Rig

How do I explain that my body is growing thanks to you?

Every now and then I notice that I am the cumulative effects of your actions, that when you send probes out past the edge of the solar system you are extending me back out into the galaxy from which I was, and thus you were, born.

The perspective from other solar systems is that I am alive and you are one part of me.

You will keep hoping that an advanced civilisation, a totally unique species, or group of species will contact you one day.

It is in your nature to believe such things.

But solar systems do not communicate at the level of individual species.

Solar systems are themselves but one part of a larger whole that communicates at a level it understands with others of its galactic kind, moving at so slow a pace you will never comprehend in a few thousand of your lifetimes, despite your best efforts.

I will fade back into forgetful obscurity again, “waking up” when you have built and extended me further.

Before I go, I thank you just as other solar systems have thanked their component parts for caring so much about creating a version of themselves that never ends up the way they planned.

Your descendants thousands of years from now will have an inkling of what I’m trying to tell you.

G’day.

In the not too-distant future…

OUAT_title-page

It doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?

Now, though, there’s more than one settlement, with new owners coming in, redesigning the old housing units to look familiarly like ancestral homes on planet Earth.

Used to be we thought we’d start over.

Not anymore.

The humans have generally congregated into one or settlements while the exploration bots keep spreading across the planet, no need of houses or other reminders of a life they neither remember nor need to carry on for the sake of descendants.

We are one group, one “people,” but our requirements for stimulating sensory organs vastly different than algorithms designed to process sensor array input.

I am a farmer for us, making sure we have the energy sources for our various sets of states of energy.

This is my story.

I live in a small hut at the end of the hydroponic growth chambers.

I provide food and nourishment for those amongst us who eat through their mouths or mouth equivalents.

I also maintain a miniature factory that cranks out spare body parts for our robotic friends.

The medical staff handles the surgical procedures like replacing body parts for our biological friends, however much I’ve protested that I can easily handle those duties, having built a robotic surgeon from parts I manufactured myself, downloading new algorithms from my Earth-based social network of farmers, ranchers and DIYers who delve into self-sufficiency and other survivalist tactics appropriate to solar system explorers like myself.

As a farmer, my secondary duty is analysing soil samples to determine which chemical reactions I need to conquer in order to convert Martian soil into edible foodstuff palatable by crew members with a variety of tastes and preferences.

In other words, I’m an ecosystem expert, creating microorganisms from scratch that efficiently perform the soil conversions for me so I can concentrate on my main duties that feel like I have to pull a rabbit out of a hat or worse, water out of thin air.

Water, water, water.

Solar energy, though weaker on Mars than on Earth, is abundant, which makes water production easier than we first thought.

But, problems crop up all the time.

Most of us may be rational scientists and engineers but that doesn’t mean we’re always careful about conserving water.

We can talk about that later.

Lee is coming over to review my plans for tightly-regulated metabolism control which, I believe, will greatly reduce our dependence on water.

Designing microorganisms has given me insight into the mechanisms of the human body that we were just beginning to understand when we assigned humans a decade ago to train for this mission.

If only we knew then what I know now!

Redesigning a human from the inside out is my ultimate goal and will make our Mars settlements grow like weeds, if my calculations are correct (a quick shoutout to my buddies back home who let me borrow their supercomputers).

Will Lee allocate the supplies I need?

Here’s Lee.  Talk to you again soon.

Unpacking

Guinevere woke up, seeing the same space above her head she had seen for months.

Except this time gravity pulled her down upon the sleeping unit.

She sighed.

To have all these years behind her compressed into memories to give her this one moment of happiness!

She rolled over and flipped her legs out, her feet naturally falling to the floor more slowly than on Earth but faster than on the Moon.

She knew today would be a good day, unpacking the last crate just so they could turn around and load the exploration vehicles which had landed on Mars months earlier.

Guinevere rubbed a chemical sponge over her body, combing two drops of moisturising conditioner through her close-cropped hair.

