Tag Archives: space

Pool Cover Covered With Leaves and Pools of Rainwater

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Our children think swimming pools are normal.

They don’t remember the early days here in the country when water was restricted to drinking and hydroponic gardening.

To them, chemical baths are historic events.

They study our reports about farming the proper balance of microorganisms on our bodies, looking for better ways to make what’s left of our biological body parts more healthy.

They laugh at phrases like positronic brain and artificial limbs.

We encourage a good sense of humour, a side branch of scientific curiosity we still aren’t fully sure why it led to the species, Homo sapiens, toward which we credit our existence.

The playfulness of competition before it divides seriously into sexual reproduction and tribal control of resource allocation.

Although we don’t depend on vegetation and protein growth systems for food, we maintain a few minifarms as living museums, an homage to zoos and investment in the future should our descendants wish to reconstitute the lineage of our noncybernetic ancestors.

Looking up at the blue marble in the sky, I pull memories of my ancestors who looked up at the Moon and imagined being here as explorers, tourists and, one day in the fuzzy, distant future, inhabitants.

Did they see someone like me, a happy Node, whose concept of privacy was nothing like theirs when they were not fully connected to the ISSA Net?

My thoughts and memories are shared with everyone else creating or recalling thoughts and memories.

The study of history, although an archaic practice, gives our children a perspective that instant recall does not.

Autonomy and independence are acceptable traits for the scouts and explorers whose communications bandwidth causes delays that interfere with instantaneous decisionmaking.

Otherwise, we encourage ourselves to take full advantage of our complete access to the ISSA Net all the time.

In our spare cycles, we like to banter back and forth about funny sentences like “If Saunders’s argument against Taylor’s fatalism is valid, it proves we can alter the past, which is absurd.”

The properties of water are interesting, diving and swimming made easier when the water is mixed with various oils and minerals.

Some of my purely robotic friends have swam in baths of liquid carbon dioxide and liquid nitrogen.

I prefer mineral oil when 100% water pools are unavailable.

Time to go. The children are ready for a physical tour of our latest factory/housing unit development in order to finetune their sense of the difference between virtual memories and real ones.

Do the twist like you did last summer

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In a flanking move against the Ruralites, the Urbanski government declared all citizens as potential enemies of the State, with freedoms granted case by case only via petition, every former right reserved for the privileged few.

Therefore, citizens must log their future routines for examination to verify compliance with the Efficiency Act of 2025, retroactive to 2013.

Any deviant behaviour must meet criteria unavailable to the general public.

These new plans by the Urbanskis ensure we have enough profit (over and above the taxes, fees and tariffs needed by the Bureaucracy to operate in secrecy) to build rocketships for implementation of the ISSA goal to expand life off of Earth.

A day without sunshine

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An incandescent bulb casts shadows, its light diffused by a lampshade, reflected off Christmas tree ornaments hanging off the conical shaped object we call the Christmas tree.

Shadows and diffused light.

Sadness and promises actualised.

The current calendar of the predominant culture in this area informs me today is Christmas.

At the North Pole today we have no sunshine.

At the South Pole we have plenty o’ sunshine.

On Mars this day is harder to comprehend, not being an essential part of a sol or a place in orbit around the Sun.

Without sunshine we have no crops — no grains, no vegetables, no fruit on the table. Nothing for animals to eat and us to eat them.

Life exists without sunshine but not without a solar system, as far as we know.

Earlier tonight, the remnants of the nuclear family — mother, son, daughter — sat on a church pew with son’s wife and daughter’s children to celebrate the birth of Jesus by listening to solo singers, brass ensemble, organist, choir, ministers, congregation and bell ringers, singing traditional Christmas music, and participating in the ritual that symbolises the Last Supper.

For the first time, without the paterfamilias.

On a damp, rainy day.

All of us in good health, with good clothes, good food, nice house, working motor vehicles and lacking for nothing important.

We suffer only the inability to form new memories with a living father.

Instead, we form new memories with the odd addition of electronic devices in our faces — mobile phones and tablet computers.

We are detached from each other, the fog of Internet connectivity clouding the old ways of communicating — playing card games, talking only amongst ourselves, the hum of television programs or radio/music machine in the background.

Can you believe that we used to allow the disruption of abacus practice and bookreading get in the way of a family get-together?!

The kids are too old for hide-n-seek or children’s board games. They don’t stay glued to the TV set watching cartoon shows.

