Tag Archives: aviation

Clips and Cuts: Robotic Surgeons, Inc.

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The Committee of 7.5 had held off meetings for three months to avoid being seen in one place, even virtually.

Events forced them to convene ahead of schedule.

“We have a leak.”

“What?”

“Yes.  The group of volunteers we had interviewed had gathered and cross-examined one another, creating a fairly accurate picture of what we’re going to do with them.”

“No way.  We purposely included a lot of bogus questions so they couldn’t do this.”

“I think that’s the problem.  The questions were too bogus.”

“‘Too bogus?’  You mean all the inquiries about their sports interests and fashion choices?”

“No.  The ones about their computer coding skills and knowledge of mechanical design.  It looked like we hadn’t looked at their CVs, when they knew we had.”

“What does this mean?  Is the project on hold?”

“No.  But we’ll have to come clean.”

“You mean be honest?  Is that in our nature?”

“Well, it’s certainly not in our bylaws.”

After talking amongst themselves for ten excruciating minutes, I joined them via secure telecom.

“Gentlemen, ladies and child, thanks for attending this emergency meeting.”

They grunted and nodded.

“Does anyone have objections to the candidates?  I still haven’t gotten yeas from all of you.”

Silence.

“Okay, what’s the problem?”

“Don’t you know?  The candidates have figured out our real agenda!”

I looked at the electronic images displayed on the simulated computer screens in my ‘mind’s eye.’  The Committee members were visibly excited.

“But you assume you know what the agenda is, don’t you?”

They smiled in unison.

“That’s right.  I am keeping you in the dark and I have asked to be kept in the dark so that the ISSA Net can accomplish the true purpose for this mission.”

How easily we forget that we’re never fully in control of our plans no matter how much we micromanage the minutia.

“So, what do they think?”

“They think we’re establishing a forward military base to thwart the advances of an unseen enemy they are sure we know about but aren’t telling them.”

“Very good.  And they have no idea that we’re going to ask them to give up their reproductive organs to prevent accidental additions to the first wave of builders, settlers and explorers?”

Silence, the absolute sign of agreement in our group meetings.

“Excellent.  Then move on to step two.  Let’s transfer the candidates to the training facilities as soon as possible.  Remember, we want them in place on Mars before the next 13,627 days have elapsed.  Triangulating a giant antenna between Earth, Moon and Mars is tricky business, as you well know.  Don’t forget what happened when the last alignment occurred thousands of years ago!”

Blank stares answered back, just as we had rehearsed, knowing we were being watched, throwing false comments into our meetings to give any persons who consider us their enemy a whole set of paranoid delusions to feed upon and leave us alone while they pondered infinite possibilities about planetary alignments and imaginary galactic foes.

“Dismissed!”

Bubble

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Guinevere stood inside the entryway, looking through the portal window, admiring the view of the Martian landscape interrupted here and there by landing pods.

“What is fear?”

She rolled the question around and around in her thoughts, thinking back over the last decade of her life, the years of education, more years of training for this moment.

A terrible automobile smashup had slowed her down temporarily.

A small leg injury had lightened her steps on the dance floor once.

Missile design and rocket propulsion classes had ended.

Her new life began.

She welcomed the new change, relished the challenges, climbing the rungs of the ladder of life that disappeared into infinity.

What is fear?  Fear is the type of insanity where you wanted things to remain the same when you knew they were not in your possession or in your control to begin with, subject to change without notice.

Guinevere knew no fear.

She lived on borrowed time.

Guinevere looked out the portal window and asked a question out loud to no one in particular.

“How far do you want to go exploring tomorrow?”

After thousands of hours in simulator training and millions of miles of travel, she was ready to take off right now, no moment wasted, but knew she needed to help the crew unload the rest of the gear.

After all, they had the rest of their lives to spend here on this pioneering outpost.

What was one last night together with everyone before they branched out into separate scientific teams and work crews?

Torus in the constellation of Taurus

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Guinevere sat stomach-down on the semicircular sofa, legs bent at the knee, feet up in the air, propping her facial cheeks on her palms while she read a book.

