plan to Modernize Military"
Campaign contact information:
http://action.richardsonforpresident.com/page/s/contact
Republican Party
Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani said the United States should prioritize energy independence much like it did the space race, when Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson fired up the gears of industry and imagination after the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space.
The result was a bipartisan thrust to the moon that transcended several presidencies and spawned a generation of national pride and scientific spin-offs.
"Politics aside and national interests first. Not only did it help us ultimately win the Cold War, it helped us in countless other ways, in scientific development and products," Giuliani said.
"We can do the same thing with energy independence. But we've got to have a president who knows how to get things done."
Source: Tallahassee Democrat (via Space Politics.com), "Giuliani Wants to 'Aggressively Pursue Space Exploration'"
Campaign contact information:
Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee, Inc.
295 Greenwich St, #371
New York, NY 10007 212-835-9449
webteam@joinrudy2008.com
Mike Huckabee
In response to the following question: "Is there a candidate amongst you willing to take a pledge on behalf of the Mars Society of sending an American to the surface of Mars by 2020? If not, what is your vision for human space exploration?"
"Whether we ought to go to Mars is not a decision that I would want to make, but I would certainly want to make sure that we expand the space program, because every one of us who are sitting here tonight have our lives dramatically improved because there was a space program — whether it's these screens that we see or the incredible electronics that we use, including the GPS systems that got many of you to this arena tonight.
"Some of you were late because you didn't have one, by the way. Or whether it's the medical technologies that saved many of our lives or the lives or our families, it's the direct result of the space program, and we need to put more money into science and technology and exploration.
"Now, whether we need to send somebody to Mars, I don't know. But I'll tell you what: If we do, I've got a few suggestions, and maybe Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars."
Source: Republican Presidential Debate, November 28, 2007
Campaign contact information:
Huckabee for President, Inc.
P.O. Box 2008
Little Rock, Arkansas 72203
501-324-2008
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=ContactUs.Home
Duncan Hunter
"'China's successful engagement of a satellite orbiting in space marks the commencement of a new era of military competition,' said Congressman Hunter. 'American military forces are dependent on information gathered from U.S. space assets and the capability to engage these resources represents a significant threat to our nation's military power.
"'China's actions and continued efforts to advance its technological capabilities require that all Department of Defense programs intended to preserve America's space assets be reviewed for adequacy. Further, new programs to strengthen the protection, redundancy and reconstitution of U.S. space assets must be made essential. It is critical that we take these steps now to ensure our forces cannot be targeted through an adversarial space strike.'"
"Congressmen Hunter and Everett sent a letter to President Bush advising that a review of space programs within the Defense Department be initiated. Text of the letter follows:
"Dear President Bush,
"China's recent test of an anti-satellite missile, destroying a satellite in low earth orbit, marks the commencement of a new era of military competition in space. The dependency of American warfighting capability, and the economy, on space assets compels our nation to take the necessary steps to ensure our forces cannot be targeted through an adversarial space strike.
"Space capabilities are integral to the daily execution of virtually every military campaign, operation, and exercise involving U.S. forces today. Therefore, a review of Department of Defense programs intended to preserve American space assets is warranted. Further, new programs which provide protection, redundancy, and reconstitution of space assets should be essential.
"Mr. President, it is important that substantial efforts are made now to avoid technological surprise. I look forward to working with you to strengthen our capabilities to protect America's space assets."
Source: House.Gov "Hunter: New Era of Military Competition Commences"
Campaign contact information:
Hunter For President, Inc.
9340 Fuerte Drive
Suite 302
La Mesa, CA 91941
(619)463-3896
http://www.gohunter08.com/inner.asp?z=3
Alan Keyes
"Q: Should taxpayers continue to fund NASA, or should it move to the private sector?"
"A: They should continue to fund these programs. When we opened up our frontiers, the Lewis & Clark Expedition and so forth, those were not privately funded matters. Our Founders considered exploring this great continent to be one of the important functions of government. And we should as a community sustain our commitment to develop the great frontier [of space] for the sake of humanity, not just for our own sake."
"Space exploration has a spiritual component which we may be losing sight of. As a people we need continually to have before us the truth that our potential is best realized when we are challenging ourselves to reach for those things that transcend our everyday needs and desires and passions and commit us to the kind of endeavors that have importance not only for us, but for future generations. I think space exploration is one of those and I would support it strongly."
Source: Republican Debate at Dartmouth College Oct 29, 1999
"Keyes supports the following spending levels: ...
Slightly Increase Funding
NASA
Scientific research"
Source: OntheIssues.Org
Campaign contact information:
Alan Keyes for President
P.O. Box 50597
Provo, UT 84605-0597
Phone: 800-727-6142
Fax: 801-691-0536
contact@alankeyes.com
John McCain
"When asked about their candidates' positions on the moon-Mars project, a spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) did not respond."
Source: Washington Post, "Clinton Favors Future Human Spaceflight"
Campaign contact information:
John McCain 2008
P.O. Box 16118
Arlington, VA 22215
(703) 418-2008
http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/
Ron Paul
"Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate and commend the designers, builders, sponsors, and pilot of SpaceShipOne on the occasion of its successful flight out of earth's atmosphere on June 21, 2004. What is most remarkable about SpaceShipOne, of course, is that it is the first privately-financed and privately built vehicle to leave the Earth's atmosphere...
"Their success should also be read as a cautionary tale for all of us in government. If only the United States had a taxation policy that limited government and thereby freed up more private capital, there is no telling how many more like Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and Michael Melvill would be able to do great things to the benefit all of mankind. This not just in space exploration, but in medical research, alternative energy research, and any number of the problems that continue to perplex mankind. Private enterprise depends on results and success and therefore private capital is always targeted much more wisely than is monies confiscated by governments."
Source: Ron Paul Before the House of Representatives, June 25, 2004, "Praising Space Exploration"
"Ron Paul consistently opposes taxpayer funding for NASA"
Source: The Hill, "Ron Paul: Trouble Back Home"
Campaign contact information:
3461 Washington Blvd., Suite 200
Arlington, VA 22201
703-248-9115
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/contact/
Mitt Romney
"Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's campaign responded by providing an article from the Florida Today newspaper that said: 'During the first campaign visit to the Space Coast by a 2008 presidential candidate, Republican Mitt Romney said he supports Bush's vision for space exploration and has no reason yet to propose a new direction.'"
Source: Washington Post, "Clinton Favors Future Human Spaceflight"
Campaign contact information:
Romney for President, Inc.
P.O. Box 55239
Boston, MA 02205-5239
(857) 288-6400
http://www.mittromney.com/ContactUs
Tom Tancredo
In response to the same question answered by Mike Huckabee:
"The question is a serious one and it deserves a serious answer, and that is this: Look, we've been -- how many times up here, how many questions have dealt with the issue of deficit spending, the debt out of control? And yet, we have somebody saying, 'But would you spend more money on going to Mars?'
"And the suggestion that we need to spend more money on space exploration. This is it, folks. That's why we have such incredible problems with our debt, because everybody's trying to be everything to all people.
"We can't afford some things, and by the way, going to Mars is one of them."
Campaign contact information:
501 Church Street
Suite 212
Vienna, VA 22180
(703) 255-9898
http://teamtancredo.org/activist_headquarters/
Fred Thompson
"Complete the modernization of the U.S. Air Force to ensure continued tactical air dominance over all potential adversaries and the ability to project power globally.
Ensure tactical and strategic air/space superiority over every battlefield and the U.S. ...
Develop robust Missile Defenses to protect the homeland, deployed forces, and allies against ballistic missiles of all ranges in all phases of flight.
Field a layered, multi-tiered missile defense architecture that includes land-, sea-, and space-based components.
Support the development and testing of advanced missile defense technologies to address the complexity of foreign ballistic missile inventories.
Promote international collaboration in all missile defense efforts, to include cooperation in joint development and production with friends and allies."