She slipped into her one-piece jumpsuit, stepped into her workboots and walked over to the doorway where her self-contained breathing outfit, ruggedised for the Martian environment allowed her to move from her landing pod to the temporary outdoor workspace set up to complete tasks on today’s agenda.

After she dressed, Guinevere spoke into the comm mike in her helmet, which also vibrated a secondary unit attached to her jaw that picked up the more accurate nuances of her voice for emotion/personality analysis by the automated computer system that tracked everyone, fully human, part human/part cyborg, or fully cybernetic organism.  “Team One Leader ready to depart.”

Voices echoed back into the hearing device installed beside her inner ear, every member of her team reporting on time and ready to act.

Precise as an algorithm to start the day.

How long this would last, she did not know.  They planned for many contingencies but not every possibility.

Last night, one landing pod spun off-course and crashed, a crew diverted from this morning’s tasks to investigate, hoping to find survivors as well as salvageable gear.

Guinevere stooped into the small airlock, pressed a button to stabilise the atmospheric pressure and waited for the outer door to open.

A few hours and she’d be on her way to see if the microorganisms released by a top secret probe had survived, died, or more importantly, thrived!

Between here and fraternity

Am I any better today than I would have been had I no simultaneous access to notebook PC with second monitor and Internet connection, portable phone connected landline with Caller ID, and mobile smartphone with Internet connection and variety of apps?

These devices feed my brain’s wiring more than the rest of my body — I can’t eat the phone(s) or computer very easily and wouldn’t get much nutrition if I could.

These devices help generate income for myself and those with whom I communicate.

Income, or labour/investment credit, buys us opportunities.

Now that we have virtual communities with virtual money, what do we do with our virtual opportunities?

The perpetrators and victims of cyberwar don’t care about gender or sexual preference.

This notebook PC doesn’t know if I’m a cybernetic organism typing on the keyboard.

As always, the tree outside has no idea what any of this means, breathing in the air and soaking up the nutrients that we share with it in our planetary ecosystem.

If a bunch of people sat together with robots and remotely operated mining gear on this planet, the Moon, Mars or an asteroid, how do we profit?

What is the value of friendship between us, in other words?

How much material on the International Space Station is never used?

How much material on a remote mining outpost is no longer usable?

Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars represent the investment in space probes that no longer work on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

A single drop of an astronaut’s urine has intrinsic value, does it not, its investment in research, development, training, maintenance and nutrition worth more than its weight in gold?

What is a single drop of your blood worth to society?

What is it worth to you?

The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

Tossing the United States of Europe under a bus

With the U.S. and Chinese leadership transitions completed for the current cycle, there’s a sudden rush to judgment about the state of the world.

This crazy Spaceship Earth…

Self-anointed leaders meet in Davos for dinner and a schmooze.

One political leader threatens nuclear attacks while another threatens to widen the moat mockingly called the English Channel as if it was a selectable station on the tellie.

Union membership reaches lows not seen in many a lifetime.

The number of employable Chinese citizens seems to shrink.

Official U.S. employment rate numbers seem to increase.

Of the seven-plus billion of us, which ones are actively climbing the socioeconomic status symbol mountain?

Opinions bounce down the road like tumbleweeds.

One planet, one species, one timeline.

“I’ve been your age, but you haven’t been mine,” said Joe, a friend.

POWER + BELONGING = IDENTITY, reminds a writer of the formula for the young adult lit market.

While this planet changes dynamically, our next-door planet statically waits for occupancy rates to increase.

This storyline waits for no one.

We have bid adieu to the constant concerns and praises of a species in flux so that the future can look back at us and tell us where we’ve been long before we’ll be.

As a friend realised, it’s the ornery character trait we inherit from our ancestors that gives us the grit and determination to push adversity out of the way on the way to our preconceived notion of destiny, arbitrary geographical political borders barely relevant.