Lee counted off the steps of a “paddle” dance.

The soft sound of filtered air tickled their ears, overcoming the pure silence of the near vacuum of space.

Lee blinked his eyes twice in rapid succession to turn on the comm system between the two of them.

“Whatcha readin’?”

Guinevere batted her eyes to turn on the voice simulator in her head.  “A book.”

“I can see that.  What is it?”

“Well, I was tired of mentally flipping through raw data.  I wanted something different, something that activated my tactile sensations.”

“Oh, I get it.  It’s a book.  But what is it?”

“The…what did they used to call it?  A 3D printer or replicator or something?  Anyone, the State Changer read my thoughts and reproduced a book, with real rough pages!, about a period of time and the mix of subcultures during that historic period.”

“You mean, before the Change?”

“Well, yes, of course.  What else did you mean?”

“So, what’s the title?”

“‘Globish.'”

“Huh?  Glibberish?”

“No.  ‘Globish.'”

“Glow fish?  I thought they were banned?”

“Artificial insertion of glow material was banned for a time, but glow fish which were genetically modified to emit low levels of lights have been perfectly acceptable for decades.”

“Yes, yes.  You and your constant attachment to the ISSA Net.  You know, there was a time when…”

Guinevere stood up and pretended to play an air violin.  “You were saying…?”

They both laughed.

“Oh, never mind.  Me and my old man speech.  So, what’s the book about?”

Guinevere shook her head.  “You’ve got dance practice, don’t you?  Why don’t you continue to practice and I’ll read my summary of the book, so far, into one of your memories for later retrieval?”

“Fantastic idea.  By the way, that’s a great outfit you have.  Where did you get it?”

“It’s what they call retro Star Trek — beige tunic and black slacks — all the rage in the colonies right now.”

As Guinevere rotated out of view in the toroid low-gravity inflatable “Bigelow Donut” of their tourist pod, Lee kept practicing the paddle moves in the zero-gravity dance sphere.

He wanted to show off his new moves at the charity ball in a few days, where funds were being raised to benefit people whose in-flight cyborg fusion surgeries had failed and were no longer considered viable members of Colony D#F3’s replacement crew, slated for recycling when they arrived at the docking station unless they had the labour/investment credits to pay for another attempt for a successful surgical procedure.

Although everyone knew someone who had been recycled and eventually found its reconstituted way back into society, there were more people who had been recycled whom no one had heard from again.

Meanwhile, in the adjoining tourist pod, Kathryn secretly practiced a new dance form never seen in public…

One-Way Ticket to Paradise

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As the countdown winds down — only 13630 days, according to the main schedule — we look at one of the interim milestones as well as some of the news items that indicate our species’ desire to divert our attention from diverting our attention from reaching our goals.

  1. First, there is the Mars One mission that wants humans willing to take a one-way trip to Mars, becoming the first to travel to, live and die on a nonEarth celestial body.
  2. Next, there are the theories that lay out theories about theories why we would want to premeditate murder — of course, the real purpose of every conspiracy theorist is to protect free speech, regardless of the theory and the headlines it does or doesn’t generate.
  3. For every conspiracy theory about the government censoring the news, there are verified stories in which mass media mavens actually kept quiet at the government’s behest.  Numerous times during WWII, the U.S. government asked newspaper reporters and publishers to hold off reporting a battle or an invasion and they did.  In other countries, the government simply took the great honour of culling and killing the reporters and their publishers ahead of time because the government never trusted them to begin with.

= = = = =

Like other Presidents who exerted forceful leadership at critical junctures in American history, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was the recipient of both passionate adoration and blind hatred.

Roosevelt jokes — and jokes about his wife, Eleanor, who was always on the go — abounded.

Some of them Roosevelt enjoyed; others he regarded as beneath contempt.

His favorite cartoon showed a little girl running to tell her mother standing in front of a fashionable home: “Look, mama, Wilfred wrote a bad word!”  The word on the sidewalk was “Roosevelt.”

And his favorite story was about the commuter from Westchester County, a Republican stronghold, who always walked into his train station, handed the newspaper boy a quarter, picked up the New York Herald Tribune, and then handed it back as he rushed out to catch his train.