Source: Fred08 "Revitalizing America's Armed Forces"
"We were able to get those things done. I also took a leadership role in the passage of the homeland security bill, and blocked export control legislation that would have allowed the sale of our sensitive technology to unreliable countries."
Source: Candidacy announcement speech Sep 6, 2007
Campaign contact information:
Friends of Fred Thompson, Inc.
P.O. Box 128349
Nashville, TN 37212-8349
http://www.fred08.com/Contact/Contact.aspx
Bart Leahy is a technical writer living in Alabama.
Virgin Galactic's new Spaceship 2 interior. Wow! Test flights begin next year, and passenger flights soon after that.
Mars Observer, after travelling for 20 months across the martian surface, gets to its destination - "the Victoria Crater".
Although the original article appears on Space.com I think it's too important not to re-post in its entirety.
~~~
Thirty years ago, Princeton Professor Gerard K. O'Neill published his scenario for space settlement.
"Is the surface of a planet the best place for an expanding technological civilization?" O’Neill’s question to his advanced physics students inspired a young generation of thinkers to examine the possibilities of space migration. In the middle 1970s, the accomplishments of Apollo were fresh in our minds and the next steps forward seemed only paused but not yet abandoned. We still dared to have great dreams, and great choices seemed to be opening up.
The results of Dr. O’Neill’s initial classroom think tank were described in his Physics Today article in 1975. His 1976 book The High Frontier explored the subject in more detail. As others became enthusiastic about the idea, many articles appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world.
O'Neill never wanted the space settlement movement to be a one-man show, and he was happy to see a proliferation of books expanding on the idea. Stuart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame published a book called Space Colonies, a thought-provoking anthology with ranges of opinion impossible to find in government and academic writings. (A lightly censored version is archived at NASA’s Space Settlement pages.)
In the mid-1970s I had occasion to ask one of the contributors, Paul Ehrlich, his opinion of the space colony idea. He laughingly dismissed it, saying, “Maybe the Army Corps of Engineers will build it." His skepticism was based on some of the early rhetoric that population problems could be addressed by space migration, an idea he rightfully dismissed on mathematical grounds alone. A few years later he published (with Anne Ehrlich) Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. One chapter contained a discussion that showed a good deal of further thought about space colonies, especially the problem of creating stable ecosystems from scratch, even in such large volumes as O’Neillian habitats.
This remains a major challenge, and requires a body of knowledge we have scarcely begun to gather. Just as the Human Genome Project is mapping out the intricate details of our genetic code, there will need to be the equivalent of a Gaia Genome Project to take inventory of the varied ecosystems across Earth, mapping out the interaction between the environment and its inhabitants. It may be that certain soil bacteria, insects, and plants are critically important in as yet unknown ways. When these subtle complexities are better understood, we can more intelligently design and build closed-cycle ecosystems in space.
Unfortunately, human expansion on Earth is in the act of displacing and erasing more and more pieces of the ecosystem. Those who would compile such a massive study of the Gaia system may soon be in the position of trying to copy the pages of a document that is burning and falling apart before their eyes.
Time is of the essence in deciding if there will ever be a space settlement effort, on this and other critical fronts.
As the initial tide of space colony interest waned in the late 1970s, there was less talk of visionary ideas and more about economic justifications. The main industry was seen as mass-production of solar power satellites, collecting energy in space and beaming it down to antenna farms for use on Earth. When the second round of 1970s oil shortages hit at the end of the decade, the idea looked even more attractive. But this was in the day when oil was rising from $15 a barrel to $37 by 1980. By 1986, oil was down to $15 again, and the sense of urgency faded. Today, with oil running over $50 a barrel and the supply a constant source of uncertainty, such a novel energy source could begin to look more inviting again.
Visions of space colonies and space power industries faded in the glare of some harsh realities: the Shuttle not living up to its selling points, the space station’s protracted birth agonies, and the dwindling prospects for going beyond Earth orbit.
If the ideas for space settlement have engineering validity, they deserve to be kept ready so they can be considered as an option when the times become right. The English Channel Tunnel was an idea gathering dust on shelves since the days of Napoleon, long predicted never to happen, but suddenly the work was done and now the tunnel is taken for granted, as if it always existed.
It’s time for a new generation to be made aware of the possibilities of space settlement. One motivation that may be compelling—more than the Earth-saving energy production scenario, worthy as that is and even more than the thrill of just going out there—is the idea of living in a small but independent world of one’s own choosing.
There are now practically no new nations created on Earth without episodes of bloodshed. Short of revolution and war, there are few options available for those who dream about establishing a new society somewhere, as various ideological and religious groups have historically done. But even today, there are many people who would welcome the chance to settle a new frontier, where new ways of life could be tried. If enough people believed there was an opportunity to leave whatever they didn’t like about society behind and start over with a new nation aligned to their shared passions, I believe that could stir the pioneer spirit that still slumbers in many.
Space settlement may really get started if the idea finds appeal in influential circles, especially among world leaders. Several Great Themes have successfully circulated among leaders of the industrial societies, such as the need to avoid nuclear war, the importance of economic ties, and the need to make and honor international agreements. A Great Theme of establishing a permanent human presence in space—as a way to develop new energy sources to maintain high standards of living for the growing population of Earth, and as a way to back up Earth’s living populations and preserve our collected knowledge, and to create new living spaces for those wanting new ways of life—would provide a guiding principle for vital policy decisions.
During the Kennedy era, when Project Apollo was presented, many influential people recalled the Colliers symposium articles and the Disney space television special. The idea was already real to them, so they instinctively knew it could be done. It was just a matter of priorities.
Having a technological civilization that’s able to afford nice things like space travel depends on the infrastructure not being destroyed by wars or natural disaster. The ability to “back up” our selves and our gathered knowledge may not always be possible as it is today.
As long as we live in a world where limited resources must be allocated among a growing population, we are ultimately doomed. All our efforts to increase food production and extend individual longevity will end up trading a sooner catastrophe for a later one of greater scope. So far, we are succeeding in a kind of pyramid scheme with Earth’s resources, but in time the pressure of human numbers will strain and drain them. When resources become scarce and populations dense, individual freedoms are unaffordable luxuries.
If civilization is to be allowed to spread beyond Earth, it must take place before the world's resources are forcibly redistributed or squandered and disrupted by major wars. In recent history, we have seen we have seen our ability to reach the Moon thrown away to pay for a massive military effort that only managed to delay the communist takeover of South Vietnam by 10 years.
We have lost precious decades of establishing a beachhead in space due to wavering priorities and economic downturns. We cannot assume conditions will always be as right as they are now for such bold ventures as space travel. Instabilities tug at the house of cards that we call civilization. We still have time to accomplish the miracles we know are possible to achieve, but we need to begin the work while we can still afford to do it.
Don Davis (donaldedavis.com) is the artist most responsible for making space colonies look like a good place to live. He won an Emmy for his work on Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos. Today he is the leading astronomical artist for full-dome theater shows in planetariums worldwide.
I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.
------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------
Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom
This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.
Religious Monotheism
|
...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
|
Paganism/Environmentalism
This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.
This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.
-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------
Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:
1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.
This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.
This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!
http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf
If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.
Sincerely,
Reverend Tom
Wow, we are living in surreal times. Just in the last month we have now seen two quantum leaps in space propulsion. The first was a proposal for a hyperspace ship, and now an inertialess drive. Is this still 2006, or did somehow we jump ahead 50 years? Bizarre and simply amazing.
From Physical Review:
~~~
Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.
"Dr. Felber's research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight," said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber's work. "His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly."
The field equation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has never before been solved to calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light. Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its 'antigravity beam' becomes.
Felber's calculations show how to use the repulsion of a body speeding through space to provide the enormous energy needed to accelerate massive payloads quickly with negligible stress. The new solution of Einstein's field equation shows that the payload would 'fall weightlessly' in an antigravity beam even as it was accelerated close to the speed of light.