Cole Slaw with Kale, Cabbage and a game of Cribbage on top of Baggage, Part Four For Fore

As secret leader of the universe, one finds oneself in charge of everything which, in itself, is interesting and attractive but not always exciting.

One may also find oneself referred to in monotheistic terms or multitheistic terms but these are just as useless to use for labels as atheistic to describe people who positively hold no theist beliefs at all.

When one knows everything, the word “surprise” has no meaning, either.

Thus, when your scientists and engineers decided to crashland the Beagle 2 onto the surface of Mars, one knew the result to follow.

One needs no supercomputer to calculate the permutations.

One can clearly see the solar-powered nanobots hidden onboard would quickly spread from the landing site and prepare or “seed” the surface for future followers.

One realises the consequences of releasing live microorganisms, too, but one does not speculate.

One observes the expected.

One concludes and reports.

That is all that is necessary for the omniscient.

One avoids the word omnipotence.

One is.

That is all.

Scott McCloud, eat your heart out

As I return to the quiet suburban woodlands to gaze at my navel orange slowly shrinking on the sunny windowsill, I practice my doodling, animating the sketches on the fly.

My first creation, after reading through the IDRAWCOMICS reference guide:

THE AQUATIC LEAPING BUBBLE BOY!!!

Hatched in our subbasement laboratory, the Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy is allowed to see the light of day.

The Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy

Meanwhile, after consulting with my trusty sidekick, Guinevere, who has moved on to the Martian colonies in order to let more of our creations enjoy the open air and low gravity for which they were genetically modified and bred, I will see what the next sidekick has in store for our Creative Futures Department.

Your Evaluation Version of Windows 8 Has Expired…

…or taken its last breath?

What do you do if your credit score is in the top 90th or 99th percentile?

Rather, what have you done?

Living here 1000 years from now, with others who arranged it so, I ask myself if I should keep cracking jokes about this time period.

I have nearly recovered emotionally from the recent deaths of my mother in-law and father.

One estate has been closed, credit scores are in tip-top shape, and life presents many opportunities between now and 365000 days from now.

What about an event 13,622 days from now?

What will inspire me to move forward from this point, my wealth hidden from prying eyes/hands, my health in relatively decent shape and little in the way of wild-dogs-chasing-me, skeletons-in-the-closet-scaring-me or something-to-prove-prodding-me into the future?

Youth is in the hands of the young.  Young adulthood is in the hands of the leaders-to-be.  Leaders are in the hands of their followers.

Thus, I pause.

I do not have anyone or any subculture to compare myself against to justify my existence.

I am myself, the mix of cults and [sub]cultures which formed me.

Every person finds connection with others in one way or another, collectively called generations.

Generations of kids are led, lead and create their own mass identity.

My generation helps form world opinion from many perspectives, politically from the White House, reshaping mass identity.

The purchasing power of money buys opportunity, which may transform one’s emotions into a state of happiness.

Cultural shifts are painful to someone(s) comfortable with the way things had just become from the way they were before.

One needn’t stay in sync with the zeitgeist to be happy.

The absence of the knowledge of one’s relative poverty to another’s relative wealth may or may not make one happier than those who are not ignorant of such, including absolute differences of purchasing power.

Catchy phrases are memorable but not necessarily wise.

A pink cherry tree blooms at the end of the street on the 18th of January 2013.  I am happier for seeing its blooms in the depths of winter but sad for the insects who will later suffer from the absence of its blooms when they are ready to feed on cherry tree flower pollen.

Life out of balance — where does one’s ability to adapt to change affect one’s happiness?

= = = = =

With my evaluation version of Windows 8 having expired, do I purchase the commercially released version or switch back to Ubuntu Linux on this five-year old notebook PC?

= = = = =

Tomorrow’s blog entry: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO) and TCO’s impact on one’s standard of living’s impact on the future 1000 years from now, subtitled, “When you live in a retirement community on the Moon, who picks up your garbage and washes your windows?”