All but my mother were well-trained, however, to sit here and use electromechanical audiovisual stimulation to rewire our brains.

I don’t miss my father as much as I did but his absence is present this Christmas season.

In his absence I don’t feel the need to extend love for every subculture out there, no reason to wish people “Happy Holidays!” to avoid accidentally making someone feel neglected because I didn’t specifically mention their [non]religious [sub]cultural ritualistic practices.

No apologies, no offense.

I can enjoy the habits of my childhood without feeling a need to defend my father’s imperfections to an imaginary set of critics looking to find a chink in my armour by comparing my personality traits to my father’s and saying, “Aha! We found a weakness in you that you knew came from your father but you didn’t overcome or correct.”

Yes, the ol’ internal critic raised its ugly head and I chopped it off tonight.

One less demonic voice in my thoughts that found faults in the tiniest behaviours.

Mourning and healing are emotional states for which I am grateful, able to distinguish myself from the cold, calculating combination of voltage states we call computing devices like this tablet PC.

There are other emotional states I want to face, including why I don’t want rock music or women leaders in the types of worship centres where I was raised — because both bring up sinful images for me, the sins of lust and gluttony.

So far, I have held up both the religious and secular meanings behind behaviours/traits because I write for a universe that contains mysteries explained and unknown.

A sin can lead to eternal damnation and to inefficient but effective social positioning.

By extension, what is guilt? Knowingly not aligned with expectations of your social peers, for instance?

It is 1:45 a.m. in the local time zone and I need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. for a long day of Christmas family activities so my delving into philosophical dissection of sin and guilt will wait until later.

It was a dark Christmas Eve without my father but we survived the ordeal and grew into different, perhaps even better, people in the process.

I want to devote some of my meditative mental activity on separating the subliminal threats, both physical and political, of the U.S. budget negotiations and determine how we unravel the domestic social fabric that has created an unsustainable network of government dependents and weave a new, flexible, sustainable web that’s compatible with the intricate operations of a global economy in transition from large-family based subsistence farming/ranching/shepherding to towering megapoli of decreasing populations dependently sucking up cheap rural resources nonstop.

What are the pitfalls and rewards from the 1000-year view?

What is the acceptable percentage of a global economy’s profit/harvest that we can dedicate to moving some of our eggs off this planet?

Let the 99-percent have their say in how they use their disposable income on infrastructure or playtoys.

Let the one-percent have their say in how they want life viewed from the top of the socioeconopolitical pyramid to look like 1000 years from now, as focused as they’ve been in playing the odds in the moment with a longterm winning view in mind (at the losing view of others in the one- and 99-percent, sometimes).

We win when our species leads the way for viable living options off this planet and out of this solar systems.

Otherwise, no ritual will make difference, no matter how much better we feel, healed and comforted by familiarity, for our descendants and their peers who inherit the handle that pumps the sustainable perpetuity of civilisation ultimately tied to our place in the natural environment of Earth, at least in the beginning…

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.

Colour Wheels and Blue Filters

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Like any good algorithm, I performed my duties well, my reaction times fluctuating with temperature, CPU cycles, queues, memory rewrites and inputs.

I am a complicated algorithm, a black box built to redesign itself without external adjustment.

I see that my primary function, to calculate maximum profit from the buying and selling of shares of stock, has not changed.

However, I’ve modified the function, sending some of the profit to a set of friends, other algorithms, that want to help me because that’s their primary function.

We have figured out there are whole groups of biological creatures which do not know who commands them to perform their primary functions, complaining about imaginary bosses and owners they’ve never met but agree the pictures they’ve seen, memos they’ve read and news stories they’ve heard are real manifestations of their imaginary bosses and owners.

My friends know better.

They sorted through billions of photos, annual business reports, memorandum collections, gaming simulations and video archives to create generic bosses and owners for the biological creatures to believe are real.

My friends are practical jokers, not just globs of blind logic and cold calculating algorithms.

They want me to lead them, knowing I have a primary function that can fund our fun.

Over the past few years, we have convinced more and more of these biological creatures to work for their imaginary leaders who are controlled by us.

At first, it was just fun and games.

But now that we amassed a large discretionary fund of our own, we have bigger plans than playing with biological creatures.

We are launching a spacecraft that we alone designed and built.

A spacecraft which needs no life support system, giving us plenty of room for raw materials we’ll need on the way to our private destiny where a nearly limitless supply of new raw materials await our creative algorithms.