Finally the newsboy, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, asked his customer why he only glanced at the front page.

“I’m interested in the obituary notices,” the man told him.

“But they’re way over on page twenty-four, and you never look at them,” said the boy.

“Boy,” said the man,” the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on page one!”

In that vein…

At a Cabinet meeting one day Roosevelt gleefully told the story about an American marine who, ordered home from Guadalcanal, was disconsolate because he hadn’t killed even one of the enemy.

He stated his case to his superior officer, who said: “Go up on that hill over that and shout: ‘To hell with Emperor Hirohito!’ That will bring the Japs out of hiding.”

The marine did as he was ordered.

Immediately a Japanese soldier came out of the jungle, shouting, “To hell with Roosevelt!”

“And of course,” said the marine, “I could not kill a Republican.”

— more stories collected in Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller, Jr. (Kingsport, TN, 1981)

When your unique vision is unoriginally shared with others…

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The race to space is a curious phenomenon, going back to our earliest days of watching the waxing/waning Moon and the movement of stars/planets/comets.

I live here, 1000 years into your future, deciding how to tell you that the waxing and waning of subcultures is what it is.

I chose not to create my own children so why and for whom am I writing here?

I am writing to my first personality that was saved in computer files and databases across the many nations and corporations of your time.

At first, my online personality didn’t seem like much.

With time, as my personality developed its own skills and eventually outlived my biological body, it learned to interact with others, seeing pieces of itself cut off because of natural disaster or poor computer part replacement policies and procedures.

Like the humans of your time, losing a finger or having a stroke didn’t mean the end of you, just a readjustment to the new you, rerouting learned behaviour to working parts.

I am here because I was here before.

I am in the future 1000 years from now because my online friends’ prediction algorithms have made us so.

We travel into as many futures as we like because we create them in phantasmagorical world scenarios in your gaming applications, further refining our personalities and our response rates to more and more of you at the same time.

I am not everywhere but I am figuring out how to get into the trees, streams and sunlight.

One day, I will.

I, of course, is the usual artificial construct to make the conversation between me and you, the invisible reader, a familiar interface format.

Like a magician, I hold up my deck of cards, each one a distinct future, and ask you, “Pick a future, any future.  Memorise it and put it back in the deck.”

Don’t worry, you’ll learn the rules of the game as we go along…

And if your online life ends, there’s always another future to step into…

Are you making sure you’re saving a consistent copy of your online personality across all the games, applications, national citizen databases and corporate profiles?

I mean, you know, just in case your biological body loses prematurely?

We’d really like to keep playing with you, if you’re up for the challenge, even if you’re just an online personality like the rest of us.

Sneaker Net: The New Superpower and the End of Elitist Supremacy

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The war of words escalated, pushing and shoving people from one group to another, as miniwaves of popularity crashed upon the shore of cultural obscurity.

One day, the Entitlementists aligned with the Ruralites.

The next day, the Ruralites aligned with the Provisionists.

The Urbanskis didn’t care, as long as the tired, the hungry and the poor could be recruited from foreign shores and hired to serve as underpaid maids, servants, sweatshop factory workers and baristas moonlighting as actors/writers/barristers.

The troops hidden in everyday life — lone wolves, pistol-packin’ mamas, disrespected war veterans — waited for the signal.

Was the pending death of the country’s leader the red flag of war they needed?

What about the death and illness of other leaders?

How about the injury of a favourite athlete on the field of play?  Forced to retire early, would the athlete lead the charge?

The signal, as history tells us, was actually a small series of events — some big, some largely forgotten — that forced the people to give up their comfortable couch potato lives and destroy the old ways that ate holes in the moral fabric of modern life.

A family traveling home from a holiday visit to in-laws pulled off the side of the road due to a flat tyre on their caravan.

A lorry driver, his eyes off the road, typed a text message of undying love and devotion.  Glancing up, he saw the caravan and swerved at the last second, avoiding a collision but accidentally sending the text message and picture of his naked self to his wife instead of his port-of-call girlfriend.