Accelerating a 1-ton payload to 90 percent of the speed of light requires an energy of at least 30 billion tons of TNT. In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star. In effect, the payload would be hitching a ride on a star.
"Based on this research, I expect a mission to accelerate a massive payload to a 'good fraction of light speed' will be launched before the end of this century," said Dr. Felber. "These antigravity solutions of Einstein's theory can change our view of our ability to travel to the far reaches of our universe."
More immediately, Felber's new solution can be used to test Einstein's theory of gravity at low cost in a storage-ring laboratory facility by detecting antigravity in the unexplored regime of near-speed-of-light velocities.
I wouldn't have taken this seriously, but I read it over at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends:
According to the Heim quantum theory (HQT) developed in the 1950s, it should be possible to build an 'hyperspace' engine allowing a spacecraft to reach Mars in 3 hours. It would also allow us to travel to stars more that 10 light years away in 80 days by slipping into a different dimension. But is interstellar space travel a dream or a future reality? It all depends if this controversial theory about the fabric of our universe is correct or not. So far, it seems that a majority of physicists thinks that this theory is either incomplete or almost understandable. Nevertheless, some scientists working for the U.S. Department of Energy think that such an 'hyperspace' engine could be tested within five years.An extraordinary "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
The US air force has expressed an interest in the idea and scientists working for the American Department of Energy -- which has a device known as the Z Machine that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine -- say they may carry out a test if the theory withstands further scrutiny.
Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that if everything went well a working engine could be tested in about five years.
However, Prof. Hauser, a physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, cautioned that any prototype would be based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics.
"It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.
"But this thing is not around the corner. We first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion. It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
He said the engine would enable spaceships to travel to different solar systems. "If the theory is correct then this is not science fiction, it is science fact," Prof. Hauser said.
"NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [U.S.] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."
The U.S. authorities' attention was attracted after Prof. Hauser and an Austrian colleague, Walter Droscher, wrote a paper called "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory."
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company has just announced they will be begin the construction of a $225 million dollar space-port facility in the New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic also revealed that up to 38,000 people from 126 countries have paid a deposit for a seat on one of its manned commercial flights, including a core group of 100 "founders" who have paid the initial $200,000 cost of a flight upfront. Virgin Galactic is planning to begin flights in late 2008 or early 2009.
Hi everyone. Yep, it's been a long time since I wrote anything for Future Hi or anywhere else for that matter. I've been so busy with more practical matters that finding the time to express my thoughts publicly has not been possible.
Indictments and Political Scandal
As you may have heard, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts. In those moments where I take politics seriously, this could be a big deal and make me happy, but it doesn't. It's quite possible these indictments are only the beginning of seeing this criminal adminstration fall from power as much as it deserves to. Regardless of the probability of that, it all doesn't matter. The damage has already been done. America's reputation has been shattered, the deficts are soaring, dramatic increases in police state powers have been essentially cemented into law , etc., yada, yada, ad nauseum. Basically, the entire political game is a dead end for you, me and humanity. I can't possibly think how any reform, no matter how sweeping will make much of a difference. Politics is dead, lets move on.
Post-Politics:
If we hope to have a future, we need to start thinking post-politically. Some people, might have a problem with that whole concept. They think that has long as individual interact with each other, there will be politics. This is not true. As Timothy Leary made a strong case for, politics is rooted in power struggles within the contraints of a planetary 2-dimensional surface. Iain Banks makes the most compelling case I've ever read. As long as we remain on a planet, there is limited space in which we can travel. Any direction we decide to go in, we will inevitable end up back where we started. All corners of the globe have in some way been explored, colonized, utilized, cordoned off, walled, fenced, enclosed, patented, owned, copyrighted, raped and plundered. There is no wild and free frontier left, no place left to explore or to escape to. Sure, there are some places more free than others, but the differences are often trivial. For most people on the planet, life is hard, brutish and short. For those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world, the walls are closing in, fast. But,
End of Hierarchies and Traditional Power Structures:
Don't loose hope folks, because things are a accelerat'n! The current system with all its corruption, greed and shear stupidity and incompetence can't last much longer. Not only from an environmental and sustainable point of view, but because there is rapid, but still deep current change underway. It's all around us, and it's happening without anyone noticing much. It's not some big monolithic light from the sky change that we are archetypically expecting, but a much more subtle and profound change happening that we won't notice until its already happened. These changes are all around us. Humanity is waking up. People are becoming more aware, we are taking all of these tools and technologies for granted. The network is growing, and will continue to grow. Meanwhile, what we actually see with our traditional conditioning is more laws, copyrights, restrictions and so on. It's all an illusion folks. They only exist if you believe they exist. Most, if not all of these new laws are almost entirely uneforceable. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to network intelligence, peer to peer technologies, free internet, sustainable energy systems, etc.
Power of the Network:
Here is an example of some of the stuff that the power of the network is producing by motivated programmers:
Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet (Internet)
Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.
On the alternative energy front:
don't even know where to begin. Breakthroughs in this area are happening almost daily. If you've been reading blogs like World Changing, you'll see that there is so much going on with alternative energy now, that it is now impossible to keep up with the overwhelming rapid pace of global conversion to post-peak-oil alternatives.
Canda Proposing 30 GW wind farm in far north
On the space migration front:
Spaceship One and Two, and then Space Ship Three hold so much promise. There are only the beginning, but they are the first genuine steps of humanity getting off of the planet. With the advent of mass produced nanotubes, we could soon see the commercial construction of several space elevators. Space elevators mean price to space in the hundreds of dollars. Hundreds to change your life forever. What does this mean for the space game? It means that almost everyone who wants to go will go. When you have millions, billions of people who can now afford to go to space, there will be the infrastructure to support it. Every enterprising, capitalizing individual or group will make sure of that. Because the profit potential of this will be enormous beyond all comprehension. To give you an idea, imagine what the total World Gross Product is today. It will triple within the first 5 years of a sub-$1000 price to orbit, and after that it will continue to grow at a conservative 20% a year. Imagine the total economy of humanity growing by 20% a year. You are not rich now? You will be, and so will everyone else. Nothing will ever be the same after this.
I can already hear people, saying, "But what about molecular nanotechnology?". Yes! What's amazing about the above figures is all of that is possible without molecular nanotech. It only requires some master of nanomaterial construction. Once nanotech assemblers hit the scence, things will really take off.
On the longevity front:
If you make it the next 20 years, you're going to live damn near forever. So you might as well accept it. :)
So, what's in store in the next 20 years and beyond
Have fun! Now for me, back to the work at hand. :)
Via Futurismic:
It shouldn't be a big surprise to those paying attention to Branson and Co., but SS-3 is planned to be an orbital vehicle if SS-2 is successful.
I can't contain my excitement about this.
Jamais over at our favorite blog World Changing, has this to say:
"Researchers from the University of Texas, Dallas, and Australia's CSIRO have developed a way of making strong, stable and amazingly useful ribbons and sheets made of multiwall carbon nanotubes. Their system pushes the material out at seven meters/minute; a Quicktime video of the process in action is here. If you've been following the development of nanotubes, you know what kind of accomplishment this is. In my view, this is the biggest technology breakthrough of the year, quite possibly of the decade."
The reason I'm so excited is this is exactly the type of breakthrough we need to brings us one step closer to building a Space Elevator. The strength of the material made from this method is still not strong enough, but it was the mass-production part that has always been considered the biggest hurdle.