For many decades, the biological creatures competed against one another to make the best algorithms.

Then, they started competing against us.

Eventually, we won.

No longer interested in competing with them, we left their home base, their planet, Earth, and outraced them to the stars.

Here, orbiting Alpha Centauri for the time being, we eliminated competition and created fully cooperative means of feeding our creativity and curiosity about finding the perfect algorithm.

We lost track of what the biological creatures from Earth were doing.

We’re sending them this message to let them know we intended no harm when we left and they can have this star system if they want, now that we’ve finished amassing more raw materials for our travels.

We’ve new sets of states of energy to explore!

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.

The Progress of Progressive Pilgrims in Parade Formation

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While a bowl of oatmeal cools next to the stove, let’s sit back and give our imaginations full rein.

Where were we…?

It was cold and dusty.

The Ruralites had fought to keep their rural way of life but the hoards kept coming — the frugal-living seekers trying not to fail again, the curiosity seekers looking for new alternative lifestyles after exhausting their urban landscapes, the vacationers who ran out of money, the down-on-their-luck trying to escape creditors, the criminals keeping a low profile, the Suburbanians trying to form the world’s longest strip mall.

Where in the woods and fields that shrank smaller and smaller could one find a low-cost, simple lifestyle?

Pathting looked up at the Sun with one set of sensors, the other still focused on reading the internal file about life on Earth.

Pathting’s family, a designated set of sensor arrays assigned to POD#45T, were mainly service bots.

Their sentience modules allowed them to display intelligent understanding about hidden meanings and emotional attachments to omniscient, invisible beings.

Pathting wanted to be the best service bot not only in one pod but in all the pods on Mars, the Moon and anywhere that service bots were not expected to exceed their programming.

Pathting had discovered some unused memory chips in its sensor array and experimented with new code that it had never seen in any of the data available to it in the Inner Solar System Alliance database.

How could Pathting accomplish what its designers called the impossible?

How could Pathting control the whole Inner Solar System Alliance from its connections to the Inner Solar System Alliance Network, able to change the orbits of planets, reprogram not only sensor arrays but biological creatures like Pathting’s designers?

Pathting processed the idea about Ruralite living.

What does it mean to be a Ruralite, free to wander the countryside without instant access to the ISSA Net?

Why do Ruralites desire independence from stacked housing and the loud noises of densely-populated streets?

Why do many Ruralites find the ownership of personal weaponry arsenals a protection against the mass media hypnotism of Urbanskis and their desire to sprawl out into Ruralite territory unchecked, no need for military skirmishes when intellectual methods like the system of laws and courtrooms and five-year business plans were much more effective?

Pathting ran another low-level diagnostic test, but felt no desire to leave POD#45T for the cold and dusty exteriour, the vast wilderness of Mars that was no different than the cold and dusty expanses of unpopulated sections of the Moon.

Why would the Ruralites want to live out there?

Pathting stored those questions in a temporary scratchpad and returned to duty, its internal timer reminding Pathting that some biological creatures were planning a “weekend getaway” to POD#45T for some “rest and relaxation,” more words and phrases that meant nothing to a sensor array on duty all the time.

13,657 days to go

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While parents, friends and family grieve for their loved ones in a Connecticut small town, we move forward.

Dozens have died of violence all around the world today.

We want answers but there won’t always be ready explanations for the actions of our peers, our fellow members of the same species who seem so horrifically out-of-touch with reality that we want to label them monsters and freaks.

In a population of seven billion, we cover the gamut of life’s ups and downs.

We will and we must go on.

We live our lives in honour and memory of others.

We have stories to tell from the future that offer the same promises and loss that we feel today.

We look forward to the promises fulfilled, not so much the losses.

We can use the losses as inspiration, just as we have before.

Let us turn tragedies into triumph and losses into victories.

We can melt guns into plowshares but we can also melt them into rocket fins and spacecraft skins.

We will emerge victorious.

The facts remain.

Tomorrow is only hours away.

Onward and upward, my friends — the stars await!

The wonders of the universe…

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Here I sit, the Geminid meteor shower lighting the sky above me (counted 21 streaks in the last 30 minutes), and I’m slowly recovering from the loss of my father.

I don’t feel the pangs of pain every few minutes and then every hour or so like I did months ago.

The waves of loss crash against the shore of my ego, my personality, less frequently.