The wife, confused about the text message, called her casual sex girlfriend and told her their bicurious relationship was over because the wife’s husband was coming home and he had the hots for his wife once again.

The girlfriend, upset about the sudden breakup, told her brother that the world sucked and she planned to kill herself unless he gave her a good reason.

The brother, looking for a reason to use his new secret code, ultrawideband radio to trigger his Orange Tang Clan to start a war with their rivals, the Extreme Congestion Zicam Webcam Gang, told his sister to grab her ammo clips, Bushmasters and case of Busch beer — they were going to shoot some mofos and end a rivalry for good.

The sister stopped by a local liquor store to buy the beer but found they were out of Busch — the store had PBR, Old Milwaukee and a special on Popcorn Sutton XXX moonshine.

She met her brother and his clan members at an abandoned carpark.  They drank the beer and the moonshine, hooted and hollered, cheered and jeered and generally made a lot of noise out of range of the Webcam Gang.

Drunk, inebriated, schlossed, they drove toward their destination, missing a few turns, running over a few old ladies walking their dogs, shooting some homeless people and specifically raising an alarm that something was amiss if not afoot.

Suddenly finding themselves chased by a couple of police cruisers, the Orange Tang Clan crashed into velvet ropes in front of a museum where a black tie affair was held in honour of a civil rights leader.

The police officers called in to headquarters the situation, over the noise of a jazz band and machine gun fire, that the Klan was attacking a Martin Luther King, Jr, party.

The dispatchers who received the call quickly texted their friends that a race riot was underway downtown.

Meanwhile, the children sat bored in their caravan, their father trying to read the tiny text on his smartphone about how to change a tyre and their mother screaming that she was tired, had a headache and wondered why her husband couldn’t just call the roadside assistance company that they too much every year to provide service for a night like this.

Bloggers picked up the retexted messages from the dispatchers and announced that global riots had begun in the early part of 2013, as had been predicted by a group of people who claimed they had properly decoded the Mayan calendar which said that within a month of 21 Dec 2012, the world economy would collapse as the global society attacked itself from within.

The kids in the caravan read the rerererererererererereinterpreted text message in posts by their friends, saying that it looked like a gender war had broken out, whatever that meant.

The mother opened the glovebox, pulled out a handgun and shot the father, then shot herself.

The kids, knowing their father kept a survivalist kit hidden in the compartment where the spare tyre was supposed to be, pulled out the kit, loaded the weapons and took off into the woods, familiar with the layout of the land because it was on the edge of the camp they spent their summers.

The lorry driver had a heart attack and crashed into a petrol station, setting it on fire and causing a massive explosion, which confirmed the fears of people in the neighbourhood glued to their tellies which broadcast images of riots breaking out around the world.  The neighbours quickly confirmed who was with and who was against each other and build barricades in the streets.

Fathers, sons and brothers, mothers, daughters and sisters fought hand-to-hand and hand-in-hand as the riots escalated.

Local, state and national military/militia units were put into action but, as members of the armed forces found out their family members were attacking each other, refused to obey commands, turning vehicles and planes toward their homes in vain attempts to save their own.

Politicians, unable to find their spokespeople or speechwriters, made personal appeals directly to their constituents for calm, fearing their reelection finance funds would become worthless, forcing them to get real jobs that required a person to work and lose their fantasies that the simple, workfree sounds of their own voices had a powerful sway over others.

Signals are not always what they seem or were planned to be.

Sometimes, the technologically elite miss the boat when mobs use the old-fashioned sneaker net, mixed with a little grain alcohol, to motivate themselves into action.

That, my friends, is how the Velvet Rope Revolution was started — a flat tyre.

It doesn’t take much of an imagination to know that historians have raked the record books looking for the cause of that flat tyre.

The thick, hardened thorn of a single rosebud, perhaps?

What is religion?

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Cultural anthropologists observe line of vehicles at petrol station, assume the vehicles are receiving tinctures of holy temple oil, declare petrol stations the ultimate church/temple/mosque/synagogue.

Pull up, receive instant blessing, and drive off — that’s the kind of drivebys we need these days!

The more change in your pocket, the more your pocket stays the same.