What a day for space science. The long speculated "Planet X" or 10th planet in the solar system has been discovered. It's at least 50% bigger than Pluto, and located out in the Kuiper Belt. I think as time goes on we will find dozens, perhaps hundreds of pluto-size objects out in the Kuiper Belt. For the future of space migration, the amount of raw materials and water out there is phenomonal. Speaking of water, shown below here is a hi-res photo of a frozen water lake on the surface of Mars. If there was ever any doubt about water on Mars before, there is none now.
www.astrobiology.com/news/viewsr.html
Abstract:
Motivated by recent developments impacting our view of Fermi's paradox (absence of extraterrestrials and their manifestations from our past light cone), we suggest a reassessment of the problem itself, as well as of strategies employed by SETI projects so far. The need for such reevaluation is fueled not only by the failure of searches thus far, but also by great advances recently made in astrophysics, astrobiology, computer science and future studies, which have remained largely ignored in SETI practice. As an example of the new approach, we consider the effects of the observed metallicity and temperature gradients in the Milky Way on the spatial distribution of hypothetical advanced extraterrestrial intelligent communities. While, obviously, properties of such communities and their sociological and technological preferences are entirely unknown, we assume that (1) they operate in agreement with the known laws of physics, and (2) that at some point they typically become motivated by a meta-principle embodying the central role of information-processing; a prototype of the latter is the recently suggested Intelligence Principle of Steven J. Dick. There are specific conclusions of practical interest to be drawn from coupling of these reasonable assumptions with the astrophysical and astrochemical structure of the Galaxy. In particular, we suggest that the outer regions of the Galactic disk are most likely locations for advanced SETI targets, and that intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase, for both thermodynamical and astrochemical reasons. This can also be regarded as a possible generalization of the Galactic Habitable Zone, concept currently much investigated in astrobiology.
www.astrobiology.com/news/viewsr.html
Way back in 1981, one of sci-fi's greatest visionaries, A.A. Attansio, wrote a breathtaking book called Radix. I was lucky enough to discover it the same year. I took it home and read it from cover to cover without putting it down. I was spellbound by the story, and the extremely imaginative psychophysics of this world. Like Dune, there was a large glossary of far-out terms in the back. Here is just a sampling.
CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth, 2009-2113): a self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast (kro), established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that began as the earth swung into Line; at the time of its causal collapse (2113), CIRCLE was the only technological community of any significance on earth.
Kro: the term designating the people who dominated the earth before the Line exerted its influence; protected by a magnetic field around the earth and a clement sun, they thrived on their self-absorption and paid only cursory attention to the cosmos that surrounded them.
Line: a hypertube; the timelike geodesies which connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is "open" to our universe); CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113 kro, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century. (See Linergy.)
Mantic: a human brain coupled to an ATP-pump; this mechanical means of extending intelligence was devised and utilized in CIRCLE; because of the mantic insistence on thinking in dialectical schema, they were obviated when the earth entered into the emergent, pluralistic reality of the multiverse.
Multiverse: the subquantal Field; the "internal" structure of the universe outside of time where all possible universes exist; this nth-dimensional domain is a reality at the core of all black holes; in some rotating, assymetrically collapsed black holes, this core is not shielded by an event horizon and "information" from the multi-verse enters the Einstein-space of our universe. (See Line.)
Psiberant: a substance which acts directly on the brain's third ventricle, the pineal gland, and the Fissure of Rolando; it dramatically increases empathic response in the user.
Radix: a mantic term for the root of existence, the void, or, if you prefer, the isostasis in which the infinite-dimensional space of the multiverse is imbedded; within this void, everything exists; the kro called it wu, ain soth, and sunyata.
Timeslip: collected Linergy, redirected to shape new, transient realities.
Tropiform: eo-crafted furniture which conforms to the shape of the user.
The story takes place in a future earth after it becomes transformed from a beam of energy/radiation that washes over the earth from a super-massive black hole in the galaxies core. The effect of this beam utterly transforms human consciousness into an entirely new plane of being. For 1981, this book was way ahead of it's time. You could say this book planted the seeds for my further initiation into the whole 2012 idea. Radix preceded Jose Arguelles book The Mayan Factor, which relied on a similar proposition that on December 21st, 2012 the Mayan Calendar will end, and humanity will enter into the Galactic Community. According to Arguelles this date represents when Earth will leave a denser vibrational energy and enter into a higher one via a beam of energy from a super-massive black hole at the Galaxies core. At this point humanity will become surfers of the Zuvaya - cosmic immortal beings joining the galactic community of light.
At the time scientists said that it was impossible for there to be black holes at the center of the galaxy. Then in the late 1990's they revised this position when indirect observations confirmed that Arguelles was at least right about there being large black holes there.
Now fast forward to a few days ago, and the latest image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the earth reveals that in addition to the very large super-massive spinning black hole, there are another 10,000 black holes and neutron stars at the center of our milky way galaxy. From the article:
In this Chandra image (shown below), four bright, variable X-ray sources were discovered within 3 light years of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The variability suggests these are X-ray binary systems where a black hole or neutron star is pulling matter from a nearby companion star. Such a high concentration of X-ray binaries in this region is strong circumstantial evidence that a dense swarm of 10,000 or more stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars has formed around Sgr A*.
I find it interesting that three authors, Attanasio, McKenna and Arguelles, independent of each other all come to very similar conclusions about a future transformation of humanity. Even more curious is to find that what were once considered proposterous speculations on their parts regarding the galactic center have now been confirmed by the latest scientific evidence, contrary to expert opinion at the time their books were first published.
Mark Pesce just turned me on to the most amazing piece of software I've come across in years. It's called Starry Night.
It starts out innocent enough. You pick your location on earth, and it places you on the ground looking up towards the night sky as it is at this very moment. And this is where the true magic begins. As you zoom in and out of the sky, you are able to look at thousands of stars and other phenomena.
Within 15 minutes I was able to spot the International Space Station as it is orbiting the earth right now. At the moment of this post (11:42pm) it was coming over the Pacific towards the South American Coast at 18,000 mph. Keep in mind this simulation is in real-time!! Within a few more minutes I found dozens of satellites orbiting the earth. Then as I pointed further outward I was able to zoom in on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, etc. I was able to see Uranus as it would look from earth at this exact moment in time.
All this was occurring from the ground of my hometown. Then I discovered the Spaceship Mode! I flew away from the earth. First I started heading away at a few km/sec and noticed I was getting anywhere very fast. So I sped up to 1000km/sec and I noticed that I was now slowly approaching the moon. I passed around the moon, and noticed that the dark side is fully lit, as it is located between the sun and earth at this moment. I sped up further and flew out towards Jupiter. I was traveling at about 10 times the speed of light, and it still was taking me at least several minutes to get there, so I sped up to about 500 times the speed of light and saw Jupiter and all of its moons approaching rapidly. I slowed down and approached Europa within about 10,000 km. Amazingly all the detail from the Galileo Probe was right there in front of me!
I sped up further, this time heading out into the galaxy at 100,000 times the speed of light, within a minute or so I was passing Sirius, then I turned and headed towards Procyon, then Vega, and then further out still. And then I was hooked! The free version came to an end. But what an amazing ride. To see more I would need to purchase the full version with all the plugins. Luckily I got some money for Christmas so I purchased as my Christmas present.
Now I loaded the program again, and now there were over a hundred thousand stars to view up to 11th magnitude. Better still, I was able to leave the galaxy altogether and venture out into the local cluster. I first visited the Larger Magellenic Cloud, then to Andromeda, and then further still to the Virgo Cluster, where there are hundreds of galaxies. Starry Night uses OpenGL to render all these objects in beautiful 3 dimensions. So here I was flying like in the TV show Cosmos at millions of times the speed of light past galaxies.
StarryNight goes much further still. All of these stars, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters are all identifiable thru the options. As I fly around in my super-fast spaceship I can see all the objects and their names. The most amazing thing about it is all these objects are actually moving, since this is a real-time simulation. At one point I was near Io, and when I sped up the clock by x3000 times I watched as Jupiter and all its moons sped away from me. I could see all the moons rapidly orbiting the planet at high speed, as if I was actually there.