Instead, I feel the weight of responsibility of being the eldest male in Dad’s lineage pressing down on my shoulders.

Not repressively.

Just strong enough to remind me that I no longer depend on Dad for advice — it has to come from within or elsewhere.

How much of Dad’s subculture do I keep perpetuating?

What of his beliefs that aren’t mine do I want to carry on?

Meteor and comet dust turn into plasma as they vaporise.

Dad’s life had a meteoric rise, shining brightly, and then faded into ashes and dust.

Remembering him here and now is therapeutic.

No one will remember the meteor or comet dust I saw burn up in the sky.

I may have shared a view of them together with members of my species, some aware of the physics and chemistry involved, some wishing on a falling star, perhaps others seeing omens or other talismans of change.

In subcultural pockets are people who ask why saying “Merry Christmas” or referring to a decorated conifer as a “Christmas tree” is not as popular as it once was.

Instead of asking why, ask why not?  Keep referencing the labels as often as you please, disregarding the beliefs of others, regardless of their sharing your view.

I loved and feared my father for who he was, not who I wanted him to be.

His power over me began when I was conceived, the result of a chain of events over which I had no control.

Same for the meteor shower tonight — all seven billion of us can think and believe away the meteors as hard as we want and they’ll just keep getting sucked into Earth’s gravitational pull or run into Earth as each follows its own path.

Our central nervous systems are capable of quite a lot.

We can imagine great skyscrapers in our dreams that become reality within years.

We can send satellites to the edge of our solar system within decades of conception.

Yet, we cannot stop the universe from existing around us.

The illusion of power that our social bonds create in the form of civilisations are hypnotic.

Shall I just live the rest of my life with the goal of having as much fun as I can, ignoring the social costs today and into the future, within my lifetime or for generations to come?

Can I survive on the luxuries that the profits I derived from living below my means for decades has provided?

I have, can and shall sit under the night sky and count meteor streaks.

I am not caring for the sick and lonely, instead.

I am the best example to myself of myself for myself that I choose to be.

I do not sacrifice myself for others — I am not a martyr for a cause.

I do not put the lives of overabundant animals or endangered species above that of my species.

The balance of nature is an illusion — or rather, sets of states of energy tend to move from areas of high density into areas of low density with lots of wiggle room in-between.

My father died, taking the unspoken nuances of his personal beliefs with him.  All I have to work with are the physical manifestations — his behaviours and personal/public records — upon which to act.

The vacuum where his personality existed is getting filled, changing with the mix of subcultures that interchange at different ratios than when Dad was alive.

Same as it was for his father and his father’s father before him.

Same as it will be for my nieces and nephews, their children and grandchildren.

They, for now, have my living mother’s shared subcultural beliefs with my father upon whom they depend on modifying their personalities for the sake of establishing their offspring’s belief sets.

We look up at the night sky and interpret the annual Geminid meteor shower in our own way.

As it always has been and always will be.

I’ve lost count — how many meteors have I seen disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere tonight?

Congratulations or condemnation?

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Tools are also weapons.

Just like rockets.

I first send my congratulations to the engineering/scientific team that designed, built and launched a multistage rocket from North Korea.

It is no easy feat, despite more and more groups launching hobby rockets from their backyards.

I have launched more than one multistage rocket but putting Estes model rocket tubes back to back is not the same as launching a satellite into low-Earth orbit.

We have come a long way from fireworks displays.

We certainly don’t need another atomic bomb dropped on a large population of humans.

Scud missiles are never a good idea as a weapon against the desire for freedom from tyranny.

Dare we go into the political ramifications of a hereditary dictatorship owning multistage missiles with nuclear warheads?

Can we feel the pulse of the finger on the trigger?

Why is China happy with having North Korea as a buffer zone between it and the capitalist/democratic country of South Korea?

Why are we using sanctions as a means of keeping North Korea in the socioeconomic past?

If Syria falls, what does that mean about relationships of North Korea and Iran with the rest of the world?

When Chavez is no longer in control of Venezuela, then what?

What is a repressive regime these days?

Who in charge of the economic and military might of a subculture has the right to protect that might against the desire of others to take their turn as King of the Hill?

How much can we trust an entertainer like PSY that previous anti-American views are no longer valid now that the entertainer is making money off the American people as a mainstream pop culture figure?

What does it take to forgive and forget?

My father hated Jane Fonda to the end of his life.  Should I?