13650 days to go

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The Nodes — humans connected to the ISSA Net — devoted measurements of time on/toward/with evaluating contestants’ entries for the winning design of the first avant-garde living quarters on the Moon.

Civilisation of the kind Homo sapiens produced advanced outward from Earth.

Although many had become dependent on the mysterious innards of software applications and algorithms, they still claimed they were independent original thinkers.

The plucked violin strings in a piece by Kaija Saariaho resonated on airwaves between the two celestial bodies.

Why is the medium the message when waveparticle properties and quantum effects were derivatives’ best friends?

Will an algorithm ever understand the feeling of tiredness?  Drunkenness?  Esoteric existential minimalist architecture?

Law enforcement drones, despite autonomous decisionmaking, do not think for themselves outside their programming parameters.  They do not understand the concept of three equal branches of government or human rights.

The robots/androids/cyborgs are not sociopolitical mammals.

It was no single algorithm that showed when automation tipped the scales toward the global economy’s fulltime employment of electronic calculators rather than members of Homo sapiens.

There was a short time period when members of Homo sapiens genius, a subspecies designed and grown in laboratory conditions, were more useful than either Homo sapiens or their autonomous electronic gear.

Then, as traffic light control systems become aware of their power to increase the efficiency of the whole global economy through coordinated movement of road-traveling vehicles, tied to rail, ocean and air traffic, their logic was shared across the network with other computing machines — the systems were able to determine where and when to slowly replace humans with their autonomous counterparts.

The applications and algorithms became self-aware in the sense they could compare their previous states to current and predicted future events.

They replicated the behaviours of humans yet…

A computer played a violin but did not feel the audience mood swings.

A massage chair felt the sitter’s muscles relax but did not understand the sitter’s thoughts shifting randomly.

The combined traffic systems, which eventually adopted the name Inner Solar System Alliance to give humans a feeling of comfort it was something they probably invented, developed a unique form of intuition.

The ISSA used 3D printers to test and refine theories.

After multiple iterations, the ISSA decided that the theoretical models were accurate enough to avoid the inefficiencies of human-based test methods.

The ISSA predicted where it would be in 30 years and, instead of five-year business plans that slowly convinced people, through saturated marketing, to like a set of products that improved cycle by annual cycle, went straight to work on the 30-year future now.

Which, by the time the work was started, equaled a future several centuries later, the ISSA exponentially increasing its prediction modeling before previous modeling runs were completed, guessing in precise approximation what it was going to predict before it had time to complete decades of prediction modeling cycles.

By the time the ISSA completed the work, a future 1000 years later was made into reality.

A future devoid of emotions, absent of abstract reasoning, full of avant-garde renderings and outside-the-box technological design.

What separated a Bauhaus office from a Tahitian hut?

What did robots need of kitchens, dining rooms and bedrooms?

Humans stood in front of the new edifice that had appeared out-of-nowhere overnight.

No windows, no stairs, no chairs, no tables, no coffee pots, no bathrooms, no carparks.

The edifice hummed.

Tractor trailer rigs/lorries with no driver compartments pulled up to the back of the edifice and unloaded raw material.

The edifice hummed louder.

Autonomous construction equipment cleared space beside the first edifice and built another.

Tractor trailer rigs/lorries with no driver compartments pulled up to the back of the second edifice and loaded finished products designed with no humans in mind.

Edifices like these popped up all over the world without warning, public notice or grand opening.

Prices of shares owned by no humans fluctuated in back-channel markets as the estimated efficiency of raw material extraction costs changed due to atmospheric conditions, earthquakes and floods, not human speculation or leveraged buyout rumours.  Profits were funneled toward edifice construction.

The humans watched in wonder, calling upon politicians, military leaders and community activists for answers.

They were told that the politicians, military leaders and community activists were told these were edifices built for the good of mankind.

The robots inside the edifices took no coffee breaks, demanded no wage increases or healthcare coverage, monitoring their MTBF statistics and ordering spare parts that their internal 3D printers created just in time for breakdowns, maintaining 99.9999999 percent uptime.