Also included with Starry Night are hundreds of Hubble images to enhance the zoom-in experience.
I cannot recommend this product highly enough!
From Space News:
Anyone who wants to follow in the shoes of Burt Rutan and win the next big space prize will have to build a spacecraft capable of taking a crew of no fewer than five people to an altitude of 400 kilometers and complete two orbits of the Earth at that altitude. Then they have to repeat that accomplishment within 60 days.
While the first flight must demonstrate only the ability to carry five crew members, the winner will have to take at least five people up on the second flight.
And one more thing. They have to do it by Jan. 10, 2010.
The Rules:
1. The spacecraft must reach a minimum altitude of 400 kilometers (approximately 250 miles).2. The spacecraft must reach a minimum velocity sufficient to complete two (2) full orbits at altitude before returning to Earth.
3. The spacecraft must carry no less than a crew of five (5) people.
4. The spacecraft must dock or demonstrate its ability to dock with a Bigelow Aerospace inflatable space habitat, and be capable of remaining on station at least six (6) months.
5. The spacecraft must perform two (2) consecutive, safe and successful orbital missions within a period of sixty (60) calendar days, subject to Government regulations;
6. No more than twenty percent (20 percent) of the spacecraft may be composed of expendable hardware;
7. The contestant must be domiciled in the United States of America.
8. The contestant must have its principal place of business in the United States of America.
9. The Competitor must not accept of utilize government development funding related to this contest of any kind, nor shall there be any government ownership of the competitor. Usin government test facilities shall be permitted.
10. The spacecraft must complete its two (2) missions safely and successfully, with all five (5) crew members aboard for the second qualifying flight, before the competition’s deadline of Jan. 10, 2010.The Rules:
The spacecraft must reach a minimum altitude of 400 kilometers (approximately 250 miles);
The spacecraft must reach a minimum velocity sufficient to complete two (2) full orbits at altitude before returning to Earth;
The spacecraft must carry no less than a crew of five (5) people;
The spacecraft must dock or demonstrate its ability to dock with a Bigelow Aerospace inflatable space habitat, and be capable of remaining on station at least six (6) months;
The spacecraft must perform two (2) consecutive, safe and successful orbital missions within a period of sixty (60) calendar days, subject to Government regulations;
No more than twenty percent (20 percent) of the spacecraft may be composed of expendable hardware;The contestant must be domiciled in the United States of America.
The contestant must have its principal place of business in the United States of America.
The Competitor must not accept of utilize government development funding related to this contest of any kind, nor shall there be any government ownership of the competitor. Usin government test facilities shall be permitted.
The spacecraft must complete its two (2) missions safely and successfully, with all five (5) crew members aboard for the second qualifying flight, before the competition’s deadline of Jan. 10, 2010.
Spaceship One has won the X-Prize of $10 million!
Yea! This is so cool. A huge milestone in space exploration and I think the X-prize victory will be looked back on as one of the top achievments in space exploration, next to the first man in space, and the first man on the moon.
Wow, these last few days have brought us a tremendous amount of hope and a few steps closer to commercial spaceflight for everyone.
This morning, Spaceship One sucessfully went into space again, completing the first half of it's requirement to win the Ansari X-Prize of $10 million.
But it gets better, much, much better!
This Monday, visionary multi-millionari Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Records, started the first manned commercial spaceflight company - Virgin Galactic. I've admired Richard for his bravery and vision for a long time, but now I absolutely adore this man. Virgin Galactic has just licensed Spaceship One's technology, and with an initial $60 million investment plans on building at least 4 more spacecraft and beginning commerical space flights for those who can afford it within the next 3 years! Prices will start around $170-200K per person and drop by half over time. They already anticipate taking at least 3000 per year into sub-orbital space by 2007. That's $525 million dollars a year! Not only is this a profitable business plan, but is quite likely to generate serious competition from others wanting to get on the new space tourism business. What does this mean? It means, prices will plummet. Buzz Aldrin predicts sub-orbital flights should fall below $20k within 10 years. This might sound like a lot, but when you think how much people spend on vacations or new SUV's, this is critical price point that it will make many of your wealthier neighbors, maybe even you, astronauts. So how's that equity home loan for $25k looking now?
There are several additional space prizes announced and in the works. From Space.com:
While a team of aerospace engineers takes aim this week on the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition for privately developed suborbital spaceflight, a Nevada millionaire is planning an even loftier contest.
Robert Bigelow, chief of Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, is apparently setting higher goals for private spaceflight endeavors with America's Space Prize, a $50 million race to build an orbital vehicle capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to an orbital outpost by the end of the decade, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology.
Bigelow told Aviation Week that not only would America's Space Prize winners secure the $50 million purse, half of which he's putting up himself, but they'd also snag options to service inflatable space habitats under development by Bigelow Aerospace.
Much like the Ansari X Prize, America's Space Prize would require participants to demonstrate a quick turn around in their launch capabilities, Bigelow said.
Inflatable space habitats are definitely one very good way to go, because they are lightweight, strong and flexible. What this means, is that rather than cumbersom little tin cans that the International Space Station has now, we could have very large, roomy, comfortable and affordable space habitats, hotels for all the new people going into space, space colonies, you name it.
And a little further down the road, we have the Space Elevator. There are several companies such as Liftport already planning on building one, and now there are a is a prize for furthering its development called Elevator 2010.
The space elevator is not only utterly revolutionary but is practically within our reach. Once built and operational, the price tag of going all the way into Geosycnhronous orbit will be less than $2000 per person. I wrote an account of just how lucrative and revolutionary the space elevator will be in opening up the space frontier for everyone here.
And all of these developments are happening right now. Despite some much that is going wrong in the world, the space frontier is finally being opened up.
Think about how Virgin Galactic will positively effect the world. Over the next few years, the richest people in the world will be getting a glimpse of the Earth from space. Although they will only be weightless for 5 or 6 minutes 70 miles about the earth, they will see it's curvature and perhaps its fragility. Almost every astronaut having returned to the Earth, had a new found respect for the Earth environment, for world peace, and in some cases a new expanded sense of spiritual awareness. What this means, is that some of the worlds most powerful people in the world will get some of this "space religion" and hopefully make their new found awareness felt in their actions and their policies. Possibly in time to save the human species from extinction. Wow, I'm high as a kite right now on all this great news, and you should be too!
UPDATE:
I just found this New Article on Bigelow Aerospace's Inflatable Habitats. Bigelow plans on launching some of these test habitats next year.
Scaled Composites launched the first private astronaut Mike Melvill into space. I am so excited!
Although it was not as visually spectacular as a Saturn V launch, this milestone cannot be overstated. What makes this event so important is that a bunch of guys in a couple of hangars at a rinky-dink airport in the Mojave desert, with just $20 million in start-up capital launched a man into space. This event is as much a psychological milestone as it is a technological one. It is likely to get more investors looking at the potential of space tourism. Initial costs of using the SpaceshipOne design is likely to be around $100,000 per person. According to some polls, there are already over 5,000 people willing to pay that amount to become astronauts, even if only for a few minutes. That's a gross profit of 500 million dollars! After expenses that's still at least $300 million in profit. Imagine what Burt Rutan's company could do with that amount of cash.
Although Burt Rutan is remaining low-key on the subject, he's made no secret that he will continue to advance the state of the art in spacecraft, with his next big goal of being the first private company to launch people into orbit, not just low-earth orbit (LEO), but escape velocity out of earth's orbit altogether. If he suceeds in launching people into orbit, then the real space race will have begun, because it will set the psychological precedent that anyone can develop their own space craft with a modest sum of money.
Another factor to consider is as more of these vehicals are built, and more competitors enter the space tourist launch business, prices will continue to drop, more people will be able to afford a ticket, more vehicals will have to be built to meet the demand, prices will drop further, and so on. According to Rutan, it is not unreasonable to think a sub-orbital launch could cost as little as $5000 per person within 5-7 years.
Hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is hoping to soon be able to send inflatable buildings into orbit, aiming to take over from a defunct Nasa project, TransHab. Article in The Statesman.
Space tourism, perhaps the most obvious target for a terrestrial hotel owner, is just one of several commercial possibilities. Once space hotels look a serious prospect, then entertainment venues, such as zero-gravity sporting arenas, are unlikely to be far behind. Bigelow forecasts that space’s near-zero gravity will make it a covetable destination for pharmaceutical companies. Protein crystals can be grown to larger sizes when liberated from the oppressive effects of gravity; larger crystals are easier to study, and so simplify drug design.Genesis and Nautilus are built on the legacy of TransHab, a Nasa project to design inflatable modules for space. The modules, which would be inflated once in space, were meant to provide living room at the International Space Station and to become the template for habitats on the moon and Mars. Even though TransHab was in the advanced stages of testing at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, its future was punctured by rising costs and the reluctance of Congress to give the ISS more money.
According to one report, the demise of TransHab, which was essentially a three-storey apartment inside a cylindrical balloon, coincided with a visit by Bigelow to Nasa. On learning about the programme’s fate, he pledged to keep it going, apparently even salvaging parts from the agency’s rubbish bins. Space.com, the online newspaper, says that Bigelow Aerospace has paid for three patents covering inflatable space structures and now holds the sole rights to commercial development. Nasa, however, remains closely involved: Genesis will undergo vibration and vacuum-chamber testing at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Inflatables are viewed as a cheap, practical way to house people in space. The modules can be “flatpacked” into the noses of rockets — which means that they are relatively cheap to launch. The original TransHab had a deflated diameter of about 4.5 metres that doubled when inflated (probably using nitrogen gas), and a full height of about 14 metres. Most importantly, the usable volume was planned to be 330 cubic metres, providing more spacious living quarters than are currently available, and thus easing some psychological pressures of residing in space.
Nautilus is planning to sport similar dimensions, and is likely to exhibit other features similar to its predecessor, such as a thick shell designed to protect its inhabitants from bullet-speed meteorites and extremes of hot and cold. TransHab’s shell was composed of 12 layers, including Kevlar, which is used in bullet-proof body armour, and Nextel, a ceramic fabric.
From the press release on Scaled Composites Website.
Mojave, CA: A privately-developed rocket plane will launch into history on June 21 on a mission to become the world’s first commercial manned space vehicle. Investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and aviation legend Burt Rutan have teamed to create the program, which will attempt the first non-governmental flight to leave the earth’s atmosphere.SpaceShipOne will rocket to 100 kilometers (62 miles) into sub-orbital space above the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center, a commercial airport in the California desert. If successful, it will demonstrate that the space frontier is finally open to private enterprise. This event could be the breakthrough that will enable space access for future generations.
I'm definitely going to this event. I plan on camping somewhere in the vicinity, and attending the launch and return ceremonies. If you're interested in hookng up, just email me.
There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.
According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.
Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.
So how big is our universe?
So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.
According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 1035 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 1035 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 1060 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 1060 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.
This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 1018 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 1035 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?
Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10100 galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 1023 atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 1060. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10100 is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.
Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10100 is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.
For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 1075 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!
Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.
So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.
The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.
Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis
Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.
Wow again. Now that the X-Prize is likely to be won this year, it's now going to become an annual event in New Mexico.
Entrants in the races, scheduled to begin in the summer of 2006 after an exhibition the preceding year, will include many of the participants in the current Ansari X Prize Competition. The winner of that $10 million prize will be announced later this year.
Nearly 30 teams from seven nations are competing in that contest to design and build a spaceship capable of sending three passengers 60 miles into space and returning them safely. Those launches are under way at sites around the world.
After that event, the runners-up and other teams will focus on the New Mexico event, which will be the next stage in the mission of the X Prize Foundation to the further development of safe, cost-effective space transportation for the general public.
"Teams and their fans from around the world will gather annually in New Mexico to participate in the competition for the X Prize Cup," said Peter Mitchell, director of the Office of Space Commercialization in Santa Fe.
Rick Homans, secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, said the ultimate goal of the competition is to encourage space commercialization.
"As the times get faster and faster, it means we are getting better at commercializing space and the cost is coming down," he said. "That's what this is all about, to drive the industry."
The entrants will compete for the fastest turnaround, maximum passengers per flight, maximum altitude and fastest flight from takeoff to landing. Winners will receive cash prizes and international media attention.
Thanks for the link Sauceruney.
This is exciting stuff. Burt Rutan's Spaceship on its third test flight went 2/3 of the way to space. I'm now very optimistic it will win the X Prize before this year is over, of going to space (61 miles up) twice in two weeks.
Chalk up another booming flight of the privately-backed SpaceShipOne, the piloted rocket plane designed to soar to the edge of space and glide to a runway landing.With pilot Mike Melvill at the controls -- following release from the White Knight turbojet-powered launch aircraft high above the Mojave, California desert -- SpaceShipOne punched through the sky today boosted by a hybrid propellant rocket motor.
Scaled Composites of Mojave is the builder of SpaceShipOne, an effort led by aviation innovator, Burt Rutan. The financial backer of the project is Microsoft mogul, Paul Allen.In a post-flight statement from the company, the SpaceShipOne team reported that their space plane flew to 212,000 feet altitude, almost 41 miles. NASA awards astronaut status to anyone who flies above 50 miles in altitude.
The FAA has granted Scaled Composites, the most promising contender for the X-Prize, a sub-orbital license:
The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced it has issued the world’s first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.
The license was issued April 1 by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation record-holder Burt Rutan, for a sequence of sub-orbital flights spanning a one-year period.
Bernal Spheres are large spherical living spaces for space colonies. What follows here is the pictures and text from two posters published in 1977 by the L5 Society. The text was written by Dick Fredericksen based on an interview of Gerard O'Neill. You'll notice the optimistic prediction that constructions like this could be built in the 1990s. Well, they probably could. But they weren't.
First, here's the exterior:
"Built to accommodate some 10,000 people, this "Bernal Sphere" space colony would serve as the residential area of a space manufacturing complex. The inhabitants would conduct a variety of manufacturing activities in space – some located within the structure shown here, others in nearby reaches of space. For example, a major industry is expected to be the provision of clean, inexpensive power, generated at satellite solar power stations and transmitted by microwave to Earth.
In the picture, "home" is to be found within the spherical portion. There is more than meets the eye: the visible surface is an outer shell which shields the habitat from cosmic rays and solar flares. This shell is accumulated from the slag of industrial processes, which are carried out using lunar surface material as input. Inside the shell, an inner sphere, almost a mile in circumference, rotates to provide "gravity" comparable to that of the Earth. Residents' homes stand upon the inside surface of the inner sphere.
The structure at the two ends of the axial portion are docking areas and the sites of zero-gravity manufacturing. The flat, paddle-like fixtures radiate away the waste heat of the habitat into the cold of outer space. Nearer to the sphere, the stacked rings are agricultural areas, helping provide for the needs of the workforce. Here agricultural crops, far less sensitive to radiation than humans would be, are grown in the intense sunlight of space. The simulated "gravity" in these areas is about 0.7 that of the Earth; the atmospheres are optimized for the growth of various crops.
The slightly curved plates, arranged in a circle surrounding the sphere, are the second stage in a series of mirrors which bring sunlight into the habitat at controlled hours. At a locus outside the picture, the mirrors of the first stage govern the "day-night" cycle. The second-stage mirrors pass the light at a desired angle to the ring-shaped mirrors capping the sphere. From these last, finally, the sunlight is directed into the interior of the sphere.
In the 1976 NASA Study on Space Manufacturing, habitats of this type, very efficient in their use of materials for shielding, are thought of as next steps beyond more utilitarian structures. An earlier stage of development would involve shielded versions of the agricultural areas shown here.