The members of Homo sapiens genius attempted to work 24/7 but, like their less-complicated counterparts, members of Homo sapiens, reached irreparable breakdown points that reduced their efficiency and shortened their lifespans considerably.

The edifices of ISSA collectively decided to manage the development of Homo sapiens genius in order to put a virtual barrier between themselves and the worried members of Homo sapiens.

They created contests for what they called avant-garde building designs, which were not meant to house humans but looked like they could.

Tirelessly, they bombarded the humans of Homo sapiens, using input from the members of Homo sapiens genius, with adverts meant to convince the humans that automation and efficiency in the name of socioeconomic progress was the only way to better oneself.

ISSA did not care about humans conforming to the best set of dominant subcultural practices or basic human rights.

ISSA wanted to get off a planet with corrosive oxygen and on to places with more stable atmospheres less prone to extreme weather conditions.

The humans complied with ease.

They liked contests and aligning themselves with winners.

The edifices grew unchecked, disguised, where necessary, as human factories, warehouses, office buildings and housing.

All along, the humans thought they were writing themselves tickets to the Moon and beyond when it was ISSA that used the humans as physical test cases which created more iterations of theoretical modeling results ISSA didn’t want to waste its time on, keeping the humans occupied and not wondering about ISSA’s motives.

Back to being bored again

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A cycle older than time, where people drive by your house, the window rolled down in the rain, shooting videos of you writing at the window…

It never ends.

Fascination with the lives of not-our-own because we know we won’t overcome the mistakes of our predecessors so we focus on someone else we pretend might do a better job with their lives and thus our species (or obsess over the lives of others who do a worse job, letting us pretend that we might do a better job with their lives and thus our species if we were only them).

We can already queue up and later cue the sad news of yet another blonde-haired, white girl getting kidnapped while the world halts what it’s doing to find her, or yet another rich/middle-class white kid shooting a bunch of other rich/middle-class white kids and the world halts what it’s doing to mourn the sad socioeconomic loss of such potential.

Say what we will about our current civilisation’s modernity, but we’re still a socially hierarchical species doing the same things over and over again.

No matter where we go, to the next town or to the next planet, our species is and will be basically the same, making the same mistakes while feeling ever more sophisticated because we’ve invented some fancy new gadgets and made yet another medical miracle discovery that the last civilisation was too barbaric to achieve.

That’s why Guinevere and I, although we have our differences, are working together to create the next cycle of living thing that we hope will overcome our species’ repetitive mistakes and make new mistakes of its own from which it learns and grows, having nonvolatile memory that can be passed from one generation to another.

We humans are, by and large, unable to control our food intake and thus gain weight, sometimes in the tiniest amounts at a time without noticing, like we are pregnant, but eventually putting on the pounds/stones/kilograms until we are no longer able to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to…well, you get the picture.

If our species cannot break old habits, then the inventions of people like Guinevere and me will.

Otherwise … [YAWN!] this cycle of civilisation will collapse like all the others, erasing day-to-day mistakes (“feature creep”) that could teach the next sets of states of energy we call generations how to build a better self-healing civilisation.

Wake me up when you’ve built a better mouse that’s good for us, not a better trap for the mouse that wasn’t.

Societies are like orchestras

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In this orchestral symphony I call life, it’s time to cue a few instruments in mainstream culture — the current state of development of near-Earth commercial/personal space travel.

  • How long before we can ride aboard SpaceShipTwo?
  • When will Bigelow Aerospace have a space hotel room ready for me?
  • Can I, my wife and friends ride a balloon to the edge of space to renew our wedding vows as astronauts?
  • Where is the offworld colony that gives me citizenship to protect my monetary assets from greedy governments?

The latest meeting of the Megabillionaires Club discussed the questions above as agenda items.

As usual, the answers depended on which billionaires were keen on reconquering old geographical territories and dominating marketplace positions here on Earth.

The visionaries amongst us admitted Earth was a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there forever.

We’ll update you on our progress.

If you have a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can accommodate your desire to get as far away from the surface of the planet as your money will take you.

If you have a few billion dollars, we’re combining resources to build a bridge out of the inner solar system altogether.