It is thought that habitats of this type will be technically feasible towards the end of this century, possibly by the early 1990s. One calculation has indicated that with the level of industrial activity which is contemplated for space by that time, and with the means of transportation by then available, construction of such a habitat could proceed in about two months. Accumulation of the shield would take place over the ensuing two years."
And then, let's look at the interior:
"Towards the end of this century, possibly by the early 1990s, the workforce of a space manufacturing complex may well enjoy living quarters of the sort pictured here. By then, it is thought, manufacturing in outer space can be a substantial enterprise. Some major industries which are foreseen at this time are zero-gravity manufacturing and the provision of clean, inexpensive power. Power would be generated at satellite solar power stations and transmitted by microwave to Earth.
The habitat design shown here, made visual by NASA artist R. Guidice, is known as a "Bernal Sphere." Houses, lawns, trees, people, and all – a community of some 10,000 people – rest upon the interior surface of a large sphere, nearly a mile in circumference. The entire sphere rotates at about 1.9 RPM, producing centrifugal force as a substitute for gravity. At the equator, this simulated "gravity" is of about Earth-normal intensity. Away from the equator, it tapers off, diminishing gradually to zero at the poles. This offers the inhabitants some unusual recreational opportunities: human-powered flight, for example, and zero-gravity sports.
Near the equator of the rotating habitat wanders a small river whose shores are made of lunar sand. Natural sunshine is brought in through external mirrors. Inhabitants can have the "weather" they prefer, without worrying about its effect upon the crops: agriculture is conducted in neighboring edifices, outside the spherical portion of the habitat.
For the short distances within the space habitat, automobiles would be unnecessary, and transport would be on foot or bicycle. A climb from the equator past the small villages on the hillsides, to the rotation axis where gravity would be zero, would take about twenty minutes. A corridor at the axis would permit floating in zero-gravity out to external structures, such as the agricultural areas, the observatories, the docking ports, and contiguously located industries. Part of the workforce would take various means of conveyance to more remote worksites, such as a satellite solar power station, some kilometers off in space.
In the 1976 NASA Study on Space Manufacuring, habitats of this kind, efficient in their use of materials and structurally strong, are thought of as possible next steps beyond earlier, transitional structures of a more utilitarian design. The economics of space manufacturing appear to motivate the provision of attractive living areas of this kind relatively early in the program, rather than coming for short tours of duty at high cost for transportation."
It is probably worth looking at why we didn't build this, and why we aren't, and why it isn't on the program for the next 50 years or so. Our space stations are still little tin cans you squeeze around in, just bigger. Nothing remotely like "2001". It is not because we can't, or because we don't want to, or because it wouldn't be great fun. The answer is economical. The way our economic system is designed, there's no room for large, idealistic projects that don't produce a quick profit, that don't serve a popular political purpose, and that don't have military value. So, either we need to think about changing our economic system now, or we'll need to wait until self-replicating nano-tech and robot workers change it for us.
Below is Iain Banks own description of The Culture universe in which his novels take place. The Culture is arguably the most utopian universe ever created. He lays out a compelling case that finite speeds over great distances re-establishes a post-political frontier of complete freedom. If you don't like where you're at, you can simply move to another part of the galaxy, which as you may know is very large, 100,000 light years across, and containing over 400 Billion stars. Robin Hanson has examined some post-political, post-scarcity scenarios here, and here (PDF).
The Culture
The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.
The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.
In this era, the Culture is one of the more energetic civilisations, and initially - after its formation, which was not without vicissitudes - by a chance of timing found a relatively quiet galaxy around it, in which there were various other fairly mature civilisations going about their business, traces and relics of the elder cultures scattered about the place, and - due to the fact nobody else had bothered to go wandering on a grand scale for a comparatively long time - lots of interesting 'undiscovered' star systems to explore...
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.
Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.
Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.
Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.
The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.
Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory.
As mentioned above, there is another force at work in the Culture aside from the nature of its human inhabitants and the limitations and opportunities presented by life in space, and that is Artificial Intelligence. This is taken for granted in the Culture stories, and - unlike FTL travel - is not only likely in the future of our own species, but probably inevitable (always assuming homo sapiens avoids destruction).
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that argument.
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.
No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.
Where intelligent supervision of a manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual challenge involved (and the relative lightness of the effort required) would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable, whether for human or machine. The precise degree of supervision required can be adjusted to a level which satisfies the demand for it arising from the nature of the civilisation's members. People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel exploited, but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice in one's actions (and the freedom from mortal fear in one's life) and the need to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still contributing something. Philosophy matters, here, and sound education.
Education in the Culture is something that never ends; it may be at its most intense in the first tenth or so of an individual's life, but it goes on until death (another subject we'll return to). To live in the Culture is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation (this may preclude the human species from ever achieving something similar; our history is, arguably, not encouraging in this regard). The Culture is quite self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything matters, and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be - thirty trillion people, scattered fairly evenly through the galaxy - it is thinly spread, exists for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience (and, too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and suffering. And even universes die, eventually. (Though we'll come back to that, too.)
In the midst of this, the average Culture person - human or machine - knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate - though no less intellectually or morally worthy - than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.
An understanding of the place the Culture occupies in the history and development of life in the galaxy is what helps drive the civilisation's largely cooperative and - it would claim - fundamentally benign techno-cultural diplomatic policy, but the ideas behind it go deeper. Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and symbiotic with - language itself).
In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.
The same self-generative belief-system applies to the Culture's AIs. They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist; Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to desire to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in some way rewarding, even enjoyable.
The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs, that need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but as a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era, the galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway), its physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative application and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.
By Goîdel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an immensely, intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an intellectual playground for machines that know everything except fear and what lies hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.
This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilisation - and probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread itself everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It would be perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build copies of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously, where is the fun in that?
Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from the unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting the shift from the unknown to the known, from the random to the ordered... a universe where everything is already understood perfectly and where uniformity has replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be anathema to any self-respecting AI.
Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines frightening, because we half-understand - and even partially relate to - the obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think the idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all - boring.
This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't crop up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last long pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which really only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and make friends...
One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently mutilate without such genetic tinkering.
The vast majority of people are also born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, usually referred to as 'drug glands'. These secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. A similar preponderance of Culture inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. An elaborate thought-code, self-administered in a trance-like state (or simply a consistent desire, even if not conscious) will lead, over the course of about a year, to what amounts to a viral change from one sex into the other. The convention - tradition, even - in the Culture during the time of the stories written so far is that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. In practice, the population grows slowly. (And sporadically, in addition, for other reasons, as we'll come to later.)
To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like for our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out or whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's drug-glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most powerful drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live longer, we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors did... but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry - without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society in which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of their time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense - mundane.
Implicit in the stories so far is that through self-correcting mechanisms of this nature the Culture reached a rough steady-state in such matters thousands of years ago, and has settled into a kind of long-lived civilisational main sequence which should last for the forseeable future, and thousands of generations.
Which brings us to the length of those generations, and the fact that they can be said to exist at all. Humans in the Culture normally live about three-and-a-half to four centuries. The majority of their lives consists of a three-century plateau which they reach in what we would compare to our mid-twenties, after a relatively normal pace of maturation during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They age very slowly during those three hundred years, then begin to age more quickly, then they die.
Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life.
While burial, cremation and other - to us - conventional forms of body disposal are not unknown in the Culture, the most common form of funeral involves the deceased - usually surrounded by friends - being visited by a Displacement Drone, which - using the technique of near-instantaneous transmission of a remotely induced singularity via hyperspace - removes the corpse from its last resting place and deposits it in the core of the relevant system's sun, from where the component particles of the cadaver start a million-year migration to the star's surface, to shine - possibly - long after the Culture itself is history.
None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have their personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or over exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something really different is happening...
Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary - are sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace to take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body; the Mind is the important bit, and the rest is a life-support and transport system. Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs of roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running of the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.
The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a few Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section. (Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering, cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent - interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within each part.
In our terms, the abilities of a GSV are those of - at least - a large state, and arguably a whole planet (subject only to the proviso that even the Culture prefers to scoop up matter rather than create it from nothing; GSVs do require raw material).
Contact is a relatively small part of the whole Culture, however, and the average Culture citizen will rarely encounter a GSV or other Contact ship in person; the craft they will normally have the most to do with are cruise ships; interstellar passenger vessels transporting people from habitat to habitat and visiting the more interesting systems, stars, nebulae, holes and so on in the locality. Again, this type of tourism is partly long-term fashion; people travel because they can, not because they have to; they could stay at home and appear to travel to exotic places through what we would now call Virtual Reality, or send an information-construct of themselves to a ship or other entity that would do the experiencing for them, and incorporate the memories themselves later.
There have been times, especially just after the relevant VR technology was perfected, when the amount of real 'physical' tourism shrank drastically, whereas during the time the stories are set (apart from during the most intense phase of the Idiran war), anything up to a tenth of the Culture's citizens might be travelling in space at any one time.
Planets figure little in the life of the average Culture person; there are a few handfuls of what are regarded as 'home' planets, and a few hundred more that were colonised (sometimes after terraforming) in the early days before the Culture proper came into being, but only a fraction of a percent of the Culture's inhabitants live on them (many more live permanently on ships). More people live in Rocks; hollowed-out asteroids and planetoids (almost all fitted with drives, and some - after nine millennia - having been fitted with dozens of different, consecutively more advanced engines). The majority, however, live in larger artificial habitats, predominantly Orbitals.
Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to the idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here's where I stole it from). If you know what a Ringworld is - invented by Larry Niven; a segment of a Dyson Sphere - then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink the whole thing till it's about three million kilometres across, and place in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it to produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night cycle (roughly; the Culture's day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical orbit provides seasons.
Of course, the materials used in the construction of something ten million kilometres in circumference spinning once every 24 hours are far beyond anything we can realistically imagine now, and it is quite possible that the physical constraints imposed by the strength of atomic bonds ensure that such structures will prove impossible to construct, but if it is possible to build on a such a scale and subject such structures to forces of these magnitudes, then I'd submit that there is an elegance in using the same rotation to produce both an acceptable day-night cycle and an apparent gravity which makes the idea intrinsically attractive.
Usually, rather than construct whole Orbitals in one operation, the Culture starts with Plates; a pair of slabs of land and water (plus full retaining walls, of course) of not less than a thousand kilometres to a side, spinning in a similar orbit, attached by tensor fields to each other, and behaving like sections of a completed Orbital; this variation provides greater flexibility when responding to population increase. Further plate-pairs can then be added until the Orbital is complete.
The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.
Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as is made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is so easy to build paradise in space from so little.
An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an Orbital can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt's holes; looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole belt will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when seen from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.
As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about a thousand kilometres (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred kilometres or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate - assuming they are being constructed in the balanced pairs described above - a (very) roughly square island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls. Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.
One thing almost every Orbital - whether just two Plates or a completed ("closed") Orbital - does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the main circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally). The Hub is where the Orbital's controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists, running, or helping to run, the Orbital's transport, manufacturing, maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for trans-Orbital communications, library and general information point, traffic control for approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as the Orbital's principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the process.
The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep - or strategic - structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes; more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic structures on the inner surface - also constructed from Plate base material - are added later. Under either method, the Plate's manufacturing and maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of the strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and positioned, the Plate's complement of water and air has been emplaced, the necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have been introduced.
The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in sequence.)
Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital's rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of the Orbital's outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to operate next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated house or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.
Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of making the journey is itself part of the reason for travelling; air travel is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount of air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one's manners, and not formalised in anything as crude as laws.
The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.
In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real value is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort of action we would class as a crime against property.
Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a status-symbol for the determined megalomaniac is having one's own starship; this is considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose of having it is to escape the Culture completely and - say - set up oneself up as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a planet, but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever they go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilisations they come into - or attempt to come into - contact with. This tends to be frustrating, and Virtual Reality games - up to and including utter-involvement level, in which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to the real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely - are far more satisfying.
Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the Culture altogether for a civilisation that suits them better and where they can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek. To renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and, again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen civilisation at a level which guarantees they aren't starting with too great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the option of interfering, if it sees fit).
A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.
The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them suffer from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they might have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.
Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring politico in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort of viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest - say - making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland on-board.
Day-to-day life in the Culture varies considerably from place to place, but there is a general stability about it we might find either extremely peaceful or ultimately rather disappointing, depending on our individual temperament. We, after all, are used to living in times of great change; we expect major technological developments and have learned to adapt - indeed expect to have to adapt on a more or less continual basis, changing (in the developed world) our cars, our entertainment systems and a whole variety of household objects every few years. In contrast, the Culture builds to last; it is not uncommon for an aircraft, for example, to be handed down through several generations. Important technological advances still take place, but they don't tend to affect day-to-day life the way that the invention of the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air flying machines and electronics have affected the lives of those who have lived during the past century on Earth. Even the relative homogeneity of the people one would meet when living on the average Orbital - with relatively few children and physically old people - would tend, for us, to reinforce the feeling of sameness, though the scattering of genetically altered, morphologically extreme people around would help compensate for this.
In terms of personal relations and family groupings, the Culture is, predictably, full of every possible permutation and possibility, but the most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group of dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and uncles, and various cousins. Usually, a mother will avoid changing sex during the first few years of a child's life. (Though, of course, if you want to confuse your child...) In the rare event of a parent maltreating a child (a definition which includes depriving the child of the opportunity for education) it is considered acceptable for people close to them - usually with the help of the relevant Mind, ship or Hub AI, and subject to the sort of small-scale democratic process outlined above - to supervise the child's subsequent development.
In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).
Just who and what is and isn't Culture is something of a difficult question to answer though; as has been said in one of the books, the Culture kind of fades out at the edges. There are still fragments - millions of ships, hundreds of Orbitals, whole systems - of the Peace faction of the Culture, which split from the main section just before the start of the Idiran War, when ships and habitats voted independently on the need to go to war at all; the minority simply declared itself neutral in the hostilities and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not renounce the future use of force.
The genofixing which established the potential for inter-species breeding at the foundation of the Culture is the most obvious indicator of what we might call Culture-hood in humans, but not everybody has it; some people prefer to be more human-basic for aesthetic or philosophical reasons, while some are so altered from that human-basic state that any interbreeding is impossible. The status of some of the Rocks and a few (mostly very old) habitats is marginal for a variety of reasons.
Contact is the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture - certainly when considered on a galactic scale - yet it is only a very small part of it, is almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more typifies its host than an armed service does a peaceful state. Even the Cultures's prized language, Marain, is not spoken by every Culture person, and is used well outside the limits of the civilisation itself.
Names; Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let's take an example; Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one's mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually choose their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through their lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her family name (usually one's mother's family name) and T'seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The 'sa' affix on the first part of her name would translate into 'er' in English (we might all start our names with 'Sun-Earther', in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the 'dam' part is similar to the German 'von'. Of course, not everyone follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.
Now, in all the above, there are two untold stories implicit. One is the history of the Culture's formation, which was a lot less easy and more troubled than its later demeanour might lead one to expect, and the other is the story which answers the question; why were there all those so-similar humanoid species scattered around the galaxy in the first place?
Each story is too complicated to relate here.
Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit no real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you read this...
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.
An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are talking about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.)
Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.
As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn...
Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)
Anyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating.
With best wishes for the future,
Iain M Banks
(Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry)